Kentucky’s Real People Radio

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0:30Find out more at polandyourplacetogrow.com. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:06Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Maria Margaronis, visiting a community radio station in Whitesburg, Kentucky, that challenges all the stereotypes of Appalachian people. I want to go where things are beautiful, Where I know I'll never grow old Where them walls are all made of jasper And that street are all painted with gold You've got Rolling Mountains as far as the eye can see up here. It's the only place in eastern Kentucky where you can watch the sunset and it'd be really, really beautiful. You can't see it from the valleys like you can up here. In the morning sometimes, it looks like you're in heaven.

2:07There's fog down there and you're above the clouds up here. This is WMMT-Whitesburg, Broadcasting 2, Horsepin, Cranes Nest, and Little Wild Dog Creek.

2:25We've pulled off the road high up in the Appalachian Mountains. The sky is clear, the air is crisp, and down below, miles and miles of billowing hills bristle with bare trees like needles. Jared Hamilton is the general manager of WMMT, or Real People Radio, and a fiddle player too. He's taking us to an old mountain resort to help us understand what this place is all about. This is Wiley's last resort. This is down, we're at the pond right now. We've got these awesome caverns up here. Everything's like really whimsical because, you know, Jim was a poet and he loves puns. So that's the walled-in pond and it's held up by the We Give a Damn.

3:09Yeah. The late Wiley Quixote, real name Jim Webb, was one of the station's guiding spirits, a wizard of the airwaves, and this half-ruined camp among pines and mountain laurels was his magic kingdom. We rumble along its rough roads in Jared's well-used truck. One of the funny things is that this is like a black bear preserve, and we keep WMMT on 24 hours a day because bears are deferred by people's voices. The funny thing about that is one of the main selling points of WMMT in a rural area, hearing other people's voices for some people on the air is very important, you know. Well, you're tuned in to Real People Radio, Possum Radio, the best radio station in the whole wide, W-H-I-R-L-E-D.

3:57Got a winter storm warning and effect, but I hope you guys are inside nice and warm with a little hot chocolate. People get lonely out in callers and stuff, and they've always got radio to turn on to hear someone local. It's not quite socializing, but it still feels like hunting. Oh, when are you coming to see me? See me, see me. Oh, when are you coming to see me? My pretty little reckless boy. Well, I think I'll come on Saturday. WMMT's been bringing people together with music, stories and conversations about local issues since 1985. It's been hit hard by President Trump's funding cuts to public radio, losing 40 % of its budget.

4:40But the people here aren't quitters. And this is Elmo's Haven. And this is your cabin. It is. Jared's an ex-punk rocker with clear blue eyes and hair down to his waist. A filmmaker and photographer by trade, he came to the station through its parent, Apple Shop, a media, education and production centre set up in 1969 as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Everywhere I have gone, I have seen men and women who wanted to leave this country a better place to live in than they found it. For the first time in our history, an America without hunger is a practical prospect. The poverty tours, yes.

5:28Let's be honest. They thought that showing white people in poverty would raise more sympathy than people of color in the populace of America. so they made us the poster child for poverty it's a higher percentage than most areas but it's not most of the people in any way but they portray it like it is you know it's like 20 percent maybe poverty is that partly where the kind of stereotype of appalachians comes from yeah but apple shop's goal has always been to like show like what it's really like here and like show the beautiful parts and the hard parts together all at once you know like the real picture This is WMMT Whitesburg, listener-powered radio for buckhorn, beef hide, and turkey toe.

6:13Eastern Kentucky is the second poorest congressional district in the United States, and one of the whitest. In the last three elections, it went heavily for Trump. It's also been the epicenter of the opioid epidemic. But those blunt facts obscure the reality of people's lives here and their resilience. Coal is at the center of their story. My grandfather on my mom's side, he was a union miner. My grandfather on my dad's side owned a trucking business. And, you know, I found my way out of that line of work. But my brother's probably underground right now or asleep. He's mining still. Yeah, yeah.

