Cumberland Gap

I'm just posting this song because I really like it. And because I could have become the narrator of the song if I wasn't born intelligent and sensitive (which I got from my mother, definitely). I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, which is considered northern Appalachia. There was no one around me, for miles, who went to college. Not until my aunt went to college to get a degree in teaching. Nobody was well off. We didn't have a bathroom in my house growing up, just a toilet under the stairs and a rusty shower down in the cold coal cellar. We took our baths in the kitchen sink until we were 5 or 6 years old. One winter all the pipes from our well froze up and we had to haul water from a spring a few miles up the road, in big plastic tubs. There was an abandoned strip mine (for coal) just a few hundred yards up over the hill behind our house--an abandoned mine and an abandoned pit and abandoned machinery and big mounds that were great to ride bikes up and down. My father, who dropped out of college after one semester then drove trucks then joined the Air Force and went to Korea as radio technician--wanted me to be a hunter and a fisher, and work on cars, but I was more interested in algebra and chess, and all he ever had me do was "hold the light," he never taught me anything about the mechanics. Nothing. And we had to crawl under the house in the "second basement" to thaw pipes with a butane torch in the winter in Pennslvania.) It eventually caused a big division between us--I completely failed when we went out hunting and fishing--and that and the fact that he abused my mother, and me and my brother a couple of times. I was done with him and we were estranged for 40 years, until his death. There wasn't even a funeral, because no one would have gone to it. He worked in a steel mill and didn't even care if I went to college. In fact, I came home for Christmas after my first semester as a freshman, and, when I was watching a Nova broadcast about 9 pm about Einstein and special relavitity (I was just then reading Ronald Clark's biography of Einstein, and planning to switch my major from electrical engineering to physics), my dad came home drunk and began berating me for not having a job. So I could have been this song's narrator if things had gone another way. I never thought about it much when I was younger, but I think about it now that I'm older, and my parents are dead, and now that the United States in a real decline. There are a lot of guys trapped in these small towns, their labor no longer needed or wanted. No other jobs, like in manufacturing or mining or construction. They're angry, and I don't blame them, and almost all of them voted for Trump. I'm very happy I escaped. Also, I like Jason Isbell's music a lot, his lyrics are often spot on ("Mustang Lounge" is the absolute perfect name for a bar in a rundown, declining coal town), it's such a raw, angry song--and it's my blog so I can post what I want.