The Sound Under the Mountain: Place and Politics in Appalachian Outsider Music

Though less visibly than the region’s traditional instrumental and vocal forms, a vibrant culture of “outsider” music flourishes in Appalachia. Mining the story of Appalachian punk, indie and experimental music uncovers an intensely multifarious world of intersecting expressive networks – one in which artists play within and against regional conventions and myths in provocative ways, and in which there also appears to be a running sensibility of “place.” This paper will begin with a brief historical survey of Appalachian outsider music (situating it as an unwieldy but eminently logical cluster of outgrowths from the region’s complex cultural and socioeconomic patterns – Virgil Caine’s [Floyd, VA] weirdly shambling country-rock, Hasil Adkins’s [“Wild Man of West Virginia”] psychotic rockabilly, and more), and then train its lens on the current underground-music community of Asheville, NC. In addition to drawing connections between these contemporary musicians and their forbears, I will illustrate how, despite their surface-level distinctiveness from better-documented regional styles, the work they’re producing is, in fact, of a piece with those practices on a deeper expressive level. Ultimately, I aim to highlight how the specific and diverse forms of outsider musical expression in this microcosm of the region (from Sarah Louise’s impressionistic 12-string tone poems to Uninhabitable’s visceral and politically-charged crust-punk) embody a unified response to, and evocation of, issues and themes applicable across Appalachia, from its musical heritage to its ecological and socioeconomic struggles