6:47And they flip him from night shift to day shift every two weeks. How does he find it? You know, he coughs a lot. Coal was discovered here back in the 1800s. speculators soon came to buy the mineral rights under farmers' fields. A century later, the coal industry was the central Appalachian's main employer. Its decline in the last 30 years changed eastern Kentucky's politics. My family were Democrats when I was growing up, and somehow, like, slowly, as regulations started coming against mining, shifted towards, you know, the side that we're deregulating. when in reality, you know, the regulations are like helping us as people.

7:30And my brother's going to have black lung. My papa has it. How old's your brother? 35. And it's worse now because it's silica dust. It's not just coal. The coal seams are smaller. So there's silica wrapping all around the coal. And that is like more cancer causing. I do see my brother like hacking up a lung. I'm going to do a piece that comes from Harlan County in the 1930s by a woman named Florence Reese, whose husband was a union organizer, and she was...

8:05She had been... accosted in her home by a group of company thugs who were looking for her husband for the purpose of killing him. And when they left, after wrecking her house, the story goes that she took down a wall calendar and wrote this out on the back of it using a traditional tune. Rich Kirby's been part of WMMT almost since it began, including ten years as station manager. These days he hosts a show called Deep in Tradition.

8:40Come all you good workers, good news to you, I'll tell of how the good old union has come in here to go out. Which side are you on, which side are you on? Which side are you on? Which side are you on?

9:01They say in Ireland County there is no neutral there. You'll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair. Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Which side are you on? We've lived through what is called the war on coal here. People were really led by the coal industry. A lot of fear of losing jobs, of losing their heritage, which is so much based on mining. And it's really been the root of the region's economic distress ever since in that the people here do not own the resources. We've powered the country and we've paid the price ever since. Mimi Pickering's another veteran WMMT hand.

9:50She has a double act on the Chicken and Biscuits Morning Show with her friend Jenny Williams. Like many other families, Jenny's has been divided by the politics of coal. For a long time, I think you either supported mining or you were against it. And if you supported mining, it meant that you weren't going to support anything else like solar energy or clean energy or clean water or anything that might threaten that industry. It's really difficult to live in a community where people that you love support people that you believe are hurting other people that you love. Are you a business or a non-profit looking for conscientious, hardworking employees?

10:30A new program is ready to offer you support to hire out-of-work coal miners. Through the Hiring Our Miners Everyday program... In one way or another, pretty much everyone here has been affected by mining. I am DJ Katie Ray. I am on WMMT 88.7 FM every Monday morning at 8 a.m. to 10. and my real name is Scarlett Gilly, though. I'm from the Appalachian Mountains, across the state line over in Virginia. It's a town called Haysi, H-A-Y-S-I. It's very remote. There isn't even a red light in the county. Scarlett grew up listening to WMMT. She's now its part-time office coordinator. My dad, he listened to the Bluegrass Express every Thursday and if you got near that radio and you tried to change the station, you didn't try to change the station.

11:28It stayed on pretty much 24-7 at the house. We'd always have the radio to let us know when school was canceled or on delay and what was going on in the county. Hazardous winter weather may impact Wattsburg this coming weekend, including the potential for heavy snow and dangerous road conditions. So now is the time to prepare. My dad was in the mines back in the 70s, and he got hurt in the mine. He broke his back, and then he was disabled. He couldn't work anymore. And just him trying to be a dad and not feel bad about not being the brave winner in the family, that's really hard. That's really hard on a guy.

12:16and my mom, she worked several jobs. She was a waitress and then she worked for the school system and decorated cakes. She sold jewelry, just anything, anything to put food on the table. Cole is implicated in the opioid crisis too. My name is Becky Rose Bowman. I am 46 years old. I am from eastern Kentucky, and I'm a person in long-term recovery, seven years. Sometimes I'll introduce myself as Becky and alcoholic, but that's not all that I am. And my recovery is not all that I am either. Becky knows the addiction story from inside and out. When I was younger and married to my first husband, I can remember him coming to me and saying, Oh, Becky, they make this new medicine.

13:06and it's called OxyContin, and it will help the pain that I have. He'd been in a car accident when he was younger. But it's not addictive. Like, I just need to go see this doctor and get this medicine, and everything will be great. Right. That marriage didn't last. We found out, you know, later that that medicine actually was very, very addictive. That was a lie that they sold. Yes, and they sold it to almost every family in this region. It's devastated. an entire generation of families in Appalachia. Becky used to work for Eric Kohn, a lawyer who's now serving 27 years in prison for the biggest social security fraud in American history.

