(Holly) A book in our reach is like a handshake to the connection we all need, because through them we gain friends, family and those characters we never even knew we needed in our lives until we start turning the pages.

Hi, I'm Holly Jackson, your host for Books by the River.

I want to say thanks to you for joining us on this journey where we sit beside the writers who tell the stories that sometimes feel like our own, or they give us a glimpse of the experiences of someone we just might need to know.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (Announcer) Major funding for Books by the River is brought to you by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina, the proud partner of South Carolina ETV and Public Radio.

With the generosity of individuals, corporations and foundations.

The ETV Endowment is committed to sharing southern storytelling and compelling conversations with viewers across the nation.

This program is supported by Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina.

This program is made possible by the support of Peter Zamuka and Lynn Baker.

Additional funding for Books by the River is provided by Visit Beaufort, Port Royal, and Sea Islands and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USC Beaufort.

(Holly) And here to talk to us today is author Taylor Brown, the writer of Rednecks.

Welcome, Taylor.

Thanks so much for joining us here.

(Taylor) Thanks for having me.

(Holly) And already drawn in, of course, by the name.

We'll get to the meaning behind that.

Some people might not quite know what the meaning of Rednecks really means, but, historical fiction.

Tell me why you chose this moment in time to write about.

(Taylor) Well, it's been just over 100 years since the Battle of Blair Mountain, and it's one of those stories that I think is really formative in US history, but most people don't know about.

And I felt that, you know, 100 years is long enough that it's time to really get the story out there.

And there's a lot of ways in which I think this story and I've had people tell me feels very contemporary, even though it happened 100 years ago.

So I think all those factors were at play in my head.

It just felt like it was time to get the story out there.

(Holly) Yeah, and there are those things that have these big events that have happened, you know, so many lives lost and that sort of thing where people talk about it's the forgotten war, the forgotten this, how did you stumble across it?

Are you a historian yourself?

(Taylor) I wouldn't say I'm a historian.

I've always been really interested in history, but I had a personal connection to this one.

I have a very good friend.

His name is Jason Fry.

He, is a freelance editor for me and my closest collaborator.

And he's from Logan County, West Virginia, which is where this all happened.

So Jason grew up going up on Blair Mountain, and instead of hunting for arrowheads, like a lot of us were doing as kids in the South, they were looking for shell casings from the battle.

And I would say probably about ten years ago, I was in his office and somehow the word redneck came up and he said, you know where that word comes from, right?

And I said, what I think 99% of people would say if they're asked that question, I said, you know, sunburned on the back of the neck from working in the field.

And Jason kind of rubbed his hands together and he said, "Boy, have I got a story for you."

And that really is is how it started.

I had not heard, as many folks, I had not heard about this story at all.

The Battle of Blair Mountain, I didn't know that much about the mine wars at that time.

So that's really how it all got rolling for me.

(Holly) Alright, so now the viewers are saying, okay, what is it?

Tell us about the real meaning of that word.

(Taylor) So the word does go back long before, they say the word redneck actually goes all the way back to Scotland, when certain, Lowland Presbyterians refused to sign, or they signed a covenant that said that they would not accept the Church of England to be the official state church, and they were persecuted for that.

And they a lot of them signed in blood, and they wore red sashes around their necks.

And people called them "rednecks."

Well, a lot of them ended up moving to Ireland, Ulster and then becoming the Scotch-Irish in America.

So it kind of that word kind of stuck with them.

So you can see how it found its way to Appalachia.

But during the mine wars era, when all these miners were getting together and rising up against the coal companies that were keeping them from unionizing and using all kinds of intimidation, violence to keep them from doing so.

When they rose up together, they needed a way to recognize one another.

And so they wore red bandanas around their necks, and people called them "rednecks."

So the explanation that we all know of sunburned on the back of the neck is not wrong.

But a lot of scholars say that the word redneck really jumped into the mainstream lexicon during the mine wars era.

(Holly) Got it.

Alright.

We've all learned something already.

Cool, thank you for that.

Okay, so throughout this book, there is a character, Doctor Moo, who is inspired by someone in your life.

Let's go into that.

