Data portal will help policymakers and lawmakers in Tenn. 'take a deep dive into why certain rural counties struggle'

The dashboard includes research results on roughly 60 topics related to a county's quality of life.

East Tennessee State University researchers created an online dashboard containing in-depth data about the state's counties. The portal is designed to help policymakers and lawmakers "move beyond superficial data and take a deep dive into why certain rural counties struggle," reports Liz Carey of The Daily Yonder. "Of Tennessee’s 95 counties, 78 are designated as rural, and 70 counties have more than half of their residents in rural areas."

To build the Tennessee Livability Indicators Dashboard, researchers at ETSU's Center for Rural Health and Research used data collected "from various agencies about 60 topics related to the counties’ quality of life," Carey explains. Data points cover "economic development, housing, transportation, education, employment, availability of health care access, and how friendly a community is for aging residents."

Dr. Qian Huang, a research assistant professor at CRHR, told the Yonder, "By bringing these data together, we aim to equip communities, leaders, and organizations with the tools they need to make informed decisions and strengthen livability across the state."

As the state decides where federal funds from the Rural Health Transformation Program are needed most, the dashboard can provide immediate, data-informed guidance. Carey adds, "Factors covered in the dashboard, such as hospital access, teen birth rate, suicide rates, and access to dental healthcare, will also help track successes from the use of those funds."

CRHR was formed in 2019 to help build a broader understanding of and for the state's rural counties. Carey reports, "Dashboard researchers said they hoped the dashboard would be used as a model for other states to be able to drill down into data about their communities, as well."

Sevier County finds a way to keep Great Smoky Mountains National Park open despite government shutdown

Smoky Mountains National Park
(David Hertle, Unsplash)

Sevier County in Tennessee worked together with state officials, U.S. senators’ offices, and local partners to keep the Great Smoky Mountains National Park open despite the government shutdown that caused other parks around the country to close, Tyler Whetstone reported for the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Mayor Larry Waters said that keeping the park open during the shutdown is important as October draws a lot of visitors who contribute to the economies of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg.

If the shutdown continues beyond November, they might not continue to keep it open because the costs might outweigh the benefits as visitation numbers drop in winter.

“I wish the federal government would look at us working together and getting this done,” Waters said in an interview with Whetstone. “I think it’s a good template for governments working in the interests of people.”

Local partners and organizations all pitched in money, some around $45,000, while the state of Tennessee gave $80,000 to keep the park running.

“One positive aspect of the routine threats of federal government shutdowns is it has allowed local governments to build up muscle memory on how to cope,” Whetstone wrote.

Rural communities hit hard by deaths from explosion at ammunition plant in Tennessee

 Photo by Jeff Kingma, Unsplash

An explosion at a rural Tennessee ammunition plant that killed 16 people on Oct. 10 has “shaken the small, tight-knit communities in Hickman and Humphreys Counties,” Ashley Ahn reported for The New York Times.

“Witnesses said the explosion was so powerful that it rattled homes at least a dozen miles away and generated a plume of smoke large enough to register on the weather radar of a Nashville television station,” Ahn wrote.

The ammunition plant, which manufactures demolition charges and explosives, is a major contributor to the economies of rural communities in Hickman and Humphreys counties.

The police and other agencies such as the FBI are still investigating the cause of the explosion.

“You want me to be honest? It’s hell,” Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis said in a press conference. “It’s hell on us. It’s hell on everybody involved.” 

For rural communities where everyone knows everybody, the devastation of the tragedy is personal. Many law enforcement officers who arrived at the scene of the explosion knew workers who were killed and families who were affected. 

And it hit hard for Davis, who had to give briefings to close friends and neighbors.

"It starts hitting me who these folks really are to me — it’s hard for me to hold that emotion,” Davis said in an interview with Emily Cochrane for The New York Times.  

Legendary and loving: Dolly Parton's Dollywood, near her homeplace, shows Americans how to accept one another

Dollywood welcomes all. (Ilustration by Ally Rzesa, The Boston Globe)

Replacing Americans' interpersonal, ideological tensions with vibes of shared heritage and togetherness can be achieved with a hefty dose of Dolly Parton, writes Christopher Muther of The Boston Globe. While visiting Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., Muther discovered a collective love for prorietor Parton: "Her broad appeal and aura of benevolence are why Dollywood is one of the rare places in the United States where you'll encounter a true ideological melting pot. I observed conservatives and queers on the same rides at the same time. I can't think of anywhere else in the U.S. where these two groups would be enjoying themselves in close proximity."