13:47Kohn bribed doctors to fake disability evidence. Becky says she had to tell his clients to get OxyContin prescriptions so the judge would believe they really were in pain. So it was all kind of a scam to get people hooked on this stuff. Sure. And then you've got a disability backlog of people waiting for hearings who can't pay their power bills and they have a closet full of this medicine that they don't take because they don't want to get addicted to it. And then they find out that the neighbor's kid is paying$80 a piece for them and they really need to pay the power bill. And that is the opioid crisis in eastern Kentucky in a nutshell.

14:28Saving a life can be as easy as carrying free, safe to use Narcan and learning how to use it. Maybe you don't think you will encounter anyone whose life can be saved with this drug, but places you visit all the time are high risk areas for overdose, public restrooms, areas along highways, parking lots, or even in your own neighborhood. Narcan or Naloxone reverses the effects of opioid overdose, but it has to be used fast. You can pick it up for free in several Whitesburg shopfronts, including the WMMT studio. There's been some small, I think, decrease in overdose rates, but the rate of use, I doubt very seriously, has decreased.

15:08How do you understand it? How do you explain it from the perspective of all the work you've done on this? I see people who have no hope, right? And where you have no hope, you know, you have to find something to fill that with. I see people in an area that has been deeply, deeply just stripped of all the resources that were available in it. Everyone thinks, I think, that coal is the resource. Coal burns, right? But the people here in this area are the true resource. These days, Becky works helping people come off the drugs that have replaced OxyContin, mostly fentanyl, heroin, and crystal meth.

15:45And she hosts WMMT's groundbreaking Calls from Home, a show where friends and family send and intimate messages to their loved ones in the prisons that have replaced the mines as the region's main employers. Welcome to WMMT's Calls from Home, a weekly show sending out messages to those incarcerated in the coalfields of central Appalachia. We are proud to say that we have been running the program on our station for over two decades. If you would like to leave a message for this show, call toll-free at 888-396-7000. So, there was a guy named Virgil Pinkerton. His show was called The Quiet Storm.

16:21He's a black fellow and he plays from hip-hop to R &B, soul. And people started calling in from the local jails very early on, almost immediately, and putting in requests. It would be like, you have a collect call from Blackstreet, no diggity. So that's kind of how it got its, like, seed. In the late 90s, two maximum security prisons were opened in neighbouring West Virginia. Both hold people serving long sentences for violent crimes. Both have been criticized for inhumane conditions and alleged prisoner abuse. They're now the most loyal listeners to the dedications that Becky reads live on air every Monday night from family members and friends who might live hundreds of miles away.

17:07You're my best friend, my whole world, my everything. With you, I always feel safe. My man, my man, my man forever. Never give up. Keep pushing. I got you always and forever. As I always say, tough times don't last forever. The show's third hour plays out direct messages recorded on a dedicated line because there's nothing like hearing the voice of someone you love. Hi, Elijah. This is Mom. I love you, think and love you, and see you soon. Happy four years, my love, and I can't wait for it to be a thousand more years. Je t 'aime mon amour, bon nuit, lots of kisses. there's a real kind of energetic love around here yeah but i know it's really hard one how do we find that lift to kind of keep going you have to share your suffering with other people the answer for me is now and probably forever more going to be that the only way that I'm liberated from the things that oppress me is if I actively work to liberate someone else.

18:24The only thing that brings hope or joy back is selflessness for anyone.

19:03America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

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20:59This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. Good morning. It's morning, Tony. How are you? It's morning. In the morning, it better find a morning. That's morning, that's morning. In the morning, the union people like me, my people like me. Nimrod Workman, folk singer, union activist, coal miner, and father of 13, was the first voice ever heard on WMMT he still heard every morning after the hoot owl shift. And when a catastrophic flood put Eastern Kentucky underwater in July 2022, his wake-up call announced the radio's return. It just seemed like the most appropriate thing to do, and it kind of filled up my heart a little bit.