(Taylor) So Doc Moo is inspired by my great grandfather, who came over from Mount Lebanon when he was 14 without his parents, landed in New Orleans, ended up going to medical school at the University of Kentucky and becoming a physician in rural Kentucky.

And I share the same birthday with him, so I've always felt this kind of connection.

And my grandmother, his daughter, always made that connection from the time I was a little kid.

So I think in some ways, my grandmother wanted me to be a doctor, which wasn't quite up my alley.

But I do feel like, this book was a way that I could kind of honor him and his memory.

(Holly) Right, a great tribute.. But you never got to know your great grandfather.

(Taylor) No.

He had passed away long before I was born.

And to be honest, he started as a side character in the book.

This is kind of just one of those kismet things in the way that books come together.

He started as a side character.

I write a draft of the book.

I gave it to my editor.

And he's got some different feedback.

He doesn't think it's ready.

And he says, you know, I was really interested in this side character, this Lebanese-American physician.

He had no idea that that was based on my great grandfather and that I had been gathering and researching about his life because I wanted to write about him at some point, but had not figured out exactly how.

So that ended up being the eureka moment when I thought, okay, no, he should be at the heart of this book.

And we really thought that the book has a lot of real historical, real life people in it.

But I needed someone that I could prop play with their life a little bit more, that can move in and out and interact with the different real world characters, you know?

And so it was kind of perfect for that.

It was just one of those moments when the stars seem to align and the light bulb went off.

(Holly) Totally.

(Taylor) Etcetera, etcetera.

(Holly) Now, you always had this connection to this man who you never met.

Do you feel like through writing this and even creating this character that, you know, is part made up, but do you feel a stronger sense after writing the book?

(Taylor) Absolutely.

I mean it, one it made me dig into his life more and find, talk to relatives and find old photos that might have been lost that I probably never would have seen.

And two, just thinking about what his life would be like.

I'll be honest, there's probably more of me in Doc Moo than in some of my other characters, because I do identify with him to some degree.

And so absolutely.

I mean, you spent so much time with the character.

You, it feels like you're creating threads with someone, even though that you never really knew them in person.

It feels like there's a much greater connection there than there ever was before.

(Holly) You brought up early on about the contemporary ties and people always hear history repeats itself.

So how do you see, in this historical moment, the ties for today?

(Taylor) I think there's a number of ways.

One, we still have, there's a lot of pushback against organized labor, and organized labor, still having a hard time really getting together, I think, to some degree, and getting the things that they want.

But also in the stories of extraction of areas that are beautiful.

Areas that we have companies that come in that a lot of time are owned from out of state or even in another country, and come in and really pull the money out of the ground, and the local community doesn't necessarily benefit from it or for very long.

And then the damage is kind of done.

I see it with the Okefenokee Swamp down in Georgia recently, has been under a lot of threat of of mining.

And there's questions around whether that would really be beneficial to the local community that lives off of the swamp, to a large degree in the tourism there.

You still see it in Appalachia and you see it in a lot of other countries now to where we have gone to other areas.

And this is happening in countries that aren't ours.

You know, with the mining for rare minerals that are used in electronics and all that kind of stuff.

I mean, we all hear this, the kind of horror stories around how the people who are actually doing the mining in the work are treated.

(Holly) Right.

(Taylor) And the conditions.

So all those ways in which, it felt very contemporary.

(Holly) Sure.

Tell me about your research process.

of course it included some genealogy research, which had to be really cool.

What else?

(Taylor) Obviously, there's a lot of book research.

You know, I felt like I read a whole library worth of books, but what's probably more fun and interesting is actually trying and going up there and going to the areas where a lot of this occurred.

And you can go to Matewan where the opening shootout in the book occurred, and you can touch the brick walls where the actual bullets went in, are still there.

(Holly) Wow.

(Taylor) A lot of the buildings are the same.

You can really see how it all happened in a really neat way.

And then I had the adventure of trying to get up onto Blair Mountain itself, where the battle took place, which was at risk of mountaintop removal until just a few years ago.

That finally kind of got defeated.

So it still stands, but it's owned by mining companies who have security gates and stuff like that up there.

So if you want to get up there, you have to be willing to... find a way.

And I did.

<laughs> (Holly) Okay.

I bet there's another story there.

(Taylor) There certainly is.

It involved motorcycles.

