![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I think just about everyone I knew at the time watched the show. Anyway, that's why the people I grew up around were cautious about the show. But when those things get turned into the sum total of a fictional character, then you end up with a caricature instead of a representation of life. It's true that things like feuds, moonshining, superstitions, and hardscrabble farming were parts of life in the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains for some people, generations ago. The hillbilly caricature is awfully prevalent in movies and TV shows in particular, and naturally, people who actually live in the Appalachians are sensitive about this. You see, a lot of times, pop culture portrays the mountain folk of Appalachia as being half-witted and ornery and generally useless. And if you think that Appalachian mountainfolk weren't simultaneously excited for a big TV series to be all about people like their forebears, and also terribly apprehensive of how those forebears would be portrayed. It was such a BIG deal when that show aired, to the people where I lived right then! You see, I lived in western North Carolina, only a couple of hours from the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee where this book is set, and where the series was partially filmed. Which is why I have a TV-tie-in cover, of course. I'd read this once before, back in the mid-'90s when the TV series based on this book first aired. ![]()
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