Focusing on the area from northern Alabama to West Virginia, this volume explores the historic and contemporary interrelations between culture and environment in a region that has been plagued by land misuse and damaging stereotypes of its people. It examines how physical space is transformed into culturally constituted place by many factors.

Folklife along the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River records the history, lore, and lifeways of people who once occupied the land that became the Big South Fork national River and Recreation Area. The National park Service sponsored the research in1979, just as former residents were being displaced from their homes . Through oral history interviews and historical records, ethnographic study, old-time-traditions, this book recounts what life was like in the Big South Fork during the first half of the twentieth-century, when the region s agrarian economy was transformed by the timber and...