(Taylor) I was trying to get up on the Blair and the old days, like when Jason was growing up.

You could get up there easily, but now it's kind of every road up there I would come to a security gate.

But I was driving my truck and I had an old dirt bike in the bed that's a vintage dirt bike from the 70s.

And I had a feeling that if I drove around in some of those kind of hollers, that there might be some old guys that would recognize that bike and want to talk, and they might, you know, tell me what I needed to know.

And that's exactly what happened.

I saw a guy, a couple of white bearded, you know, guys.

(Holly) Like that's my man, I see it!

<laughs> (Taylor) One of them was mowing the lawn and he had stopped and he was talking to his neighbor.

And of course, I drive by and they see the bike and I start talking to them, and they started telling me stories of that era and their ancestors who were there.

And then they told me a way to get up onto Blair, which was basically a rocky creek bed.

But luckily I had the dirt bike and I was able to do it.

It was too narrow for a truck, but you could do it with a side by side or a four wheeler or the dirt bike.

Although it wasn't easy, I'll say that it was basically, as some of the trails back then were, they're just creek beds.

(Holly) Oh, I bet that was really cool.

Alright.

So talk about, you know, the pressure must be on, as a writer, whenever you can so easily just have everything at your fingertips at your, at the comfort of your laptop.

But there's something different about putting your hands on it and your eyes on it.

(Taylor) 100%.

(Holly) And I think, you know, the reader definitely benefits in some way.

Tell me how just the point of you being there you think makes the story better.

(Taylor) I really feel that way.

I mean, to me, it's one of my favorite things that kind of gives me a reason to have these adventures, which I like to have, but I think it's hard to write about something if you haven't really seen it and you haven't really been there, and you haven't really felt it to some degree, and tried to put yourself in the shoes of the people who experienced it.

And with this book, you know, up on Blair Mountain is not that different than it was when this was occurring a little over 100 years ago, even Matewan itself, some of the towns have not changed in terms of their architecture and stuff.

So you can really feel that you can really feel that you're there.

(Holly) Yeah.

(Taylor) And I think that's really important.

And I think it's important for writers, it's probably good for them too, not just for the books to get out of the office, out of the study, out of the library and go out into the world.

And the other thing is that when you're out in the world, you talk to people and they're full of stories.

And lots of times it's stories that aren't in any book ever, you know?

(Holly) "Hold on, let me write this down!

I don't want to forget this!"

(Taylor) And there are things that would have stayed buried and people love to talk and to tell the stories of their ancestors or what they experienced or what they heard, and the myths and the rumors and the legends.

And, that's one of the, that's just a lot of fun to me, I would say.

And it just really enriches the work, I think.

(Holly) Yeah, I feel like part of being the best writer is to be the best listener.

And I think I've heard you say before about, you know, you've been taught to just take it all in and take those moments and not let them pass by.

And it does make you a better writer.

Alright.

So historical fiction, I love that because you're teaching the readers about a moment in time they might not know, but filling in those holes with what might have been, talk about how you get to use those creative juices and bring those in.

(Taylor) I think that what's really interesting is we can read the history, but there's so much in between.

There's so much negative space, and that's where you can really fill in the emotions and the human experience.

Because what we have, a lot of the time are the facts and what someone said, but we don't really know what they were feeling and what happened to make things transpire.

And so you get to, I sometimes see it as you have this backbone or this skeleton of the history as we know it, and then you get to go in and really flesh it and create, bring it to life.

And that's kind of what I feel like I'm doing a lot of the time, and not even necessarily when it's historical, just it's something that is - a place, sometimes, can be the same way.

And we get to really go in and bring it to life for the reader and for ourselves.

I mean, I'm going into the dark spaces.

And when I say dark spaces, I don't mean dark in a - I mean dark in a negative space way, what we don't know, the unknown.

(Holly) Yeah.

(Taylor) And taking what we know and our imagination and walking in there.

That's our torch.

And we find, you know, what we find in there.

And, I find that an amazing feeling of kind of discovery and exploration that comes with the work.

(Holly) Was there a character or a moment in this book in particular, where you had the most fun with that?

(Taylor) I would say that, I had a good bit of fun with Mother Jones just because she was such a fiery personality, and I had her speeches to go on, but I was kind of rewriting them and trying to get into her rhythms of speech, and she just had ways of saying things.

