read Hillbilly Liminality, Part 1

Would that you had had the privilege of growing old amid the limited circumstances of your origin, and that Fortune had not raised you to such heights!

Seneca, in Letters from a Stoic

Many years ago—so many now that I can’t remember what year it actually was—I began spending a lot of time at a restaurant and bar in Athens, Ohio called Casa Nueva and Cantina. I was an undergraduate at Ohio University at the time, and because of my four years of military service, a bit older than most of my college peers. Casa was (and still is) a worker-owned “Mexican” restaurant, and the patrons skewed older and more townie than the college-aged customers of other establishments in downtown Athens. I quickly found myself dispositionally unsuited for those other establishments (call it early onset old manhood or maybe just a preference for drinking with people who didn’t need a fake ID), and so I chose Casa and a pub called O’Hooley’s (later Jackie O’s) as my regular hangouts instead. Occasionally I found myself hanging out at Night Court for karaoke night where the owner, Bill Cash, sung his favorites while strolling back and forth on the bar top. I never took the karaoke mic myself despite at least one occasion of being prodded to do so by Jim Warner (to sing Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” a song I didn’t even know at the time). As I watched him and another friend sing the song I thought to myself, “Well this certainly sounds nothing like Townes Van Zandt.” I was then, and still am, really into Townes Van Zandt. If you know NIN and Townes you recognize the difference.

In the 1990s, Athens had a solid music scene, as college towns often do (if not as solid as that other Athens that spun out R.E.M., The B-52s, Drive-By Truckers, of Montreal, and many others). On any given night you could catch some really good local music at The Union or on the tiny Casa stage, Celtic and folk bands at O’Hooley’s, or open mic nights at the Front Room. Bands with names like Joe Bob Billy and the Texas Alien, the Wingnuts, Stella, Cactus Pears, Akimbo, and Appalachian Death Ride played most weekends in one bar or another. There were guys named Catfish and June Bug hanging around, playing in multiple bands. Once in awhile some great but lesser-known national artists would show up, which is how I ended up seeing former Flat Duo Jet Dex Romweber playing his retro guitar rock at Another Fool’s Café and Slaid Cleaves singing alongside Stella’s Laura Nadeau at Casa a few years before I’d catch him every Wednesday night at The Ginger Man in Austin, Texas. When the rest of the world was obsessed with grunge, Athens was still a haven for roots music aficionados who wanted a little bluegrass with their disenchantment.

I have no idea where I first saw J.D. Hutchison play. I’ve seen him sing on so many stages in the last 25+ years that it would be impossible for me to venture a reasonable guess. But I do know I liked him immediately. Here was this authentically-Appalachian dude who played brilliant originals and covers of everyone from Dylan to Cash. Occasionally these last two at the same time, as when he sang both parts of “Girl from the North Country” in a close approximation of Bob and Johnny. A few years later I started listening to Robert Earl Keen and discovered J. D.’s song, “The Coming Home of the Son and Brother,” on Keen’s “Picnic” album—a song I knew well from seeing J. D. play it so many times around Athens. J.D. was a hillbilly in the best sense. Born in Southeastern Ohio not far from West Virginia, gregarious and intellectual without being affected, well-read and well-traveled, humorous and philosophical, down-to-earth, and a damned fine musician and singer. Insofar as Athens had musical royalty, he was a strong candidate for king, adorned in faded denim and a Blue Eagle Music t-shirt.

Over the decades, I saw J.D. play countless times, and I would often see him in Casa Nueva on weekend mornings having breakfast with friends at their usual booth. In that time I never took an opportunity to meet him or to strike up a conversation, and in any case, I have never felt comfortable chatting up my favorite musicians; I’ve let slip away my opportunities to talk to Neko Case, Robbie Fulks, Jonathan Richman, Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, David Lowery, and, most recently, Danielle Ponder. I was always happy enough to glean what I could from J. D.’s stage performances and banter and the stories told about him, such as the unsubstantiated claim by some that he was, in fact, the Sleepy John “everybody knows” in Keen’s “I’m Coming’ Home.”