Sperling's Best Places map

Parton grew up as a sharecropper's daughter "in a one-room cabin near Dollywood (its location is kept secret) with her 11 siblings," Muther notes. "She became a country-music star more than 50 years ago, but more importantly, she became a pop-culture sensation and a legend. Dollywood celebrates it all. . . . Parton is a rare jewel of a human whose coat of many colors includes red and blue states (plus many rainbows)." She has been outspoken about diversity and inclusion, which probably makes her crowds diverse and inclusive.

The park, like the woman, delights visitors. "Dollywood is a candy-coated dive into Parton's subconscious. . . . If Parton's legacy and message of universal love were not attached to the park, would anyone be here? I suspect not. . . . Dolly is the great unifier. . . . Few (if any) musicians have scored number-one hits on both the Billboard Christian and electronica charts. . . . She is a woman who can collaborate on a cake mix with Duncan Hines and design clothes for dogs."

Parton sets an example that, if multiplied outside Dollywood's boundaries, could heal some of our nation's wounds. "Clipping wings is not on-brand for Parton. She professes her deep love of God and shares her spirituality," Mathers writes. "But her down-home values don't come at the expense of excluding gay fans and the drag community. She has supported her gay fans for decades. . . . '[Dollywood is] a place for entertainment, a place for all families, period,' Parton said in a 2014 interview with Billboard magazine about those who are critical of the LGBTQ+ community. 'It's for all that. But as far as the Christians, if people want to pass judgment, they're already sinning. The sin of judging is just as bad as any other sin they might say somebody else is committing. I try to love everybody.'"

"Was anyone passing judgment at Dollywood the day I was there?" Muther asks. "Perhaps. But people were respectful of each other. . . . Parton's Appalachian amusement park re-creation of the U.S. may be cornier than Kansas in August, but it's a place where a wide swath of people are respectful and smiling. . . . . The only animosity I witnessed happened between a mother and daughter bickering in a gift shop over who would get to wear the 'Good Golly, Miss Dolly' T-shirt."

TVA must do more to generate clean energy, write energy analyst and former environmental reporter

As part of his "Green New Deal" plan, Democratic presidential primary candidate Bernie Sanders wants the Tennessee Valley Authority to shut down all its fossil fuel-burning plants and generate electricity solely from renewable sources. TVA currently operates six coal-fired power plants, 17 natural gas plants, and one diesel generator site. The rest of its power comes from nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind and biogas.

That may seem fanciful, but two writers say in The New York Times that it's not a bad idea for TVA focus on clean energy generation. Justin Gillis is a former Times environmental reporter; Jameson McBride is an energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center.

TVA, which sells power across parts of seven states, has a history of polluting waterways and property by improperly storing the toxic coal ash generated by its coal-fired power plants, they write: "In December 2008, an immense spill of coal ash at a TVA plant in Kingston, Tenn., polluted a nearby river and caused millions of dollars of property damage. The TVA had failed to carry out elementary safety measures, and the lead cleanup contractor was found negligent in court. Many workers on the cleanup have fallen ill and close to 40 have died; how much responsibility the contractor bears for the deaths is still being contested in court."

Though TVA is moving away from coal, and generates the lion's share of its electricity from nuclear power, Gillis and McBride write that the federal utility is moving too slowly to build more wind and solar generators. The modest solar buildout the agency's has adopted will result in higher electric bills for TVA customers than those who buy from other producers, they believe.

The biggest problem is that TVA has no central boss to drive change; just board members appointed by the president. "So the agency, long dominated by a conservative engineering mind-set, has gotten little pressure from Washington to move faster on the energy transition. But it is starting to get pressure from the other direction: cities that buy power wholesale and resell it to their citizens. Memphis, for instance, is considering pulling out of the TVA system and cutting its own deals for clean power," Gillis and McBride write.