You can see how she must have just drawn people to herself, but we don't really have recordings very much of her.

And there are a couple people who have kind of done reenactments, but that was a lot of fun for me.

And she could be kind of bawdy with what she would say, and she could kind of speak like a man and she could really talk to anybody.

And so that was a lot of fun for me I would say.

And Sid Hatfield himself, that was an interesting one because we don't have much on record that he said.

So I really got to kind of see what was behind the scenes of someone who was in some ways, although he smiled a lot, a very stoic figure, I think.

(Holly) Yeah.

Alright, let's talk about Taylor Brown himself.

We've talked about the writer, but there's more.

"But wait, there's more!"

And tell me about this motorcycle stuff.

(Taylor) So, yeah, I grew up, my dad was a big motorcyclist.

I grew up riding dirt bikes and, then got older and did trips with him.

And, you know, as a rider these days, most of us have to have another job besides just riding.

And I am not, alone in that.

And a lot of riders of my generation have gone into academia and they teach, and it's just not the way my life went and not quite what burned hot for me.

And so about a little over ten years ago, I started, a custom motorcycle publication called Bike Bound, and so I'm the editor in chief of that now, and that's kind of my day job.

And so I get to work with builders of custom motorcycles from all over the world and go to various events and that kind of thing, so it's pretty neat.

The Venn diagram overlaps somewhat because I am telling the stories.

You know, people bring me their pictures of their motorcycle and they bring me some stories behind it, and I get to kind of work with them and put that picture together and put it out into the world for them.

And I find that really gratifying.

(Holly) Are you always taking notes whenever it's, not just for the publication, but for, you know, your outside work as well?

(Taylor) Yes.

I carry, like I have a little moleskin, you know, that's in my backpack.

I have two of them in there right now and I have one from last year that had some notes on it that I'm still looking back at, and then I have the one for this year that I write, you know, my updated notes and a lot of stories, even whole books have come out of little things that I heard and wrote down in one of those books.

(Holly) Yeah, I mean, just that moment at the desk about where did the rednecks come from?

I love how it created a whole book for you.

Alright.

So tell me when writing began for you, when did you kind of know, "Alright, I think this is the path that I want to go on."

(Taylor) To be honest, for me, it was really young.

So my mom jokes, she's not quite joking.

I mean, this really happened when I was a kid.

I would follow her around the house telling her stories about my GI Joes and my dinosaurs to the point that she would lock herself in a room sometimes.

(Holly) "She's like, I just need a minute!"

(Taylor) Yes, and I would get down on the ground and I would keep talking to her under the door.

And then in first grade, I had a teacher named Mrs.

Pruett, and I don't know what everybody else is really supposed to do in first grade, but as I recall, we wrote a story and illustrated it every single day on these big newsprint papers that we had - and they're rectangular and the top was blank, where you had illustrated in the bottom you would write.

And I really took to that.

I had a story about a spider that steals a remote control car on Christmas or something.

That won like at the the county.... (Holly) Yeah.

(Taylor) ...contest.

(Holly) You won $10 or something, right?

I remember those.

(Taylor) And went off to State - my mom still has some bond we got for it, or something like that, I think.

But I kind of felt like, "Oh, maybe I have a knack for this."

And then I just - and I was always a big reader.

I was born with clubfeet.

I had a number of surgeries and injuries around those for the first 20 years of my life.

So I spent a lot of time laid up and immobilized.

So books were my liberation.

They were my time machine, my airplane, my, they were the way that I was able to get out of the house.

And so it's, you know, not that far of a leap to want to, you know, create that magic.

(Holly) Yeah.

(Taylor) Yourself.

(Holly) So beautifully stated about the places that they can take us.

Alright.

So tell us what's next for you.

(Taylor) I have a new novel that comes out in 2026 called Wolvers.

(Holly) Okay.

(Taylor) It's my first novel set outside of the South.

It's set in the southwest, in the Gila Wilderness, which is the first, our first Federal Wilderness Area.

It's in New Mexico.

A "Wilderness Area" means that they try to really keep it as natural and almost primeval as possible.

I mean, nothing mechanized is allowed inside.

