and I do love the subtitle but the book, mostly, was of such a skewed perspective as to not be worth reading.

What perspective? Liberal with a capital L Democrat Socialist Progressive perspective. Anything that might smack of, oh, conservative values (like music) was given amazingly short shrift, and anything that smacked of a progressive political perspective was declared to be “appalachian” even when the people he was profiling didn’t live in the mountains more than minutes (like most of his abolitionists . . . while he totally ignores the pro-South perspective that was and still is here which totally ignorant people please note—a pro-South perspective is not pro-slavery).

At least he did a decent job with the Wautaugans (even if he calls them by the wrong name) and the Over-Mountain Men who basically won the revolution for the Patriots. But that story was already well established for him to draw from . . . and his telling isn’t a really compelling one even at that.

sigh.