Hillbilly Tales from the Smoky Mountains includes several short stories based on the folklore of the Appalachian Mountains. Before the time of cell-phones, computers and television, family members would gather on the front porch and offer up stories through simple oral traditions. These stories were to provide simple forms of entertainment to their children. With each generation, the stories become more elaborate and creative. These yarns became known as Appalachian folklore. Mountain people have always led a difficult life; but how they dealt with their struggles is a unique perspective on Appalachian people. Also, in this book you will find a small section on mountain medicinal treatments and hillbilly proverbs, which were carried over from mother to daughter down the family line. Knowledge of apothecary, or also known as mountain medicine, was necessary to treat family members who became ill while the local doctor was away visiting two towns over. Most importantly, no decent self-respecting mountain folk would ever go unprepared without offering up advice to help their fellow neighbor. Wise sayings or hillbilly proverbs go hand-in-hand with mountain medicine and is given to anyone who might need guidance in their daily life. The second part of the book includes a special story written by one of the original descendants of the Crowe Family, Ms. Verna Humphrey. This short piece of fiction centers around a light romance based right after the end of the Civil War. The setting takes place in Green Cove and it presents a time of struggle and death while a young girl, Charlotte, struggles to regain her birthright during these trying times. When a young lawyer enters upon the scene, Charlotte's interpretation of birthright takes on a whole new meaning. Now she must make some hard decisions that will alter the course of her life.

For centuries, the majesty and mystery of the Great Smoky Mountains have lured mankind. The Cherokee were among the first to build thriving communities here, and backcountry frontiersmen were next to put down roots. In time, visitors arrived, eager to take in the cool mountain air, and returned home with stories of hillbillies. Then came those who used the mountains for their own advantages, such as lumber barons, armed with steam shovels and skidders. Eventually, civic boosters from western North Carolina and east Tennessee took note and began advocating for the protection of the Great Smoky Mountains. Before a national park could be established, though, there were competing interests to be sorted and a consideration of the lives affected.

The Great Smoky Mountains, at the border of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, are among the highest peaks of the southern Appalachian chain. Although this area shares much with the cultural traditions of all southern Appalachia, the folklife here has been uniquely shaped by historical events, including the Cherokee Removal of the 1830s and the creation of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park a century later. This book surveying the rich folklife of this special place in the American South offers a view of the culture as it has been defined and changed by scholars, missionaries, the federal government, tourists, and people of the region themselves. Here is an overview of the history of a beautiful landscape, one that examines the character typified by its early settlers, by the displacement of the people, and by the manner in which the folklife was discovered and defined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here also is an examination of various folk traditions and a study of how they have changed and evolved.

J. Blake Perkins searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks--and discovers how it changed over time. Eschewing generalities, Perkins focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people themselves as they interacted with government in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He uncovers the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different reactions by hill people as time went by. Resistance in the earlier period sprang from upland small farmers' conflicts with capitalist elites who held the local levers of federal power. But as industry and agribusiness displaced family farms after World War II, a conservative cohort of town business elites, local political officials, and Midwestern immigrants arose from the region's new low-wage, union-averse economy. As Perkins argues, this modern anti-government conservatism bore little resemblance to the populist backcountry populism of an earlier age but had much in common with the movement elsewhere.

ONCED UPON A TIME AGO, in the Smoky Mountains, there lived a feller named Jack. So begin twenty Jack Tales, based on traditional folk and fairy tales, plus an extra tale, The Legend of Stingy Jack. Nine seasonal stories are adventures with Giants, a Witch, Trolls, and Death. Bonus Tales feature a heifer hide, a bear, moonshine, golden eggs, a ball of butter, a Kings ring, and a lost ax. Smoky Mountain Jack Tales of Winter and Old Christmas These are fun performance tales for reading aloud at home or in public, for oral interpretation, or re-told in your own words. Primarily for older youth and grownups, these varied tales are for readers and storytellers who already know and love Jack and those about to make a new friend.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is among the most visited national parks in the country, and countless attractions around its borders have tried for decades to siphon some of those valuable tourist dollars. From ersatz western towns and concrete dinosaurs to misplaced Florida-type attractions and celebrity theaters, you will find them all preserved in this book. Author Tim Hollis showcases those businesses that no longer exist, from Hill-Billy Village in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg's theme parks on the Tennessee side to the motels of Cherokee and Ghost Town in the Sky on the North Carolina side.