You can't even ride a bike.

You can only go in on foot or on horseback or mule.

And they reintroduced wolves there around the same time as they reintroduced them to Yellowstone in the late 90s, although it's much less known in this area.

So the book is kind of a modern Western that deals with wolf reintroduction and the wilderness areas and public land and and all that kind of stuff.

(Holly) Well, it sounds very interesting.

Alright.

So whenever you're writing these books, what kind of audience are you thinking about?

Who's that reader in your mind?

(Taylor) I try to write mine in such a way that, I have friends that I grew up with that are smart.

They're not necessarily big readers, and I want almost anyone to be able to pick up a book, one of my books and get something out of it.

But I also want them to maybe have to work a little bit harder and there are words that they don't know or that have fallen out of usage and those kinds of things.

I think about that a little bit a lot of the time, to be honest, I'm probably not thinking about the reader as much as I'm thinking about the characters in the story and not thinking about how a reader will.

React to it, but how the characters are reacting and what feels very alive on the page.

And then I go back later and think about maybe what a reader would think.

But to some degree, it's probably not my priority, I would say.

And not in my head quite as much.

(Holly) And probably a good way to go, to not get too bogged down in that because you're not thinking about what really matters, which is the story.

So, I like it.

Alright.

Taylor, thank you so much for joining us.

This has been a great conversation.

Rednecks, we've all learned something, especially the the real meaning behind that name.

So, thanks so much for coming here for Books By The River.

And everyone, we want to say thanks to you for joining us.

It's a pleasure to have you around.

I'm your host, Holly Jackson.

You're watching Books By The River.

Until the next book.

(Taylor) I think I'm going to read the prolog today from Rednecks.

This kind of gives you, I think, a pretty good idea of just what the world was like for these miners at the time.

They worked beneath the pale flames of carbide headlamps.

Some swing picks into the face, hewing the coal straight from the scene, while others shovel the black rubble into iron carts, all crouched like boxers in the shoulder high room.

They worked dark to dark in this mine.

Descending before daylight touch the deep, coal camp hollers where they live, and surfacing ten hours later, soot faced as chimney sweeps - the last glow of dusk to greet them.

The mine cars are drawn to the surface by mules born underground - animals who only know darkness, like some cave species, pulling their trains of coal through swinging trap doors attended by ten year old boys who curse and sweet talk them in turn.

Boys they kick into the wall when they like.

All breathe a black dust, explosive, which swirls to the cramped yellowy light.

The pickers and shovelers work with red bandanas knotted over their faces, the cotton black fogged over their noses and mouths.

Perhaps it's an inadvertent spark from a miner's pick striking an unseen shard of flint.

Perhaps a pocket of methane has just been exhaled from the strata, freed after eons.

The mountain erupts.

A train of fire bores through the tunnels and shafts and rooms.

Men are burned alive, boys buried underground.

A great plume of ash blows from the mouth of the mine and rolls skyward, seen for miles.

The morning papers will read, "21 Killed In Mine Blast."

The country will hardly register the news.

Such headlines are frequent, far removed from the reading public, like earthquakes or eruptions on far sides of the world.

Outside the drift mouth, two miners lie on their bellies, heaving hands atop their heads.

They look at each other, red eyed, dizzied, ears a-whine.

The world blows around them, dust and smoke and red meteors of coal, everything clad in a pale of ash, thick and wooly.

Tonight the coal camp will wail with death.

One raises his head.

"Told you she'd blow, ain't I?

This would never happen.

at no union mine.

We'd have them vent shafts we asked for."

The other miner looks over his shoulder, eyes wild as if the devil might be standing behind them, marking their words.

He hisses through his teeth.

"Hush with that talk, man.

You're like to get us killed."

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (Announcer) Major funding for Books By The River is brought to you by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina, the proud partner of South Carolina ETV and Public Radio.

With the generosity of individuals, corporations and foundations.

The ETV Endowment is committed to sharing southern storytelling and compelling conversations with viewers across the nation.

This program is supported by Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina.

This program is made possible by the support of Peter Zamuka and Lynn Baker.

Additional funding for Books by the River is provided by Visit Beaufort, Port Royal, and Sea Islands and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USC Beaufort.

♪ ♪