But one Saturday morning about five years ago I was in Athens for one reason or another and decided, as I usually do, much in need of their huevos rancheros and delicious coffee, to have breakfast at Casa. I arrived there just as it opened and picked an open booth to hunker down in, just before J.D. walked in a minute or two behind me. Unaccompanied by his usual group of friends, he gazed somewhat covetously at the booth I sat in, and I quickly realized it was his usual table. Feeling a twinge of guilt, but I suppose not enough to move, I offered him a seat across from me. “Feel free to join me if you want.” And so he did. After close to a quarter century, this was the first chance I had to just sit and talk to J. D. one-on-one, so I began with the typical niceties about how beautiful a morning it was and what he was up to for the day. I was surprised that my usual introverted avoidance of chatting with people I don’t know gave way to easy conversation. Sometimes Athens and Casa just have a way of making you feel your most comfortable.

When the conversation lulled, J.D. asked me one of the most important questions I’ve ever been asked. Or, at least that’s how I see it these several years later. One so obvious that I’m perplexed that I never really asked it of myself, or, if I did, not in a way that produced any useful answer. One that stuck into me like an unextractable splinter that I still fuss at five years later—after a pandemic, after hours, days, weeks, years of labor, after J.D.’s passing nearly a year ago. He asked me the question everyone asks each other when they meet: “What do you do?” I gave him the usual rote response about teaching writing, administering a writing program, working at a university, so on, so on, so on, rinse repeat. He listened to me for a few minutes with the attentive gaze you rarely get from folks these days, and when I had finished, and after a slight pause, replied, “That’s what you do for work, but that isn’t who you are. What do you really do?” Framed this way, the question was much more difficult to answer. Much more uncomfortable. To answer this question I could not hide behind a convenient script designed to obscure deep existential complexities about labor, freedom, and identity. J.D. had asked a simple enough question, but in doing so he had pulled at a loose thread that I have always been loathe to see unravel.

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After a stint in the Navy, I went off to college. I was the first (and last) member of my family to do so. I returned to Southern Ohio just as the failures of a fractured American economic system began to be revealed in rural communities that had once seemed largely immune to the vicissitudes of capitalism. You needn’t have read the self-promoting memoir of that other J.D. to have heard this story, and you are better off if you skipped that version altogether. It isn’t that the writing wasn’t already on the wall—the Reagan revolution had done a magnificent job of establishing a cult-like subservience to a trickle-down economic theory that, in reality, gushed money upward long before the 90s and NAFTA saw the guardrails come off the economic system for good. The canaries had been dying in the coal mine for a couple of decades, but the fate of rural America was largely sealed in the mid-90s when the technocrats and the libertarian cyber-capitalists who would eventually rule the pristine palaces of Silicon Valley convinced an entire population that their vision of America was more democratic, more fair, and more economically-favorable. That last one is only true if you overlook how that vision was really only favorable to these cyber-capitalists and to the venture capitalists who provided the seed money for their pet projects. For my 8th-grade dropout mother who lost her factory job in 1997? Not so much. For the left-behind laborers who found themselves out of jobs and hope? The Sackler family had their backs, and the results were deemed a moral failure by the poor rather than of the system that ensured the demise of America’s working class.

My choice to get a college degree was not fated by parentage or financial circumstance, a fact that I have never lost sight of even in those times when I try to forget I don’t belong here—here among the books and the theories and the concepts and the cooly-objective writing and the sabbaticals. To be a liminal hillbilly is to experience the tension between the circumstances of one’s childhood and family and the economic and cultural mobility that feels forever undeserved. When you see your sister, uncle, cousin die young and addicted you think to yourself, “There but for the grace of god, go I,” because it hardly seems rationale to credit yourself for your own escape. After all, why would you of all people fall so far from the tree? Ask yourself this enough and imposter syndrome creeps in and puts your mind in a headlock. You might spend an inordinate amount of time trying to pick apart the possibilities, thinking about it even more after a breakfast companion asks you what you do. If I’m an imposter, then what I do can’t possibly be me, so maybe I’m someone else I have consigned to memory. Maybe the mop-headed hillbilly boy and the balding middle-aged academic aren’t even the same species.

The thread that binds the two isn’t labor, or economic status, or the “predicatable” logic of a childhood being raised a certain way. The thread is something even more abstract than that.

