Watchin' the Bluegrass Grow

Book excerpt: Cane Bottom, this book's fictional Appalachian town, boasts an assortment of made-up crusty characters who get into a story-telling contest at the depot one night—with the twist that their tales and anecdotes are pieces of real American folklore. The narrator's authentic first-person colloquialisms and comments on the progress of the evening's entertainment provide a portrait of mountain social life around 1950, still moving at a snail's pace even as the rest of America gets on the move. The second part of the book is a collection of prose poems that describe the goings-on in Cane Bottom when its residents suddenly have to cope with a religious conversion, a baptism, a wake, a funeral, and some difficulties surrounding snake handling.