or long days in the
open. He can walk--or hoe corn on an almost perpendicular corn
patch--from daylight till dark. He is patient and is never in a hurry.
Time means nothing to him. Down in the Unakas a mountaineer once had a
cataract removed from the right eye. The surgeon told him to return in a
couple months when it would be safe to operate upon the other eye.
Twenty years elapsed before the fellow returned to the doctor's office;
when he was chided for the delay he answered unconcernedly, "I 'lowed
'twas no use to be in a hurry about it."

Yet for all their seeming indifference the people of the Blue Ridge, who
locked their offspring generation after generation in mountain
fastnesses that have barred the world, have kept alive and fresh in
memory the unwritten song, the speech, the tradition of their
Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic ancestors.

Down through the centuries the blood and traditions of the pioneers have
carried, creating a stalwart, a fearless people. Hidden away in the high
crannies of the Blue Ridge they have come to be known as Mountaineers,
Southern Highlanders, Appalachian Mountaineers, and Southern
Mountaineers. But if you should ask a name of any of the old folk of the
Blue Ridge country they doubtless will tell you, "We are mountain
people." Never hill-billies! A hill-billy, the true mountain man or
woman would have you know, is one born of the mountains who has got
above his raising, ashamed to own his origin, one who holds his own
mountain people up for scorn and ridicule. To mountain folk the word
hill-billy is a slur of the worst sort. A slur that has caused murder.

They recognize no caste in the Blue Ridge Country. They are hospitable
beyond measure, I have come to know in my long years of roaming through
the mountains, first as court stenographer in isolated courts, then as
ballad collector. I have never entered a mountain home throughout the
Blue Ridge, no matter how humble the fare, where man, woman, or child
offered apology for anything, their surroundings or the food and
hospitality given to the stranger under their roof. "You're welcome to
what we've got," is the invariable greeting--though the bed be a crude
shuck tick shared with the children of the family, the fare cornbread
and sorghum.

As a child I used to go to the cabin home of one of my father's kinsmen,
a man who could neither read nor write, though he knew his Bible from
cover to cover and could cite accurately chapter and