Which Side Are You On?
The Doolittles' Silas House and Jason Howard

use music to fight mountaintop removal mining

BY LESLIE SMITH TOWNSEND

 

From the haunting melody of "Which Side Are You On" to the rollicking harmony of "A Ton On My Shoulder," Silas House and Jason Howard bring us Appalachian music that intersects with our own deepest longings to make a difference in the world.

The two Eastern Kentuckians formed the group the Doolittles following the first author's tour of mountaintop removal mining in 2005 and joined others in the production of the CD Songs For The Mountaintop. House is a best-selling novelist and Howard is a freelance writer. The duo recently produced their first album, Pine to Pine, a field recording to benefit Hindman Settlement School.

The Doolittles have played at churches, bars, college campuses and for two popular public radio shows: "Woodsongs" and "Kentucky Homefront." They will be performing June 23 at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn.; July 19 at Murray State University in Murray, Ky.; and Sept. 14 at The Rudyard Kipling in Louisville, Ky.


Leslie Townsend: How did the Doolittles get caught up with mountaintop removal?

Silas House: I was on the first authors' tour on mountaintop removal, which by now is already kind of a historical thing. Since then, it's become much more a part of the media because the writers just went nuts. Even though I had seen mountaintop removal, until that tour, I didn't completely understand it, mainly because I got to see the scientific part of it. They had people come in and tell us about the ecosystem and erosion and flooding and the loss of plant life. Then we saw the natural aspects. We went on a flyover. Until you're up in the air, you can't see the scope of it, because there's only so much you can take in on the ground. When you get up there, you can see mountaintop removal sites that are bigger than the city of London. Mountaintop removal is the only thing besides the Great Wall of China you can see from space.

Then they took us to the Hindman Settlement School, and we had a community meeting. People came in and told us about their experiences living with mountaintop removal and how their lives had been ruined. Ever since then, I've felt a moral obligation to do something, like it would be sin for me not to do something. It felt like a religious thing to me.

Jason Howard: At the time of the first tour, I was living in D.C. so I'd been following this in the media and then coming home. I had a friend that I brought down with me. We drove up one day from Bell County, and I saw the site right past the Wal-Mart there, and I was just blown away. I decided that when I moved back home, this was something I wanted to focus on, to start working against, fighting against. So I moved back home, and I went on the second authors' tour, which was in the fall of 2005.

How we started singing about that subject — singing against it — was us talking about it so much and us both being from coal mining families. We'd been playing all kinds of great Carter family songs and Gillian Welch and Loretta Lynn, but at some point, we decided to write about it in song format.

SH: "Which Side Are You On?" was the first song we wrote about it.

JH: It's based on "Which Side Are You On?" that was written by Florence Reese in Harlan County in the early '30s. It was a union song. She was waiting on her husband to come home one night, and he was a union man. She got word that these gun thugs, these company men, had surrounded her house and were going to waylay her husband. She got word to him not to come home. Then she pulled a calendar down off her wall and wrote "Which Side Are You On?" It's a song that's been sung all over the world for all kinds of social justice movements. We decided that it needed to be reclaimed for mountaintop removal because it had started in eastern Kentucky and it was dealing with coal. We used the tune of it and rewrote the lyrics.

SH: It was important to rewrite a famous song. First of all, it's part of folk music — the rewriting of songs to fit the purpose like —

JH: "This Land is Your Land," by the Carter family.

SH: And "Red Wing" and "Union Made" and all those songs. That song came real easy. We wrote it —

JH: At the kitchen table one night —

SH: In 15 minutes or so. We tried to hit all the things that were really important. Right off the bat, we say, "My daddy was a miner" to say that we're not against coal miners. We're for coal miners. Speaking out against mountaintop removal and living in eastern Kentucky is sort of like proclaiming yourself a communist. It's the way the coal industry paints you. They want everyone else to be turned against you. So we tried to hit everything like —

JH: That it took jobs, with the big machines.

SH: It was a call to arms — that song was. That's what it's always been since Florence Reese wrote the first version. She wrote the lyrics. The tune is actually an old gospel song: "Lay the Lilly Low."

LT: How was the idea of Songs for the Mountaintop birthed?

SH: There were several of us that were involved in the whole mountaintop removal movement who got the idea and took it forward to Kentuckians for the Commonwealth that we should be using music — that writers could do a lot, but musicians could do a lot, too. Music can reach more people. Jason and I and Anne Shelby and Kate Larken and Bret Ratliff and Jesse Wells and Lora Smith formed a committee. This was last summer. We set a goal that we wanted it out by the Kentucky Book Fair, so we could release it there.

LT: I don't know whether this was intentional, but I noticed that more voices enter the chorus of "Which Side Are You On" as the song progresses.

SH: That is intentional. The thing we tell people who are singing with us is to imagine that we're walking down the road singing this song and they're coming out of their houses and joining us. And we're all walking down the road to the coal company.

