With the 1970s making their retro-glorious comeback, Dateline>City of Angels readers might want to check into the popular Foxfire book series that debuted during that decade.
I was reminded of these books while making my recent post about Grannie’s breadbox. As those who lived the 1970s will recall, “returning to nature” and “the basics” were prevalent themes back then, spurred by a tough economy and a burgeoning ecology movement. (You know the saying: “The more things ‘change’…”) Then, like now, there was a yearning for the “simple life” of earlier times, and the Foxfire books helped many Americans explore that fantasy.
The story behind these books is remarkable in itself. Starting about 1966, high school teacher Eliot Wigginton armed his students with notepads and tape recorders and sent them out to interview the denizens of the Southern Appalachians about traditional folk ways. The result was Foxfire Magazine, a student publication that Wigginton and his classes eventually compiled into an eight-book set from 1972 to 1984. (By 2004, the series had grown to 12 volumes with more than 9 million circulating copies.)
My dad was an avid fan of the initial series and, growing up, I also became absorbed by each new addition to his collection. Foxfire 1 dealt with hog dressing, log cabin building, mountain crafts and foods, “planting by the signs,” snake lore, hunting tales, faith healing, moonshining “and other affairs of plain living.” Later volumes would serve as equally eclectic guides to ghost tales, animal care, gardening, weaving, midwifing, home remedies, wagon and banjo making, blacksmithing and more.
Being a heritage-minded bunch, I think this blog’s readership would appreciate these books, which are captivating on so many levels. Wigginton’s students may have started out as amateur journalist-sociologists, but they quickly got caught up in the lives of their “hillbilly” interviewees. The books display a deep affection not just for the lost bits of Americana the kids discover, but for the old-timers whose oral histories they record. You sense that, somewhere along the line, the students came to understand themselves as custodians of dying but meaningful traditions, which they in turn felt compelled to pass along in honor of their mentors.
To me the books are timeless. Having recently borrowed them again from my Dad’s shelf, I’m once more struck by the stark contrasts they paint between urban and rural living one generation to the next. The people and customs we encounter in the Foxfire series are as removed from modern L.A. as you can get. Yet, incredibly, it wasn’t that long ago in our history that Angelenos lived a similar frontier life.
- Link: Foxfire on Amazon.
