The History/Culture of Appalachian “Country Roads”

”Life is old there / Older than the trees / Younger than mountains / Growing like a breeze!”

🕰️🌳⛰️🌬️🍃

Do you have the melody already? Maybe knew it by the first millisecond seeing the words and heard it played through every word even in your initial reading? And then… above it all… heard the following chorus flying into your brain… with a torrent of true nostalgia??! 🎆🎇

No… just me? Oh — me and a few other readers, right.

Anyway, if the rest of you haven’t picked up what I’m laying down…

Yes, that’s the incomparable, low-key patriotic John Denver song, “Country Roads!”

Now why did I just spend 100 words on that and am only now getting to the topic? Well… it was fun. TBH, as the kids say — To Be Honest.

But, believe it or not, that song we all love — some of us begrudgingly — is fundamental to Appalachian pre-history.

⛰️⛰️⛰️🏔️🏞️🏞️🏞️🏞️

How?

Well, first off — if you’re like approximately 60% of those who’ve heard the song regularly — you probably didn’t know what the first word of those lines actually was.

Or maybe you’ve had an incorrect word in its place in your mind.

But… ding, ding, dig! You were either right or wrong. Congratulations! Or… you know… try harder next time.

Depending on whether or not you already knew the word was… “life.”

Life is old there….

Let’s see what you may or may not have won!!

Haha, no anyway (another 147 words later)….

… What does it mean that “life” is old? Trees are life too, scientifically. Along with all other plants, insects, and animals.

But since this “life” is “older than the trees,” that probably rules all of that out.

It would seem that must mean human life. And anything before humans had writing is pre-history. So prehistoric human life.

That’s also “younger than the mountains.”

What a double puzzle-piece, huh?

Now, I bet there’s split camps forming in the leadership trying to connect those pieces.

Because — depending on your view of how things “probably work” — you might think this particular set of facts is downright impossible … or the most obvious way it could happen.

Those are like, kinda… you know… like… the opposite things!

So, what’s the natural way of these things? I’m not sure either.

Ok, ok! Don’t freak out. Of course I wouldn’t write this not knowing anything about it.

From what I know, it seems like mountains being older than trees that come to live on them is actually quite rare.

But climate and Earth scientists largely agree that the Appalachian mountain range existed long before trees could grow on or around it.

And you can see above the extent of the claims of its truly ancient nature.

And that’s just an aside to buttress the main point. Because we have the other real key.

Prehistoric human life goes back further than those trees!

Which means that we’re not just talking about the Native Americans who still survive from there: The Eastern Cherokee, The Seneca Nation, The Choctaw, and the Piqua Shawnee.

Interestingly — or more likely, horribly — there is no federally recognized tribe in present-day West Virginia.

Two that were there, and not recognized, are the Tutulo and Saponi.

Isn’t it strange actually… that the place that truly failed and forgot about the people there centuries ago is still where people are most forgotten about by the federal government?

Horrendous injustice then mirroring governmental injustice now (for the whole state’s population).

So, bringing it back… we’re not talking about those countless unrecognized tribes going back into the same history.

And… we’re not even talking about all of those tribes’ predecessors.

No, at some point there were civilizations that preceded all of them, but didn’t have writing nor pictographs.

Again, pre-history. That’s why archaeologists call something pre-Mississippian, for example. In this case, Mississippian is not referring to the modern state, but the Native culture that existed there before.

So pre-Missippissian, pre-Cherokee, or pre-Inca…. They all mean something simple yet incredibly profound: that we’ve determined there was a precursor civilization before the cultures that were before us.

And whatever those prehistoric civilizations were… we know that they honored a mountain that was solid rock. Before the trees that most of us would assume are primordial.

They would have honored everything, but especially this impressive mountain range. The trees on that mountain, however, that look so old to us… wouldn’t arrive for centuries, if not millennia.

What an archaeological education we can get from just from 2 short lines of the right song!