21:37It made me feel really warm to play that. As soon as the roads were passable, operations technician Shane Terry drove to the old Appleshop building down by the North Fork, Kentucky River. The water inside had risen to two metres deep. And then when I actually was able to go into the building, it was just completely covered in flood muck. Chemicals, excretions, and mud, of course. Down the street, people could find tapes from the archive just strewn across the streets, up in trees, up in bridges. It was devastating because that's our history. Apple Shop had been capturing stories since 1969. Scarlett was there too.

22:17My daughters and I, we came over and got down and dirty and started digging stuff out of the archives. It was so sad. There were so many artists that I know and love, And I would pick up their albums and mud and water would just drip out of them. It was heartbreaking just to see the damage and everything that everyone lost. But we're rebuilding. We're doing good. We're trying anyway. My job was like, well, how do we get the radio back on? What do we need to do? because everybody talked about how eerie it was to not hear WMT on the radio. It's kind of spooky, you know. We didn't have that community outlet to tell people where to get supplies, where to find shelter, or where to go to help people.

23:12And so our plan was like, we've got to get WMT back up in one month. That meant getting up to the transmitter. Me and the engineer basically took his side-by-side, an ATV, over to making peak so that's i think the highest mountain within our area and we couldn't even get across the road to get the side by side up the trail and so he finally tells me he's like shane i think we're gonna have to do this the hard way we're gonna have to take this this road called the devil's half mile and it's called the devil's half mile because there's a rock facing that goes 60 degrees downward. It's very steep and so I was riding with them and I was a good co-pilot and so when the ATV would try to flip I would basically hold it down like kind of lean out from it and hold it down from flipping.

24:07It was dangerous and I think at like 10 p.m we were able to get it online and were able to get the first broadcast out. It was the 29th day after the flood. By December, Shane had built the Possum Den, a radio studio in a silver Winnebago trailer that became WMMT's home for the next two and a half years. You are a man of many skills. Well, I grew up poor, and when you're really poor around here, it's like you can't really afford to pay somebody to do something to fix your electric or your heat. so you have to learn how to do it or you don't have it, you know. I guess all that has just been my ongoing way of learning and working is just go ahead and do it.

24:53The flood was a real test of the station's resilience. The old Apple Shop building is still just skin and bones, brickwork and bare studs, but WMMT has built two cosy studios in the corner of a cavernous former hardware store on slightly higher ground with bright yellow walls, folded quilts to buffer sound and music posters everywhere. And Jared's won funding to expand the station's role as a community lifeline in future crises, natural or otherwise. This is WMMT, Whiteburg, broadcasting to Hurricane, Cyclone and Torrent. Real People Radio has never been mired in the past. Every DJ brings their own style, from bluegrass to punk and gospel to rap.

25:36And new musical hybrids get made here too, like this hip-hop track by Joshua Utsi. This ended from coal miners in Birmingham, Alabama. I come from round the mountain, but ain't no banjo on my knee. I was a boy in Alabama, became a man in Tennessee. I bid farewell to old Kentucky, more times than my heart can bear. But I built my home in Big Stone Gap, my heart is happy here. The melody for the song was borrowed from an old folk song that my aunt and uncle taught me from their days of living up in the mountains and stuff. And it was this old song. I don't know if I could share it a little bit, but it was Grandma's in the Cellar.

26:19Lordy, can't you smell her cooking biscuits on an old rotten dirty stove while the boils on her belly keep her dripping in the jelly and she whistles ass that runs down her nose. And so I, as a kid, right, it was gross. It was cool. It was fun. And so that to me was my connection to being Appalachian. So I took the melody and I told my story. And I definitely have been excited to help Appalachian embrace hip hop now as one of its own forms.

27:13musical taste often maps onto politics but at wmmt the music's in the driving seat here's jared again apple shop is kind of known to be left-leaning but we don't gatekeep it you know there's people who want to defund the police and there's former cops both on the radio yeah it's a community thing. So anyone that wants to do a show can. And here's Rich. Somehow MMT was a sort of a neutral space, not that people couldn't express themselves, but they just gave each other space to do that. And in the last few years, the divisions in the whole society have just gotten so much sharper. But I'm hoping that that's still the case.