TVA already has some of the lowest emissions in the country, but it could achieve much more in short order if it wanted to, they write: "The backwardness of the TVA on this issue is not just a national embarrassment; it is a betrayal of the agency’s own progressive legacy as one of the signature creations of the New Deal. The next president, whether Mr. Sanders or somebody else, needs to shake up the TVA board and demand that the agency become a leader, not a laggard, in battling the climate crisis."

Small town of Muscle Shoals made Aretha Queen of Soul

Franklin helps open the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival
at Radio City Music Hall. (Photo: Rebecca Smeyne, NYT)

Aretha Franklin, who died today at 76 of pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer, may have been the greatest singer we ever heard. But in the music trade, talent does not guarantee success. You need good evaluators, collaborators and promoters. And she got the collaborators she needed in the small town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, then less than 7,000 souls and now about 14,000. It was the career "pivot point" that sent her to stardom, says The New York Times:

"Jerry Wexler, the producer who brought Ms. Franklin to Atlantic [Records], persuaded her to record in the South. Ms. Franklin spent one night in January 1967 at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., recording with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the backup band behind dozens of 1960s soul hits. Ms. Franklin shaped the arrangements and played piano herself, as she had rarely done in the studio since her first gospel recordings," Jon Pareles writes. "The new songs were rooted in blues and gospel. And the combination finally ignited the passion in Ms. Franklin’s voice, the spirit that was only glimpsed in many of her Columbia recordings." Franklin was born in Memphis and was living in Detroit.

Rick Hall's studio in Muscle Shoals (Photo by Carol M. Highsmith)

"The Muscle Shoals session broke down, with just one song complete and another half-finished, in a drunken dispute between a trumpet player" and Franklin's husband, Ted White, whom she would divorce two years later, Pareles writes. "But when the song completed in that session, 'I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You),' was released as a single, it reached No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 9 on the pop charts, eventually selling more than a million copies. Some of the Muscle Shoals musicians came north to complete the album in New York. And with that album, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, the supper-club singer of Ms. Franklin’s Columbia [Records] years made way for the “Queen of Soul.”

For The Bitter Southerner, Chuck Reece recounts the Muscle Shoals sessions with the help of David Hood and Spooner Oldham, two of the musicians (all of whom were white). "Coming to Muscle Shoals probably resonated the Southern experience in her brain, even though she had been gone forever," Oldham said. "And then, when she was allowed to turn loose with all that Southern expression, we just played our hearts out, because we were used to that stuff."

Poynter Institute writing guru Roy Peter Clark recalls how Franklin helped him understand, as a musician and a young writer, "the rhythm of sentences and the voice of the writer," and how an artist can take over a song, just as Franklin seized Otis Redding's "Respect," much as Redding had turned the 1933 Bing Crosby standard "Try a Little Tenderness" into a whole 'nother thing: "The same text can be delivered to different audiences at the same time with different effects."

Rural areas could be hardest hit by budget cuts and work rules in SNAP, Social Security disability

President Trump's proposed budget includes work requirements for “able-bodied” persons in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly food stamps, and cut the funding by $192 billion over the next decade. The budget also proposes a reduction of $70 billion in Social Security disability funding.

"To President Trump . . . access to food stamps is far too easy, and being on disability is just a matter of finding a friendly judge," Yamiche Alcindor and Campbell Robertson write for The New York Times. White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney cites the cost savings and the incentive of good, old, hard work. "We need everybody pulling in the same direction,” he said.

However, many are concerned about the impact that these cuts will have on rural communities, especially in states like Mississippi, a state with much rural poverty, the Times reports: "Since last January, about 83,000 people receiving food stamps in Mississippi between the ages of 18 and 49 without dependents have been required to work, or prove they are looking for work, at least 20 hours a week to receive food stamps, according to Beth Orlansky, advocacy director of the Mississippi Center for Justice, which focuses on issues of racial and economic inequality. "The rules originated a decade ago in Washington, but because of its high poverty rates, Mississippi had been allowed a waiver since 2006."

"While asking people to work might sound like a good idea 'in the abstract', she said, a state like Mississippi — with large pockets of poverty, sprawling rural communities and some of the highest rates of people on disability and food stamps — does not have enough jobs in the right places. Most people receiving food stamps and disability are doing some sort of work, but they need better skills and education to rise above poverty wages."

