Mountain Grrl Experience Shines With Light and Love for Appalachian Women Artists, Writers, Makers and Creatives

PIKEVILLE, Ky. – It was back a couple months ago I heard an NPR Earth and Sky episode talking about the various versions of twilight, and, as a sporadic stowaway on a sailboat or two, I instantly became entranced with a re-acquaintance to the term and magic of “Nautical Twilight.”

So much that I wrote a song (not uncommon due to my incurable affliction as a writer) but also began thinking metaphorically about that special time of twilight when sailors are finally able to take reliable readings via well known stars because the horizon is still visible.

To us music-loving folks here in Appalachia trying to navigate life and family’s complicated cross-currents, irregular waves and flotsam and jetsam, we have been guided in year’s past by such Kentucky-created canons as Sturgill Simpson’s “A Sailor’s Guide to the Earth.”

This summer, of unrelenting rain, of oppressive heat and of unprecedented upheaval and loss of rights nationally for women, bright stars in Pikeville, Kentucky, gathered together with one another to shine on at the holistic and beautifully orchestrated celebration of Appalachian women called “The Mountain Grrl Experience,” a two-day “music-based, issues-based and empowerment-based” festival hosted by the Appalachian Center for the Arts and held on multiple stages around the city on July 22-23.

“At Mountain Grrl, we celebrate our lived experiences as a well-spring for our collective creativity, our tenacity, and our capacity of great love,” said the organizers in a mission statement that also included the fact that everyone was welcome, which was sure the case.

Created last year by Kris Preston, a member of the all-female bluegrass band, Coal Town Dixie, Robin Irwin, director of the Appalachian Center for the Arts, and Bek Smallwood, by day a salesperson and by night a fireball rocker, Mountain Grrl was born out of Preston, whose band has played Dollywood, KET and Woodsongs Old-Time Radio Hour, knowing that the land and highways that birthed Loretta Lynn, Patty Loveless, and the oft-forgotten great Molly O’Day, is teeming with rock-star level ladies of all creative stripes whether they be country, rockers, painters, photographers, storytellers or poets. And that they need to be heard, seen and appreciated.

“We had a staff of three of us and very little money and saw that turn into nothing short of miracles,” Irwin said. “In between tears, laughter and rage, we decided to do another year.”

Appalachia’s almost embarrassment of contemporary musical riches made Mountain Grrl’s music stages shine like diamonds. I put the Saturday night headlining triple bill of Luna and The Mountain Jets (who are playing Red Rocks in early fall opening up for their long-time friend Tyler Childers), Bek and The Stalight Revue and Brother Smith (armed with knock-out featured vocalist and keyboardist/songwriter, Amberly Winfrey-Cadell) up against any three sets I’ve seen in a row in a long, long time.

And I’m still savoring the wild and blue singer/songwriter set from central Kentuckian via Mississippi Anna Kline (whose song “Come on Home to Yourself” is featured on an upcoming episode of “True South”) and Jedi songstress Chelsea Nolan, who immediately had our crowd (baking in late afternoon heat before another damn storm) stomping, hollering, singing, clapping and real life LOL-ing.

While reeling in the near endless stream of talented female musicians in our region, might be like picking beans in July (actually it’s not that easy because beans aren’t touring), the thing that equally spoke to me at Mountain Grrl, was the incredibly well curated and quality depth of feel to the fest beyond the music.

A visual art exhibit of women artists filled the Appalachian Center for the Arts, where Kentucky’s poet laureate Crystal Wilkinson gave an emotion-packed reading and Q&A Friday night with one of her former students and now long-time friend, Amanda Sloan, who is now an assistant provost at PIkeville College, which sponsored the event and donated copies of one of Wilkinson’s books to those who attended.

Sloan had driven hours back and forth to Morehead, Kentucky as a graduate student to take a writing class from the revered Wilkinson, whose last book, “Perfect Black,” won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry.

“From Crystal Wilkinson I learned to truly value storytelling and to truly value my story and that our voices matter,” Sloan said. “I credit Crystal with all the things I have done since then. Her class was a transformative experience.”

I love TedTalks and geeked out earlier this year hitting a bunch of powerhouse panel sessions at South By Southwest in Austin, so I was stoked for Mountain Grrl’s bold move to come out swinging. The opening session “Overcoming and Thriving – Women in Leadership in Appalachia,” which I dubbed a TifTalk, was one of the most powerful panels I’ve ever witnessed. The nearly two-hour session was a straight-talk (no BS) express with Tiffany Craft (the first woman mayor of Whitesburg, Ky.), Angie Hatton (running to be a four-time Kentucky State representative), Janet Stumbo (who was Kentucky’s first woman on Ky Supreme Court), Jean Rosenberg, a Civil Rights activist and social justice pioneer who started AppalRed in the region, and Connie Little, who is in her 21st year of running Turning Point Domestic Violence Services, one of the two recipients of proceeds from the fest. Proceeds also went to the Westcare Perry Cline Emergency Shelter.

After tackling a wide range of questions from their greatest accomplishments, to roadblocks to ideas for self-care, they each talked about changes they have seen since they began their professional careers, and Hatton talked about Emerge Kentucky and the effort to get more women to run for office. “One thing you can do is to recruit other women to run for office,” Hatton said. “We need you to march, we need you to vote, we need you to run.”

The main day – Saturday – was packed daylight til dark with music, rows of food vendors (like 2 Broke Chicks) and some incredible craft vendors (like Sweet Life Farms) and like many good fests that pinball on multiple stages, so much stuff you couldn’t do it all. I think one of the things I loved best about the fest is that there were so much room in the inn for anyone whether it was young or unpolished songwriters sharing a tune they had freshly-written, or the many workshops where folks could walk up and do guided painting therapy, learn dulcimer, work on their rhythm, write poetry, try flatfoot dancing, or learn to play spoons after a performance by nationally-traveling and now Kansas-based artist, Abby The Spoon Lady.

Some of my favorite moments from Saturday of the fest was attending a music therapy session called “Soundtracks of Our Lives: Using Daily Music to Explore, Empower and Heal” with Charleston, WV., native, Cecilia Blair Wright, who has a master’s in music therapy from UK, and who is a classically-trained cellist who appeared on Tyler Childers’ Grammy-nominated album, “Long Violent History,” and who has also toured with Senora May.

Sitting in a circle we shared our collective love of music, the ways music makes us feel, the way music has rescued us during downtimes, during the strange days of Covid isolation and how music can truly bring us together, especially when we were all singing “I Will Survive” and Lizzo’s “Good As Hell” together.

In the wake of the weekend, uncertainty and anxiety build as flooding rains fall, as people on TV shout and hate themselves into a corner wanting us to segregate our country into “us and them” and it truly feels like darker days are coming but those days don’t have to come if men would only sit for a spell and actually listen.

Whatever is coming. We must persist. That is the Appalachian way. I let my mind drift back and I feel myself moving forward by all of the good, all of the respect, all of the listening and sharing and all of that Mountain Mama jamming shooting shimmering starlight into this nautical twilight.