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Stories from the hills. History that got left out of the textbook. Food worth arguing about. The kind of thing your grandmother knew and nobody thought to write down.

Glad you found it.

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Happy Mother’s Day!

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🚂 WELCOME ABOARD
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This week on The Wayne Train:

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🗞 APPALACHIA 250
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A weekly look at the region’s contributions to keeping America 250 years strong

Start with a banjo.

Not the polished, stage-ready instrument you'd see in a bluegrass festival poster. The raw version. A gourd body, a skin head, strings made from gut. It came over from West Africa in the hands of enslaved people, and by the time it reached the Appalachian mountains it had already traveled further than most people in 1780 would ever go in a lifetime.

Then add a fiddle.

Scots-Irish settlers brought that one over from Ulster and the Scottish highlands. They played jigs and reels at dances, the same tunes their grandparents had played, the kind of music that tells your feet what to do before your brain has a chance to argue.

Now put those two things in the same room.

What came out of that room became every genre of popular music America ever sent into the world.

Much of what became the key ingredients of ragtime — and by extension, everything that followed — came from self-taught and largely uneducated musicians: slaves, hill folk of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and minstrel-troupe musicians.

Hill folk.

That's us.

The Library of Congress puts it plainly, without ceremony, in its official history of American music. The mountain people of Appalachia are in the sentence right there alongside enslaved African Americans as co-creators of the sound that became ragtime, that became jazz, that became blues, that became rock and roll, that became everything your grandchildren listen to today through a small white rectangle in their pocket.

None of it gets invented without what happened in these mountains first.

Here's how it worked.

Ragtime's syncopated rhythm — that ragged, off-kilter pulse that makes you want to move — descended directly from jigs and reels played by British Isles immigrants, the fiddle music Scots-Irish settlers carried into the hollows and played at dances. "Turkey in the Straw," thought to be of Scottish origin, is a direct ancestor.

The banjo players learned to syncopate too. They were playing African rhythms on an African instrument, and the syncopation they put into their playing was the same rhythmic engine that would drive ragtime sixty years later.

What happened in Appalachian cabins and at backcountry dances was a collision between two musical traditions that had no business being in the same room together — and produced something neither one could have made alone.

That's the American story, really.

But Appalachia got there first.

Now. About a saloon in Middlesboro, Kentucky.

Prior to 1895, popular music in America was largely limited to ballads and waltzes. Then something happened that music historians are still arguing about, and some of that argument points directly to a boomtown built inside a meteor crater in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky.

In the late 1880s, a young man named Ben Harney arrived in Middlesboro with his father, who was a land surveyor and engineer. The city was in its earliest days — a wild, wide-open town with boomers flooding in from across the country and from Europe. It was loud, lawless, and full of money looking for somewhere to go.

Harney found a piano.

He immediately set to work reproducing broken rhythm on the piano. In a few weeks, he said, he had it perfected to a degree that he was composing ragtime tunes. He played the Middlesboro saloons. He watched what happened to the room when he played it. Then he quit his job as assistant postmaster and took the music to Louisville, and then to New York.

The first recorded use of the term "ragtime" was by Ben Harney, who in 1896 used it to describe the piano music he played — which he had extracted from banjo and fiddle players.

Banjo and fiddle players.

Mountain musicians.

One writer later said: "If any one man can be held responsible for this much-mooted jazz age, the distinction goes to an humble vaudeville pianist and comedian, Ben R. Harney, the originator of ragtime music from which jazz and modern syncopation was derived."

Harney himself was more careful. Later in life he said that rather than being the full-fledged father of ragtime, it would be more accurate to call himself the father by adoption. He heard something in those mountains. He understood what it was. He took it to the world.

The credit, as usual, went elsewhere.

Scott Joplin got famous. Rightly so — he was a genius and his compositions deserve every note of praise they've received. But Joplin and the Black pianists of the Mississippi Valley were working the same musical vein that had been running through Appalachian music for a hundred years. They took it somewhere Harney couldn't, gave it formal structure and lasting art.

The whole story is tangled together the way American music always is — Black and white, African and Scots-Irish, mountain hollow and Mississippi saloon, fiddle and banjo and piano, all of it running into each other until you can't pull the threads apart without destroying the fabric.

That's not a problem. That's the point.