Guy Carawan, folk singer and civil rights pioneer, died on Saturday at 87 in Tennessee

Guy Carawan, a folk singer and activist who fight for civil writes and worker's rights in Appalachia and the South, died on Saturday at 87 in New Market, Tenn., Lance Coleman reports for the Knoxville News-Sentinel. Carawan and his wife Candie "marched with Martin Luther King through the streets of Selma, Ala.," and "introduced the song 'We Shall Overcome' to the movement." (News-Sentinel photos: Guy and Candie Carawan)

"The couple and their children lived with and documented the people and stories of Johns Island, S.C., and preserved those stories in books and recordings," Coleman writes. "They also worked with coal miners and others in union battles while recording their own albums of songs."

The News-Sentinel wrote a feature story about the Carawans in 2009. To read that story, click here.

George Jones, 'the spirit of country,' who did things his way and is compared to Frank Sinatra, dies at 81

Associated Press photo by Mark Humphrey

"George Jones, the definitive country singer of the last half-century," as Jon Pareles of The New York Times dubs him, died today in a Nashville hospital at age 81 after being hospitalized for eight days with fever and irregular blood pressure.

Jones "was a legendary figure in country music," Pareles notes. "His singing, which was universally respected and just as widely imitated, found vulnerability and doubt behind the cheerful drive of honky-tonk. With a baritone voice that was as elastic as a steel-guitar string, he brought suspense to every syllable, merging bluesy slides with the tight, quivering ornaments of Appalachian singing." The Tennessean quotes country-music scholar Nick Tosches: “He is the spirit of country music, plain and simple.”

Terence McArdle of The Washington Post puts it in comparative and perhaps surprising terms: "Music writers often placed him in the same echelon as Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday for his expressive and unguarded style." He also notes Jones's "marriage to Tammy Wynette was one of the most turbulent in country music." And Pareles notes, "As Mr. Jones sang about heartbreak and hard drinking, fans heard the echoes of a life in which success and excess battled for decades."

Jones was born in a log cabin at Saratoga, Tex., northeast of Houston, to an alcoholic father who would "beat the boy if he didn’t sing for his drinking buddies," McArdle writes. He broke into the big time through the "Louisiana Hayride" in Shreveport. He was known for singing with "very different duet partners," such as Melba Montgomery and early '60s teen idol Gene Pitney, but "his most popular duets were with Tammy Wynette, whom he married in 1969. Wynette’s producer, Billy Sherrill, helped alter Mr. Jones’s image from a wild honky-tonker to a sensitive balladeer. Sherrill chose songs for both performers that mirrored their stormy on-again, off-again relationship. And their fans hung on to every word of every song." (Read more)'the 

Gangs are migrating into rural West Tennessee

Urban gangs are migrating into West Tennessee's rural areas, creating a problem for local law enforcement, Brian Haas of The Tennessean reports. "Sometimes on the weekends, thousands [go] into those towns, partying, violence, drugs, the things that follow that type of clientele," Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director Mark Gwyn said after a budget hearing with Gov. Bill Haslam.

Gang crime has tripled in the state's rural area since 2005, "far outpacing urban centers more commonly associated with gang problems," Haas reports. Larger cities, like Nashville, have had success in reducing gang violence, but rural communities "suddenly find themselves facing gang murders, robberies and drug distribution," writes Haas.

Gywn told Haas gangs migrate to rural areas to escape crackdowns in cities, and because rural police forces don't always have the resources to fight gang violence. Gwyn has partnered with local law enforcement and District Attorney General James Woodall of southwest Tennessee to create a gang task force to address the issue in rural areas. (Read more)

Minnie Pearl's hometown paper marks 100th anniversary of her birth, touts statue funding

Last week, with an item about a newcomers' feature in the Hickman County Times of Centerville, Tenn., we ran a photo of the model of a statue of Minnie Pearl, to be placed at the old courthouse in her native county. Today would have been the rural comedian's 100th birthday, and the Times noted it in this week's paper, with a story about how Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon became Minnie Pearl of Grinders Switch, and a photo of her with Roy Acuff at the Grand Ole Opry.

