DOCUMENTARY SERIES
APPALACHIAN HOLLER is a raw and intimate documentary series from Appalachia — told through the people, places, and songs that keep its spirit alive.
New episodes keep coming — pretty regular.
A wandering musician plays a ballad older than anyone who still sings it. Between the dulcimer and the ridgelines, archival images from 1940 — a tune that has outlived every hand that carried it.
Charlotte is one of seventeen children and catches rainwater in barrels at home. In rural Virginia, she runs the only store for miles, and the valley comes to her: to trade, to rest, to hear who else has been in.
The grave is still out on Highway 268, fifteen miles from town. On Friday nights in Wilkesboro, old-time musicians gather to pick and sing the ballad of Tom Dooley — and between songs, they tell what happened that night in 1866, over moonshine, guitars, and three hundred years of white liquor.
A bowling alley, a movie theater, a car dealership, a bank. All of it stood here once, and the sewer still runs in the creek. What the mines left behind is not ruins but a slow, ordinary quiet.
A man could be replaced. A mule had to be bought. In the coal camps the company owned the house, the wages, and the store where the wages went — and underground, the animals were worth protecting.
Mike lives off-grid with a few animals and a fiddle. He plays where the bow presses hard enough that the note nearly breaks — the sound he first felt holding an old man's arm, wanting to know how much force it took.
After the tornado, two rainbows touched the roofs. One man reads that as proof the Lord was watching. His uncle, who once played gospel and bluegrass in church bands, has stopped believing altogether — same blood, same holler, two different skies.
Herman is closing the shop he ran for years. He explains what a gun means where the nearest help is twenty-five minutes out, then turns the argument around: it is the person behind the gun, he says, and the person behind the camera.
A couple of strings and a box to make noise. The dulcimer Lyle Rickards plays is built from barn wood, wormholes and all. When he plays "Little Pink“, the old tune feels less performed than uncovered — an instrument he calls native here, though like everything else, it came from somewhere else first.
The coal trucks ran up and down this holler until they didn't. A retired miner describes the friend he watched die underground, gathering house coal to keep his children warm. What came after the mines was not another industry.
He graduated with a 3.8, fell in love with a girl who ran a kitchen bus, and left. Street preachers stop to bless him on a sidewalk in Staunton; he listens, then points out that the man they praise chose that road himself.
They buried Dorthy in the woods, in rain that did not let up. The preacher spends twenty minutes on the crucifixion — the thorns, the whip, the small ledge a dying man pushed against to breathe. Afterwards everybody eats, and the talk turns to chili.
Somebody comes in and says the tractor is out there, key in it, tell so-and-so. Nobody hauls their own trash; whoever is driving takes everyone's. What holds this valley together is not sentiment but necessity — a system of shared work and shared trouble.
A hundred thousand people lived in McDowell county once. The land above ground belongs to the people who stayed; everything beneath it does not, and that is why nothing new gets built. All we own is the surface.
In 1924 a guitar player walked into a Galax barbershop for a haircut and met a barber who played fiddle. A year later, asked in a New York studio what they were called, they answered: just a bunch of hillbillies. The genre took its name from that sentence, and the room lives on as Barr's Fiddle Shop — where strings still get swapped and tunes still pass hand to hand.
Chris Wolford lost his father and his brother to this, and still takes up serpents. He forces no one, tells anyone who asks to count the cost first — and speaks about the needle marks he carried before any of it.
Sick or not sick, you were there. The mines built these towns and emptied them again, and a preacher's son who dropped out of school now cooks burgers. Ralph Hood, who spent decades studying these communities, argues that what outsiders read as poverty is the opposite: a rich tradition, fiercely independent people, and a life rooted in one particular place and no other.
Lyle Rickards grew up on stadium rock and spent years looking for a dulcimer after hearing one. The tune he plays stayed in these families because nothing came in from outside — the music never homogenized, so it kept its edges.
Eight years, one backpack, and clothes cut loose enough that nobody could tell she was a woman. She learned the spoons on freight trains, where tunes pass rider to rider — an instrument that has always belonged to people with nothing else to play, and a sound she carries still, long after she left the rails.
A baptism in a mountain river. A mother who brought her daughter into this faith before the child could weigh it, and a young woman whose earliest memories are of scripture, strictness, and serpents in worship. And men who lift venomous snakes — not for the spectacle, but because they read the Word literally.
APPALACHIAN HOLLER is an ongoing one-person documentary project, running since 2017. One camera, no crew — people talk differently when there is only one person in the room.
Copyright © 2026 Matthias Lawetzky · Alle Rechte vorbehalten. · Who the f**k is BUGIMAN?
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