Michael and Carrie Kline, Talking Across the Lines

In honor of the current Centennial of the March on Blair Mountain and Battle of Blair Mountain, we're reposting a favorite piece. Remembering Blair Mountain was written and produced by Miranda Brown while interning with Talking Across the Lines. Brown weaves oral history interviews recorded by Michael and Carrie Kline and music from the The Blair Pathways Project, produced by Sara Lynch Thomason....

Revelations: A Staged Reading Celebrating Appalachian Resiliency in GLBTQ People, was performed for its 17th time in Shepherdstown, West Virginia April 12, 2019 as part of the SpeakStory Series and is presented as part of our Talking Across the Lines podcast. We are available to produce it in your community with a volunteer cast over a fire day residency. Revelations is a theatrical presentation o...

To the tune of country blues and jazz, played by coalfield bluesman Nat Reese on guitar and Ralph Gordon on bass, African American educators and esteemed community members talk about the obstacles and impetuses related to getting an education. What were the losses in terms of community support for black students, once schools integrated? Students black and white learned widely from the few but pow...

Ollie Watts Davis and Willie Ben Pritchett paint pictures of their mothers, grandmothers, early teachings and shortfalls driven by alcohol in one case and racial discrimination in both. Willie Ben even gives a lesson on housecleaning. "Most people just organize a little," he says, detailing how much his mother taught him to survive, when she was able. Dr. Davis treats us to an operatic grand final...

Willie Ben Pritchett, an Honors Student, football and track star and glee club member, discusses the educational dead ends for black students at Mount Hope High School when he graduated in 1964, unless the students already had a family member with experience in navigating the college admissions process. Pritchett goes on to describe how he survived and finally thrived. He exemplifies the idea of “...

To a background of blues riffs and folk songs, Bernice Clayton and Nathan Shelton, natives of Fayette County, West Virginia describe their older family members' ability to make do from scratch, from the land, making sorghum molasses, making soap, preserving food, and squatting on land during the time of the West Virginia Mine Wars, getting by with a pinch of humor and a pound of know-how.

In this interweaving of oral histories and music, natives of Mount Hope, West Virginia discuss their close knit relationships across racial lines in the 1940s to '70s, as well as the ways local adults shielded young blacks from institutional racism. "I never had to be false to myself. I could always be me. And I'm proud of that," says Mount Hope mother Bernice Clayton.

This West Virginia bluesman describes the span of his career throughout the southern coalfields. His dad came from Virginia "to shake that money tree," but precious little shook loose. Nat Reese expresses humor and pathos through music and narrative in this eight-minute production made with WV Humanities support by Michael Kline in the 1980s while working on staff at the Augusta Heritage Center. P...

Dollars & Cents: Race and Class in the West Virginia Coalfields is the second installment in the Hope audio series, commissioned and directed by the Mountain of Hope Organization, supported by the West Virginia Humanities Council and produced by Talking Across the Lines, LLC, www.folktalk.org; www.facebook.com/klinesacrossthelines/ Hope is an interracial documentary project looking back 50 years o...

Game Changer: Football as a Catalyst for Peaceable School Integration is the first installment in the Hope audio series, commissioned and directed by the Mountain of Hope Organization, supported by the West Virginia Humanities Council and produced by Talking Across the Lines, LLC, www.folktalk.org; www.facebook.com/klinesacrossthelines/ Hope is an interracial documentary project looking back 50 ye...

This is an eight-minute narrative and musical profile of the gas rush in central West Virginia with diverse voices and views produced by Talking Across the Lines on 4-18-14.