The paper also promoted two auctions being held in conjunction with the anniversary, to raise money for the statue (which would replace one removed by a dissatisfied donor) and make the courthouse a cultural arts center. A radio auction on KIX-96 FM runs until 8 p.m. CDT. To get a list of items and make a bid, call 931-729-2900. Also ending tonight is The Pearl On-Line Art Auction, with 160 items created by local artists. For details, go to www.ThePearlAuction.com.

State legislator says he can't control Topix, sorry

Looks like folks in Tennessee have been talking to their state legislators again. This time, it's to freshman Republican State Rep. Jeremy Faison who went on Facebook over the Memorial Day weekend to ask his constituents (and everyone else on the planet who is his friend) if they would like him to try to do something about "cyber-bullying." According to David Oatney of the Tennessee Statehouse Examiner, Faison's constituents were actually asking him to do something -- please -- about Topix. Which, as many in rural communities know, "has become a catch-all for discussing all kind of local events anonymously around the country, but it has become something of an Internet gossip hall or a sort of cyber hair-salon in rural East Tennessee." Or rural (insert your state here).

Faison told the Examiner: "I think people need to understand that we aren't really in a position to regulate the Internet from Nashville, and is that something you'd really want us to do?" Faison went on to say that the Topix site is advertiser-driven, and if you wanted to stop it from existing, stop visiting the website.
(Read more.)

Dolly Parton apologizes to lesbian couple for censorship of gay-marriage T-shirt at her park

Jennifer Tipton and Olivier Odom

"Dolly Parton has apologized to a lesbian couple for an incident in July in which one of the women, who was wearing a T-shirt with a slogan promoting gay marriage, was denied entrance to Dollywood's Splash Country theme park until she turned the shirt inside out," Jayne Clark reports for USA Today.

Parton issued a statement saying in part, "Everyone knows of my personal support of the gay and lesbian community. Dollywood is a family park and all families are welcome." She issued the apology after Dollywood canceled a meeting with the couple because they wanted to include a representative of the Campaign for Southern Equality, a gay-rights group, the Knoxville News-Sentinel reports. (News-Sentinel photo by Saul Young)

Dollywood is in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Parton grew up nearby.

International Storytelling Center is bankrupt

The International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tenn., has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Ken Little reports for the Knoxville News Sentinel. The center is the host of the acclaimed National Storytelling Festival held each October since 1973. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is the largest creditor of the $4 million debt carried by the center. Its assets are listed in court documents as $56,000 cash on hand.

Jimmy Neil Smith, the center's executive director and founder of the festival, told Little that several factors have affected its finances. The mortgage on the 14,000 square-foot Mary B. Martin Storytelling Hall, built in 2002, is "one of the things that is dragging us down," Smith said. The recession has also hurt the center. Attendance to the festival was down in 2008 and 2009 (but slightly up in 2010). Up to 60 percent of the organization's annual revenue is derived from the sfestival, court documents say. Smith told Little that a study done at East Tennessee State University found the festival has an economic impact of nearly $7 million in Jonesborough and helps create almost 100 jobs.  Said Bob Browning, town administrator: "It's not something we can afford to lose. We need to do whatever we can to make it as strong as we can."

Smith emphasized that the Storytelling Center will remain open, the annual Teller-in-Residence program will continue, and the 2011 National Storytelling Festival will be held as scheduled. (Read more)

A review: Get Low, an homage to the rural South

Sony Pictures photo by Sam Emerson

Rural East Tennessee, in 1938, is the setting for Get Low, a gentle new movie starring Robert Duvall (left) and Bill Murray. Everything about the movie feels so authentic. It is as sepia-toned as waking up in your grandmother’s rural Tennessee home while the morning sun shines through the yellowed window shades. The daffodils that occasionally appear in the hands of Sissy Spacek’s character stand out like an explosion. You could almost smell pine trees, too. The movie was filmed in Georgia, but the mountains look lush and green as the Smokies (and the Cumberlands around Oliver Springs, site of the true story on which the movie is based).

