To play and share music in Appalachian Kentucky, the wisdom went, is to be a steward of its traditions - and that duty is never more serious than in times like these, when the tangible is lost. But the music-minded residents I encountered while traveling through these counties often spoke of a higher responsibility, inherent to their roles as artists, educators, craftspeople or simply listeners.
The practical steps toward recovery, though daunting, are already in motion throughout the region - repairing facilities and venues, restoring instruments, wrangling the logistics and raising the funds to gradually get programs and performances back on the calendar. And for the people, places and institutions that make up the region's storied music scene, a more complicated question looms: What does it actually mean, after a disaster like this, to rebuild an artistic community? There are still hundreds in temporary housing in state parks and travel trailers, who don't yet know when their lives will return to normal. But the absence of news cameras doesn't mean a catastrophe is over. Three months later, the floods have receded from national headlines as new weather emergencies have hit Florida, South Carolina, Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Driving along Kentucky Route 15 in early August, I saw school buses shoved into buildings and entire homes forced off their foundations. Andy Beshear's office has put the official death toll at 43. Twenty-one public water systems were operating at reduced capacity and two more were fully disabled. Thirteen counties had received major disaster declarations from the federal government. WFPL Damaged instruments from the Museum of the Mountain Dulcimer line the upper floor of Hindman's Appalachian Artisan Center.īy the time this summer's historic floods subsided, tens of thousands of eastern Kentucky households had lost power. "I think that's one of the reasons why it was so devastating, because it was just so huge." "I've never even seen the water get above a certain level, let alone like five, six feet above that level," he says. "This was like an unthinkable that happened," says John Haywood, a tattoo artist and musician who lives in Letcher County and specializes in the "old-time, drop-thumb, overhand east Kentucky" style of banjo. But there's a distressing redundancy in the responses I heard when asking people about this particular weather event, which swept through Central Appalachia but did the most concentrated damage here, in the southeast part of the state. Sounding philosophical, he adds, "Is this a hopeless project? You tell me."Įastern Kentuckians are familiar with flooding the region's creeks and mountain runoff have wreaked havoc on these communities for decades, centuries. "Now we're in just a big salvage operation," Naselroad says. About two-thirds of the collection "just disappeared." What was recovered will need extensive restoration. The water carried away dozens of historic instruments, including early examples of the hourglass-shaped dulcimer, developed and honed in Knott and Letcher counties in southeast Kentucky, and one once played by Appalachian music legend Jean Ritchie. In the early hours of July 28, after days of heavy rain, floodwaters from nearby Troublesome Creek rushed through the museum with enough force to blow a door off its hinges and shatter the front windows. You have trepidation and dread looking in at the things you cherish and trying to will them back." When he finally did get up the nerve to visit, he says, the sight of the place gave him a ghostly chill - "like you're Indiana Jones exploring his own tomb. He knew the space all too well, having co-curated its exhibits, and had felt heartsick every time he tried to wrap his mind around what it would look like empty. It was weeks before Doug Naselroad could bring himself to set foot inside the Museum of the Mountain Dulcimer in Hindman, Ky.
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