As a lonely and mostly quiet child growing up in the 70s and 80s in the Appalachian foothills, I could find in my environment only a few resources with which to occupy what seemed like the endless days of my youth. There was, of course, the always-present woods behind my house, which drew me into their cool, dank arms. Which still draw me in. Forests call to me from all corners of the earth. Forests speak mystery and comfort and splendid seclusion. I am mycelium, entangled forever in the soil, reaching out my tendrils, drawing the earth toward me, feeding, breathing, longing, wondering and wandering. Entering the woods meant, means, getting lost in thought and shutting out the noise that disrupts and distracts. I sensed as much as a child; I know as much as an adult now that the noise is cacophonous. If I belong nowhere else I belong in the woods.

It was among those Southern Ohio trees that I found comfort and identity in books and music, though nobody else in my family was especially interested in either. My family had a few books in the house—a slim set of children’s encyclopedias, a couple histories of World War II, a handful of Little Golden books—but we were certainly not collectors. However, once I learned to read I took advantage of every other opportunity I had to get my tiny fingers on as many texts as possible, from the back of the cereal box to anything the school and local libraries would allow me to check out, to the mail order library that delivered books to your home in brown manila envelopes. OVAL (Ohio Valley Area Libraries), a consortium of libraries delivering books-by-mail to eleven rural Appalachian Ohio counties, was a lifeline for several summers of my childhood when I, sequestered at home by a father who saw no value in allowing his children to socialize, ordered books from its catalogue and waited excitedly for each parcel to arrive in our mailbox. Ah, OVAL. The once but no more OVAL. My first great love and my true and stalwart friend. How you changed the life of a lonely and alone Appalachian kid in late 1970s rural and dying Ohio.

And music? Getting my hands on a book or on a cassette tape was just about the same experience. How do you make a small place seem infinite? You see, you read, you hear everything you can that is different from what is right in front of you. Until I became a tween (which is a group of people who didn’t even exist at the time, so maybe I was one of a whole generation of proto-tweens), I was beholden entirely to the musical choices of other people in my life—from my father’s collection of classic country albums (fundamental!) to my older sisters’ 45s of bands like Paper Lace (Fun? Maybe. But definitely not mental). It was the Christmas of my thirteenth year that I set off on my own journey of musical discovery when I was given a boombox and a couple of cassette tapes—the soundtrack to Eddie and the Cruisers and Bob Seger’s live album, Nine Tonight. That enormous gray plastic box became my closest friend in the next few years, alongside a subscription to Columbia House Records copped on the sly. Seemingly overnight the LEGOs that preoccupied me were replaced by Pink Floyd’s The Wall, unfathomable hours of song, thousands of albums, countless nights at live concerts. Nearly forty years on and some things have not changed in the least. The cumbersome gray box has just been replaced by a small space gray one that weighs so much more than any of us want to admit.

I doubt J.D. really wanted me to espouse a theory of labor and identity, or to link my life story to the machinery of declining America, or to illuminate the shadowy corners of my childhood when he asked me what I do. Maybe he was simply trying to elucidate the difference between vocation and avocation, advocating for letting the latter define or describe oneself. In a crumbling America where economic security is at best a crap shoot, we still routinely define ourselves through the lens of our work, however teetering and vulnerable our work might be. My work and my hobbies are more or less the same, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing. When I settled in among the brick sidewalks of Ohio University, directionless and ill-defined, in need of a major, I chose the thing I always chose: books. Trees would always serve me well in one form or in another. Nearly thirty years on from that choice I’m not sure I could have made a better one. Whatever discomfort I might feel as a hillbilly academic, internally shouting toward folks on both sides of that liminal space, Why the hell can’t you see the other side?, the factories and fields where I might have otherwise landed are long gone. And at least I’m not an errand boy for Peter Thiel.

All of this is just to say that one is plopped down in a place on this planet in order to go be something, anything, who really even knows what? You get carved out of a big block of wood, whittled here and whittled there, sandpapered and chipped, sometimes forgotten in the back of a dresser drawer, brought out into the light squinting and recalling, worn smooth, sometimes good but more often bad at self-interrogation, exposed by the queries of a more-or-less-stranger, wondering how the fuck you got from there to here, and maybe you have to consider the possibility that you weren’t ever driving the car after all.