Sybil L. Halcomb Brown

Appalachian Mamma Sybil L. Halcomb Brown

This is the story of a girl growing up in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky during the 1950s and 1960s. The America most often remembered by television shows of that era present quite a contrast to these woods. Women worked hard or harder than men who slaved in coal mines. Few had indoor plumbing, medical care was not within easy access, and education took place in the one-room schoolhouse. Through gritty labor, mountain people rewarded themselves with plenty of fiddling and banjo pickin' while other parts of the world buzzed along a technological landscape of modernization. Under the brush of the backwoods and down the paths of dirt roads, storytelling and family traditions were celebrated around the hearths. Memories of preachers, parents and barefoot children, coal miners, farmers, bootleggers, and everybody else from that time seem to have come of age and evaporated into distant memory. I hope to reclaim this part of American life. This is the America I knew as a girl, and this is my story.