“VOICES WORTH THE LISTENING: THREE WOMEN OF APPALACHIA” by Thomas Burton (The University of Tennessee Press, 113 pages, $25).
In the introduction to Thomas Burton’s “Voices Worth the Listening: Three Women of Appalachia,” the author recalls a remark once made by a new colleague at East Tennessee State University, where Burton is professor emeritus of English: “You’ve been out among these people in Appalachia – what makes them ‘tick?'” the colleague asked.
Burton was taken aback. “Well, there are wood ticks and there are clocks that tick,” he quipped, using wry humor to divert the conversation from the assumption that “the essence of Appalachia and its people as a whole can be absolutely perceived and succinctly delineated.” As he explains in this slim volume of ethnographic interviews with three women from the Blue Ridge Mountains, Appalachians are too “diverse and complicated” for that.
To Burton, whose previous work includes documentaries and a book on Pentecostal snake handlers, a better approach is found in Act III, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” in which the Danish prince remarks, “Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! … you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.”
Presenting the women’s lives in their own words, Burton invites readers to consider their mystery by following “each of the women as though you were having the opportunity and the privilege … to watch a player present her own private role ‘as ’twere the mirror up to nature.'”