Si Kahn wrote a great one regarding Wyzzy's point........

Blue Ridge Mountain Refugee, by Si Kahn

I'm workin' in a factory, thinkin' of how it feels
To be bringin' home good MONEY like my daddy never seen;
But a feelin' follows after me, like a hound-dog at my heels.
And I know that I'll never see my mountain home again.

CH:Cause they say that I can't go back again,
Never sit and talk among my childhood friends,
Never live among my neighbors and my kin,
No, I'll never see my mountain home again.

Down by the railway station, in the early afternoon,
You can see them with their bundles that are all done up in twine.
They hear the whistle from the south,
And they're sayin' their good-by's,
And they say that they'll come back again;
But they're leavin' for all time.

CHORUS

Cinncinati, Baltimore, Chicago, and Detroit;
You can see us by the thousands, with our husbands and our wives.
You wonder what we're doin' here, so far from our mountain homes.
Well, we're Blue Ridge Mountain refugees,
And we're fighting for our lives.

CHORUS
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Its not the Peace Corps Ebbie. The group founded out of LBJ' time was then VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America). Like so many other things it was underfunded but worked well in some places and not so well in others. Many VISTA's were students such as I was and some (like me as well) had been working in other programs like the Appalachian Volunteers prior to being absorbed by VISTA. Most were attached to some other organization to have a local group make the best use of them. This was also an up and down deal.

Telling the story of Appalachia is a lot more than any single or even single group of issues. Fixing things starts in a hundred different ways and most will have to address the dichotomies of the region and of this country today. Coal is still a great not fully tapped resorce but coal is losing its place in the energy market. Even so, look at how badly the regional people have been treated by everyone even related to the mining business........Black Water and Black Lung....Property you don't really own, poverty level wages.............

Christ I can't even begin to get into all this here....Its volumetric........


Spaw