Robert Duvall is ever the masterful actor, saying more with less, playing the scary man in the town. He is Felix Bush, the bearded, crazy-haired hermit feard by the town's children. One morning, Felix hitches up a mule and rides into town to ask the preacher to hold a funeral for him while he is still alive. Preacher portrayals are so often dreadful in the movies. Usually, it’s more Elmer Gantry than kindly minister. What a relief that Gerald McRaney is a preacher willing to sit down, ask Felix what’s on his mind, then respond to him thoughtfully, if not necessarily in the way Felix would wish. The only other character who knows Felix and his secret is also a kindly minister, played by Bill Cobb.

Eventually, Felix hooks up with Frank Quinn, the shady funeral home operator who says if your funeral home fails, you have no one to blame but yourself. Bill Murray is Quinn, an actor most interesting when he also says more with less. Is he honest? Is he a snake? Who knows. Murray’s assistant at his funeral home is played by Lucas Black. Blessedly, he is really from Alabama so – thank goodness! – he has a real Southern accent. So many movies are ruined by actors trying to sound Southern. Black, as Buddy, represents a kind of sweetness and purity that Felix can recognize, even though he’s been a hermit for 40 years.

Another real-life Southerner, Sissy Spacek, is also the real deal actor. She has that authentic accent (she’s from Texas) and that steel spine she made famous as Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter. She, too, is wonderful in this movie, hinting at lost love. Was it for Felix?

Felix wants this funeral party to find his own redemption and perhaps, forgiveness, of a grevious sin he felt he committed. Fortunately, Felix didn't make moonshine, he didn't spit tobacco. He crafted beautiful furniture, built a church. This movie offers so much more than frightful portrayals of rural hicks (ack, Deliverance!). Rather, it offers the kindness, sense of place, hope and sadness as rich as the rural heartland really is. This lovely movie is an homage to that place.

Other reviews: Los Angeles Times("one of his [Duvall's] finest performances"), Time magazine, The New York Times (two trailers and several clips)

Tennessee is national hotbed of animal rescues

Tennessee relied on the The Humane Society of the United States more than any other state in the last two years to respond to animal rescue missions, Anne Paine of The Tennessean reports. The increased use of the nonprofitgroup stemmed from a lack of facilities and funding in rural communities to respond to animal cruelty, she writes. The Humane Society assisted on nine rescue missions in Tennessee during the period; the No. 2 state had five.

"Tennessee just doesn't have the infrastructure to address animal cruelty," Leighann McCollum, the Tennessee director of the Humane Society, told Paine. Forty of Tennessee's 95 counties have no government-funded animal control program, and many that do only have dogcatchers who have no authority to investigate animal cruelty. On Thanksgiving Day, the group rescued 84 food-deprived horses and mules from a Cannon County farm.

"They have all those resources we don't have," Dickson County Sheriff Tom Wall told Paine. "After they came down here, I went on the Internet and joined, and set up an automatic deduction out of my paycheck for them." The group relies mostly on donations to fund its $2 million annual budget. In the upcoming legislative session, Tennessee lawmakers are expected to attempt to amend several state animal cruelty laws to better protect all animals. (Read more) (Tennessean video)

One writer sees end of traditional country music, another says Swift brings young people back to it

"Country music just ain't what it used to be," Steve Tuttle writes for Newsweek Xtra, the magazine's online add-on. Writing before this week's Academy of Country Music Awards, he said, "If past concert appearances are any indication, the nominees for vocalist of the year will be dressed in skintight, revealing tops, some with long, flowing blond hair and deep golden tans. And that's just the men."

The description also fits Carrie Underwood, who was named both vocalist and entertainer of the year. "Women ruled the awards show," writes Shannon Mason Brock of The Anderson News in Lawrenceburg, Ky., noting among others the Crystal Milestone Award to Taylor Swift "for selling CDs and bringing young people back to country music." To read the column by Brock, a recent University of Kentucky graduate, click here.

Tuttle calls the 19-year-old Swift, left, "today's Nashville 'it' girl" and an example of the trend he doesn't like. But he notes that the definition of country music has been debated since the Carter Family made their first recordings in 1927, but in recent years the genre has blurred beyond recognition. He dubs Garth Brooks "the final nail in the honky-tonk coffin. His pop-sounding megahits and his wacky flying over arena stages on a wire in his way-too-tight Wranglers made my skin crawl. Almost two decades later, and by today's Rascal Flatts-ian standards, I consider him almost a modern-day Hank Williams."