Every time you hear a country song, there's a fiddle line in it that started somewhere in these hills. Every time you hear a jazz pianist syncopate, there's a banjo player from 1780 in the ancestry of that rhythm. Every time rock and roll makes you feel something in your chest before your brain catches up, that's the ragged time, the mountain time, the sound that was born in a collision between two worlds inside an Appalachian cabin.

America made a sound that the whole world recognized as American.

It started here. In the hills. On instruments that came from two different continents and found each other in a mountain hollow.

Nobody planned it. Nobody organized it.

They just played.

Next week: The men who went underground. Coal, the mountains, and the lights that came on in cities that never said thank you.

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📡 FROM THE DIGITAL HOLLER
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Picture this.

It's 1916. A skinny Englishman with round glasses and bad teeth climbs out of a wagon somewhere in Madison County, North Carolina. He's sick half the time — doctors eventually pulled every tooth out of his head during the trip. He's got a notebook. He's got a pencil. He's got an assistant named Maud Karpeles who is probably wondering what she signed up for.

And he's looking for something he believes the mountains are hiding.

His name was Cecil Sharp. Born in London. Died in London. Collected over four thousand folk songs in his career, and spent a chunk of his final years limping around our hills doing it.

He didn't come here for the scenery.

Sharp didn't even go to America with the intention of collecting songs. He came in 1915 to advise on a Shakespeare production. But a woman named Olive Dame Campbell pulled him aside and told him something that must have felt like a punch in the ear.

The mountains, she said, were full of old English ballads.

Not scraps. Not echoes. The real thing. Songs that had crossed an ocean in someone's memory and survived two hundred years in the hollows of Appalachia, largely untouched.

Sharp thought she was out of her mind.

She proved him wrong before supper.

Sharp spent roughly 46 weeks between 1916 and 1918 gathering 1,612 folk songs from 281 singers in North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky.

Let that number sit with you a second.

281 singers. People who didn't record albums. Didn't play festivals. Didn't have a manager or a publicist or a Spotify page. They just sat on porches and in kitchens, and they sang what their grandmothers taught them, who learned it from their grandmothers, who learned it on the other side of the Atlantic.

Sharp wrote it all down.

Every variation. Every bent note. Every singer's name, location, and date. He was meticulous about that — noting names, locations, and dates — which allowed later researchers to do biographical work they otherwise couldn't have done.

He also took photographs.

Ordinary mountain people standing in their yards. Their homes in the background. Their faces looking at the camera the way people did back then — steady, no nonsense, not sure why this Englishman is so worked up about a song they've known since childhood.

Now. I want to be straight with you, because that's what we do here.

Sharp was a man of his time, and his time had some ugly ideas baked in. He was interested in Appalachian music with a British origin — his mission was specifically that — and he largely confined his collecting to white descendants of British immigrants. He missed hymns. He passed over fiddle tunes. He walked right by African American musical traditions that deserved the same notebook, the same pencil, the same careful attention.

Phil Jamison put it plainly: Sharp "was interested only in English music and dances. He ignored the rest."

That's a real cost. Worth naming.

But here's the other thing.

The songs he did collect were sitting on the edge of a cliff. Within a decade of Sharp's work, modern country music was born out of traditional ballad recordings produced in the heart of Southern Appalachia. The world was changing fast. Radio was coming. The railroad was already there. The old ways were getting crowded out.

Sharp ran toward the cliff.

He and Karpeles collected 1,625 tunes from over 350 singers, and what he didn't know — what none of them knew — was that some of those singers would never be recorded any other way. Their voices are gone. Their names survive because a sick Englishman in round glasses wrote them down.

You can argue with the man's blind spots. I do.

But I'm not willing to argue with the result.

There's a moment I keep thinking about. Sharp's first day in Madison County. He collected only a few songs, but wrote in his diary that he was "thoroughly satisfied" with his first afternoon's work.

Satisfied.

After one afternoon in the North Carolina mountains with a notebook and a pencil.

I like that. There's something in it that feels true about what this region does to people who bother to show up and listen.

The mountains will give you something.

If you're willing to climb.

Next time you hear a mountain ballad — at a festival, on the radio, at a shape-note singing — there's a decent chance Cecil Sharp had something to do with its survival. Buy him a grudging cup of coffee in your mind. He earned it.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.

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🗞 APPALACHIA IN THE NEWS
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The mountains are getting quieter
Once upon a time, you didn’t have to go far in Appalachia to hear the deep thump-thump-thump of a ruffed grouse drumming through the woods. These days, it’s becoming harder to find. A new piece from Appalachian Voices explores the growing effort to protect the ruffed grouse, one of the region’s most iconic woodland birds.