LT: You all harmonize so well together. What instruments do you play?

SH: I play guitar and a little bit of mandolin.

JH: My main instrument's piano. That's the one I started on. I play a little bit of guitar. I play bass guitar. I play autoharp and guitaro — the really weird one [cross between an autoharp and a guitar]—a little mandolin and organ.

LT: Did you take lessons?

JH: I took piano lessons starting when I was 6 for a few years. Then I started picking it up by ear. I grew up in a Pentecostal church and that was a lot of my musical education. That's where I picked up a lot of my piano playing and bass guitar. When I was living away in Washington and was deathly homesick, I would play a lot of coffee houses and open mikes up there...  Now I feel better about playing in front of people, but at the time, I would not play guitar on stage. So I would do all these piano songs, but I really wanted to do mountain music up there because that's where my heart is — these old Carter Family songs and stuff. They don't translate well to the piano. So I bought me an autoharp with some Christmas money. It's based on the piano scale so I was able to relate that.

SH: I started playing guitar to quit smoking. I've only been playing three years. I did everything in my power to quit smoking, and I've been playing ever since. I consider myself a singer, not a musician so much. I play enough to keep time. The main reason I always wanted to play music was because I was raised Pentecostal, and music was such a big part of that. My mother was a gospel singer. She still is. When I was a child, she sang all over the place — at tent revivals and camp meetings and things like that. So three or four nights a week, we were at church. The nights we weren't at church, I was at my aunt's house. She loved rock ‘n' roll; she loved the devil's music. So I had about the best of both worlds, music-wise — gospel music and rock ‘n' roll. There wasn't that much difference between them really.

LT: Jason, would you tell the story about your great-grandfather?

JH: That was my great-papaw on my daddy's side. His name was McClelland Howard and they called him Clell. He went into the mines at a really young age. I think he was killed when he was 29 or 30. He was a union man, a really early union organizer, and if I'm telling the story right, it was his wife's stepfather that was a company man. There was that conflict in the family. Coal has always divided families. Everybody talks about the Civil War dividing families. Coal has, too. They fought and fought and fought over this and finally, when everybody went back into the mines after a strike, my great-grandfather was killed. He was mangled and crushed to death by a machine. Everybody said, and it was acknowledged and eventually claimed later on, that his wife's stepfather had done it. His name is the first name that's on the miner's memorial up in Harlan County. It was done because he was taking a stand. It was 1930. That's just one story of a coal miner in my family.

SH: It's always something you're conflicted about. On the one hand, if it hadn't been for coal, my family would still be destitute. It enabled them to rise up out of poverty. But at the same time, when I was a child, there was a strip mine for about a half a mile on the road right across from me. It was being stripped for two or three years. So my childhood was really marked by that — all the air pollution and the noise, not being able to go out to play at certain times because when they blasted, you couldn't be around cliffs or under the bridge where we stayed. So we had a blasting schedule that you would clip out of the newspaper every week and put up on the refrigerator. And then my parents ended up buying that land and building a house on it. They had to reclaim it themselves. So I have first-hand knowledge of how the coal industry will say, "Look at this beautiful piece of land we've reclaimed," and I know that that's this model piece of land that they haul out for every journalist who ventures into Kentucky. But I lived on reclaimed land. My own daddy had to bring in loads and loads and loads of topsoil, and he had to plant all the trees himself, because the coal companies just left it. They'd throw a few seeds on it and that was all.

LT: Silas, you wrote The Coal Tattoo before the author's tour, right?

SH: Right. The Coal Tattoo's about two sisters, the unconditional love between siblings. Then I found out about this woman called the Widow Combs. Her land was being strip-mined. [The coal companies] owned the mineral rights, so they went in and basically took the whole mountain from under her house. All the refuse was falling down on her. She went and laid down in front of the bulldozers. This was in Knott County two days before Thanksgiving in 1965. The coal company called the police on her, and the sheriff and two deputies came in and carried her away —this 65-year-old woman — and put her in jail. She stayed there one night, until Thanksgiving Day. This got on the front page of The New York Times. It finally drew national attention to something people in Kentucky had been fighting for years. I think of what a heroic, brave act that was for this old woman. When she laid down in front of the bulldozer, she didn't know whether it would stop or not. I wanted to pay tribute to her story in some way. So I have the sisters [in The Coal Tattoo] and they have to fight for their land and wind up lying in front of bulldozers. Through that novel, I think, my activist spirit was born. A year after the novel came out, I was taken on the tour of mountaintop removal. I had to write the draft for the authors' statement. We all worked on it together.

JH: And you helped host the tour.

LT: And you wrote the forward to Missing Mountains.

SH: The major thing about the music part of it is that after I left the mountaintop removal tour … I was able to put it into music in a way I couldn't put it into prose. It was too big a thing, and the economy of music helped me to [express it].

JH: I think [singing] is a different act than getting up and reading something you wrote.

