Mummy’s not the word
Thank you for the opportunity to voice my concerns about The Party Crasher article on the Crooked Road Music trail in your August 8 edition [“I think we’re all hillbillies on this bus”].
Was the best way to handle the assignment of this article to your Party Crasher by sending an outsider to look inside another area’s musical traditions and then come back home to judge it against that reporter’s individual standards? In a city and community that values diversity, are white, Southern, Christian, traditional musicians exempt from the call to approach other cultures with dignity and respect? Shouldn’t a reporter always listen carefully and strive to ask the questions that fill in gaps of his or her knowledge about the subject of an assignment? Is it possible to write an article on the Crooked Road without thoroughly treating the cultural context of the geographic area in which that music is physically located? In the final version of the article, there was no evidence that J. Tobias Beard sought to ask why Spencer Strickland values what he does or why the Crooked Road Trail is doing what it is doing (it’s more than just a tourist ploy).
While there are strains of excellent reporting in Beard’s piece, the bulk of it is opinion. And frankly, it’s opinion that I do not value. As a reader, I value opinion articles when the reporter has proven to me that his or her opinion is well researched, thoughtful and wise. And funny—I like humor, too. Who doesn’t value humor? But not at the cost of fact or of the human dignity of the subject at hand. I grew up in the North Carolina mountains in an area that values all the things that Spencer Strickland values that were targets of Beard’s sharp cynicism. The sense of “nostalgia” and “mummification” that Beard felt along the trail come from a way of life that, whether he likes it or not, is actually quite common, alive and very real in most of the Appalachian South. I was horrified to see it treated in such a simplistic fashion.
I hope that you’ll strongly consider either publishing an interview with Spencer and Leah Strickland where you ask them questions where they have a chance to defend themselves or an apology to them, as two human beings that you allowed to be reduced to caricature for a catchy article.
Lydia Wilson
Scottsville
CORRECTION
A photo in our August 8 edition that accompanied a story about private schools expanding and relocating was incorrect. The Renaissance School is indeed moving to the former McGuire-Woods building, which is located at 418 E. Jefferson St., not 300 Court Square. This is the correct photo of the school’s new location.