The story goes beyond hunting and wildlife management. It’s really about habitat, changing forests, and what happens when the balance of the mountains shifts over time. In many ways, saving the grouse means saving part of the old Appalachian woods themselves.

👉 Read the full story

When the music comes back to town

The place where country music first found its voice is tuning up again. A new partnership between East Tennessee State University and the city of Bristol, Tennessee is bringing fresh life to “Bristol Sessions Nights,” a series built around the sounds that shaped a region.

Inspired by the legendary Bristol Sessions, this effort blends history with live performance, giving today’s artists a stage in the same hills where it all began. It’s part tribute, part revival, and a reminder that in Appalachia, the past doesn’t sit still. It keeps playing.

👉 Read the full story

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🗞 KAY’S CORNER
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One of the greatest blessings in my life was when I became a mother. I have two sons in whom I am very proud. My husband and I had a lot of responsibility when those babies were born into this world. I pray that we succeeded somewhat in shaping their lives into decent human beings.

I am so very thankful for the lady that I was blessed with as my mother. Mommy was my very best friend, the one I could go to with any concern or problem that I had. Mommy was my greatest inspiration, biggest cheerleader as long as I was behaving and doing good, but if I messed up and disobeyed her, she was quick to discipline me, and today I’m very thankful for that.

As I look back, I realize the sacrifice my mommy made to raise her five children. She would work from dawn to dusk to take care of our home and us children. Mommy would help Daddy on the farm as much as possible. She would fix a big breakfast for Daddy before he would leave to go to work. Then she would get all us children fed and ready for school.

I was the only girl, so I think I may have been just a bit spoiled, maybe!

I have often been told that I favor my Mommy so much. My brothers have told me that my actions remind them so much of Mommy. If I can be half the woman and mother that my Mommy was, then I can consider myself blessed.

I hope you can recall some precious memories of your mother while reading this section of The Wayne Train.

Here are the words to a song that I have sung many times in honor and memory of my mother.

Who’ll Pray For Me When Mama’s Gone

My rough and rowdy ways have kept me from His Grace.
But there’s hope for me because Mama’s faith is strong.
She’s the only hope I got to keep me in touch with God.
But who’ll pray for me when Mama’s gone?

Who’ll pray for me when Mama’s gone,
Who’ll ask His forgiveness from then on?
Who’ll care enough to talk to God
When her pleading voice has stopped?
Who’ll pray for me when Mama’s gone?

I guess I’m just too weak to fall down on my knees.
And talk to God like a man on my own.
But He knows who I am; she mentions me to Him.
But who’ll pray for me when Mama’s gone?

Bible Verse of the Week

Her children arise up and call her blessed; 
her husband also, and he praises her.

Who can find a virtuous woman?

For her price is far above rubies.

Her children arise up and call her blessed; 

her husband also, and he praises her.

Proverbs 31:10, 28

Gospel singer Kay Himes Knuckles has been sharing her music ministry in Eastern and Central Kentucky for more than 40 years.

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📜 KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS
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The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Pull up a map of northwest Georgia and drag your finger down I-75 toward Atlanta.

You'll pass right through it without knowing.

That's Gordon County. Population just under 58,000. County seat: Calhoun. Named for a West Point man who built Georgia's first railroad — William Washington Gordon, founder and first president of the Central Railroad, and incidentally grandfather to Juliette Gordon Low, the woman who started the Girl Scouts.

Good family.

But Gordon County's story is older than any of that.

Before any county lines were drawn, this land was New Echota — the capital of the Cherokee Nation from 1825 to 1835. A real capital. A functioning government. Home of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the country, printed in both Cherokee and English.

They had a written language. A press. Courts.

Then came the treaty.

In 1835, a faction of the Cherokee signed the Treaty of New Echota, trading all their land in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina for five million dollars. Most Cherokee opposed it. Didn't matter. The U.S. considered it binding.

In 1838, soldiers rounded up the last 15,000 Cherokee in Georgia and marched them west.

Gordon County is where that march began.

You drive through it at 75 miles an hour eating a bag of Funyuns.

De Soto came through before any of that. His chroniclers wrote that the land was rich — "one of the best and most abundant provinces" they'd found, with corncribs and fields full of maize and beans.

They repaid that hospitality with smallpox.

The epidemic killed roughly 90 percent of the native population. The survivors moved southwest and became what we now call the Creek Nation. The Cherokee moved in behind them.