SH: You can really put your passion into it in a different way.

LT: This comes across on Songs from the Mountaintop. It immediately immerses you in a different world.

SH: Something else that's important about our songs is that we choose to keep the dialect and make that real obvious. We always make a conscious choice. If it's the way we would say it, just sitting around, the two of us, that's the way we go ahead and put it in the song. We want it to be real.

JH: It's about preservation — preserving an accent, preserving a dialect, preserving a sound of the culture and merging it with modern day, with our experience growing up in contemporary Appalachia. There's a reason why my living room is papered with Carter family memorabilia. It's something that is in our collective memory. Every time we stand up to sing, we think about it as something we're preserving and that our ancestors were a part of.

SH: The whole thing is a real political act, the way we look at it, even if we're not singing about mountaintop removal. Like we have this one song called "A Ton on My Shoulder." It's all about people making fun of your accent and keeping your accent. To us, that is just as much a form of activism as mountaintop removal, mainly because it's something that people don't talk about at all. We're a country that has laid down and accepted homogenization. That's what that song is about. People will say, "You've got a chip on your shoulder." It's a racial thing in a way, or an ethnic thing. It's being judged based on where you're from.

JH: Being country, being a hillbilly, is the last socially acceptable stereotype. We have all these qualms about labeling African Americans, gays and Hispanics. That's fine. No one should discriminate. I spent five years defending where I came from.

SH: And there are about 15 million hillbillies in the United States.

LT: Say something about gigs you've played and what you have planned. Do you do PR or is it word-of-mouth?

SH: It's all been word-of-mouth so far.

JH: Any PR has been more about mountaintop removal.

SH: That's sort of overtaken our music. The whole mountaintop removal thing has really overtaken our lives, because it's such an immediate threat that you have to —

JH: Lay everything down.

SH: Two weeks ago, we went to Knoxville. We were looking at the mountains, and they were just beautiful and pristine at the state line. Two or three days ago, we went to Knoxville again, and a whole mountain's gone. When you see it happen that quick, you feel a real urgency.

JH: It's really damaging to see the places you love not exist anymore.

SH: For a little while, we were all about the Doolittles' music, and now we tend to think more about mountaintop removal music than anything. We're part of a group of musicians against mountaintop removal called Public Outcry. There are six of us. We've been to a lot of gigs with them, instead of as the Doolittles.

JH: We are playing at the Church of God over in Montgomery Creek on Wednesday, because the pastor's land is being threatened by mountaintop removal. Once people see that threat up close — see that this is happening to our friend or our brother — that's when people will get on this…. I think that when mountain people see an immediate threat, they're going to get on board and do something about it. The problem is that it will be too late at that point. This is something we feel a responsibility, as hillbillies —

SH: As Christians.

JH: — to get out and promote a dialogue about this and say, "It can't wait that long." There's a section of our show with Public Outcry where we address this whole idea of environmental stewardship. The Kentucky Coal Association always attacks the artists, the authors and the musicians about this. They've started attacking the religious leaders, as well. So we try to respond: "Look at all these great things in religious tradition that happen on mountaintops: Moses and the Ten Commandments; Abraham and Isaac; the temple built on the mountaintop; Jesus crucified on the mountaintop." All these things — "I will lift mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help."

LT: What is at stake for you personally?

SH: Leslie County, where all my people come from, it's being flattened completely. People tend to not live in one place anymore, so they don't get as connected to the land. When you see your home county where your people have lived for a hundred years, that really drives it home for you. If everyone could see ancestral land done that way, I think a fire would build in them.

LT: What is your vision for the Doolittles?

SH: It is mostly about fun, but it's also an activism thing.

JH: It's an act of preservation.

SH: Also, we just want to be raw. Of course, we have to rehearse, but it is important to us to be raw and not too polished.

JH: All these mainstream acts of country music are polished. That's something we never want to be, even if we record in a studio. We don't want to have that slick, glossy sound. That's not who we are.

LT: How do your families respond to your music and to the investment of time that you give it?

SH: [Laughs] They love to tell people about our music, and they go to a lot of our gigs. They're proud of it.

JH: They don't think it's work.

SH: They don't think it's work, and they don't completely understand it. Anytime you're really doing art, you're an outsider for the most part with your family, unless they're artists, too.

JH: Not just with your family, but with the general public. People think that you just get up, and it's just a magical thing. I don't want to take the magic away from it because that's important, but it can be really grueling.

SH: It is a big time investment, but it's also a lot of fun. We only play music with people we really love. We don't ever play for people unless we really love them.

 

New Southerner contributing editor Leslie Smith Townsend, of Louisville., Ky., is a pastoral counselor in private practice. Her essays have been published in The Louisville Review, Arable, Church & Society and The Journal of Pastoral Care & Counseling, and a composite excerpt of her memoir Body Beautiful is forthcoming in an anthology by the Healing Project (2007-08).