Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. English Dept.

Advisor(s)

Adrian Blevins

Second Advisor

Onnesha Roychoudhuri

Abstract

This project begins from the understanding that song lyrics can have lasting impacts on the poetic work that proceeds from them, and can and should, therefore, be read as literature. In the cultural context of Southern Appalachia, a historically underserved and academically underrepresented region, this understanding is intertwined with Audre Lorde’s idea that “For women...[poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence.” The women of Southern Appalachia, denied access to particular modes of expression as a result of external circumstances such as poverty and sexism, need poetry, according to Lorde, to take “tangible action” in their lives. What came before poetry in Southern Appalachia, a region rooted in oral tradition, however, was song. The most well-known collection of Southern Appalachian songs is the 1927 Bristol Sessions, though only a small percentage of these songs address Southern Appalachian women’s perspectives on marriage. Reading the Bristol Sessions lyrics as literature, this project examines Appalachian women poets’ resistance to heteronormative expectations for marriage over the last 100 years. If, as Lorde writes, poetry is as necessary as breathing for women and a way to incite change, then Appalachian women’s poetic reactions to heteronormativity are a powerful assertion of their right to exist and their right to have opinions about that existence. Ultimately, this project argues that the 1927 Bristol Sessions lyrics are the first life of the Appalachian counter-myth, which Appalachian women poets revived in an act of resistance. This act of resistance can be understood as the Bristol Sessions’ poetic afterlives.

Keywords

Appalachia, poetry, women's literature, songwriting, myth, counter-myth

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