My family actually lived in the same village for about 400 years. They had great stability until the last century. People lived and intermarried in small villages.
My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
I remember my grandmother drying wild coffee berries in the sun, then hulling and roasting them for her own cup of coffee each morning.
I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.
In many ways I'm an experimental and new music composer that comes from a rural tradition rather than an urban one.
What you need for breakfast, they say in East Tennessee, is a jug of good corn liquor, a thick steak and a hound dog. Then you feed the steak to the dog.
From a distance, at a time of urbanization and connectivity, rodeo and ranching may seem anachronistic notions - quaint and sepia-toned from an America that no longer exists.
I used to help my granddaddy make sausage. He would mix it up in a cleaned-out washtub with his hands, no gloves. Man, if we did anything like that today, they would jack the jail up and throw us under it.