But Tuttle says he's learned to accept the world as it is. "Today's producers are just giving people what they want, navigating the market as best they can," he writes. "It's a business, after all. Today's suburban music buyers don't labor in coal mines or cheat on their wives. Well, they don't work in coal mines, anyway. Songwriters and hit makers write about what they know, just as their forefathers did, except now what they know is driving the kids to Target in the minivan, or staying at home because they're unemployed. So maybe country sounds and lyrics veering a little toward spit-polished pop music aren't a sign of the end of the world, but something gritty and real has been lost. They borrow the vernacular of country music, the genuineness and masculinity of that hard-knock life, but they morph it into something that's barely recognizable. The rough edges and authenticity have been sanded off." (Read more)

We also recommend watching the article's slideshow of country stars from the beginning, including Patsy Cline, above, who some argued was too "pop" and was one of Swift's early favorites. We've seen most of the photos before; the better parts are the captions by Sarah Ball. To watch the show, click here.

Town idol's move causing uproar in Tennessee

UPDATE, Oct. 25, 2012: A move is afoot to get a new statue to replace this one.

There's no place like home for Minnie Pearl since a bronze statue of the Hickman County, Tennessee, native and country-music comedienne has been moved from its original location on the courthouse square in Centerville.

In 2005, Centerville resident Rod Harris spearheaded and helped pay for the 900-pound bronze statue of the icon with the help of an anonymous donor. But the donation came with a caveat: It was not to be moved from its spot in front of the courthouse's eastern entrance without Harris' permission -- a problem for officials trying to implement a $700,000 downtown renovation, since Minnie's location interfered with traffic. But Harris disagrees. "That particular position was the very best position," he told The Tennessean. "Minnie Pearl should be center stage, or she won't be there."

The dispute reached new levels over the weekend when Harris took matters into his own hands and hauled Minnie Pearl away in his truck. (Photo from the Hickman County Times, which is not online.) Now, folks in the county are wondering if and when Minnie will return, while Harris continues negotiations with the town 50 miles west of Nashville. "I'm right in what I done," he told The Tennessean's Clay Carey. "I had an agreement that was ignored."

The character of Minnie was created "in the late 1930s by Sarah Ophelia Colley [later Cannon], a Centerville native who studied drama at the exclusive Ward-Belmont finishing school in Nashville," Carey notes. "As Minnie Pearl, she became the first female member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1940, joined the cast of the long-running cornpone TV show Hee Haw in 1969, and was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1975." (Read more)

Knoxville photojournalist Clay Owen dies at 47

Clay Owen, a photojournalist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel who photographed Appalachia, passed away at home Tuesday following a heart attack. He was 47.

Owen worked for the News-Sentinel for 17 years. A 1988 graduate of the University of Kentucky's journalism school, he freelanced at the Lexington Herald-Leader before joining the Knoxville paper in 1991. He won a number of professional awards, including a regional award last fall from the National Press Photographers Association.

"Mr. Owen also was the regular partner of now-retired senior writer Fred Brown in the Appalachian Journal series, in which they roamed East Tennessee to bring readers a peek into life off the beaten path," the News-Sentinel wrote in a tribute. Brown wrote, "It was Clay Owen's kind smile and gentle way that was the key to our success." (Read more)

Cracker Barrel returns to original corporate name

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store became a huge success by marketing rural food and culture. Now, after mixed results in its first attempt at diversifying, and selling off the Logan's Roadhouse chain last year, its corporate name is returning to the original we all know and leaving one known only to investors. The company "announced Wednesday that its shareholders overwhelmingly approved changing the corporation's name" from CBRL Group to the old name, reports The Lebanon Democrat, in the company's hometown of Lebanon, Tenn. (Read more)

Michael A. Woodhouse, the company's chairman, president and CEO, said in a release, "With our return to a single-concept company and to further build on our strong and highly-differentiated brand, we are pleased to return to the company's original name of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc." The company's stock will continue trading as CBRL on NASDAQ. It topped $50 a share in March 2007 but dropped to $25 by January 2008 and is trading today at just under $20.