And then they got moved too.

That's a lot of weight for 358 square miles to carry.

The county came back. Cotton, then carpet mills, then an economic thread in textiles that continues to this day. Sherman marched straight through it on his way to Atlanta and didn't slow down. Gordon County has more interstate exits than any other county in Georgia, which sounds like a Chamber of Commerce brag but actually tells you something — it sits in the middle of everything, always has.

Crossroads country.

Now. The part I want you to sit with.

In 1887, a boy named Roland Hayes was born in Curryville, a farming settlement just outside Calhoun, to a formerly enslaved woman named Fanny and a tenant farmer named William.

His father died when Roland was eleven. His mother moved the family to Chattanooga.

Roland grew up singing spirituals in a church his mother founded in Curryville. He had a sixth-grade education. He sold newspapers. He shined shoes.

Somebody played him a Caruso record. That opened the heavens.

He talked his way into Fisk University. Toured with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Moved to Boston. Rented Symphony Hall himself. Paid for everything himself. Promoted himself. And then sang his way into concert halls across Europe.

By the late 1920s, Roland Hayes was the highest-paid tenor in the world. King George and Queen Mary of England requested a private performance. He sang in seven languages.

From Curryville, Georgia.

From a sharecropper's cabin in Gordon County.

He came back and bought the land where his mother had been enslaved.

Let that one breathe.

Gordon County was also home to the Georgia Yellow Hammers — one of the most important old-time music bands of the 1920s. Their Charles Ernest Moody wrote "Drifting Too Far From the Shore," later recorded by Jerry Garcia, Emmylou Harris, and Hank Williams.

Gospel standards born in the same county that gave the world Roland Hayes.

Something in the water.

Or maybe just something in the hills.

Gordon County isn't flashy. It's not a name that shows up in conversations. Most people pass through it chasing somewhere else.

But it held the last capital of the Cherokee Nation. It launched the Trail of Tears. It raised a sharecropper's son who sang for kings. It produced hymns that outlived the men who wrote them.

History doesn't always put up a billboard.

Sometimes it just sits there, quiet, off Exit 318, waiting for somebody to pay attention.

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📜 APPALACHIAN ALMANAC
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THE SKY ABOVE

The moon has been waning all week, shrinking down toward nothing.

By Saturday, May 16, she's gone. New moon arrives — and this one is a Super New Moon, the first of two in 2026, meaning the moon is sitting closer to Earth than usual. You won't see her. That's the point.

Dark skies and a new moon mean the Milky Way core will shine at its brightest Saturday night. Get away from town. Get somewhere without a parking lot light humming overhead. Let your eyes adjust for twenty minutes. Then look up.

The old people called it the Backbone of the Night.

They weren't wrong.

👉 Read the full story

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📜 APPALACHIAN ASTROLOGY
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Week of May 10–16, 2026

I'll be straight with you.

I am not an astrologer. I am a man who once drove forty minutes to avoid a black cat on a two-lane road, so take that for what it's worth.

But up here in the hills, we've always kept one eye on the sky and one hand on the almanac. The signs govern the garden, the haircut, the fence post, and apparently the heart. So every week I'm going to translate what the planets are doing into language a person can actually use.

No crystal balls. No chakras. Just the stars, the mountains, and a little common sense.

This week's big news: on May 10, the Taurus Sun lines up favorably with Jupiter in Cancer, bringing easy, heartfelt moments. Good timing for Mother's Day. The universe, for once, is cooperating.

Then on Saturday, the New Moon in Taurus arrives — ideal for fresh beginnings, starting a garden, or launching something new. Whatever begins now has staying power.

Plant the seed. Trust the ground.

👉 Read the full story

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📜 THE BACK PAGE
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Mother’s Day Phonograph Sale

Just think, $1.00 and you can join our club and get a beautiful phonograph. Any make you want sent to your home. Then you can arrange balance of the payments to be made each week or month. We will give you ten of the latest Victor records with each sale free. Just think mother at home and how happy she will be with a phonograph and you can play “Little Church Around the Corner,” “My Wondering Boy Tonight,” “When You and I Were Young Maggie,” “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” in fact, all the old songs mother used to sing. Then you can put a good jazz record or two and have a real dance the whole family will enjoy. Join our club now. Come in, let us tell you about this easy plan of buying a phonograph. Candito Piano Company, 120 South Limestone Street, Ave.

The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

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