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Made In The Smokies

by

Kathryn Ray

Kathryn Ray

Kathryn Ray

Rob Howard

Kathryn Ray

Kathryn Ray

ENO photo

Kathryn Ray

Kathryn Ray

Appalatch photo

Kathryn Ray

Kathryn Ray

Kathryn Ray

Kathryn Ray

Kathryn Ray

Kathryn Ray

Bill Crabtree, Jr.

A spirit of craftsmanship has always imbued these mountains. These days, Southern Appalachia’s most innovative artisans and entrepreneurs honor the past and this region while pushing their crafts to new limits.

Instrument Makers

Elizabeth Jayne Henderson ////// EJ Henderson Guitars & Ukuleles

Law school isn’t standard training for a guitar maker. Then again, growing up with Virginia luthier Wayne Henderson as Dad—he who legendarily made Eric Clapton wait ten years for a guitar—isn’t a typical upbringing, either.

Now in her fourth year as a luthier in her own right, Elizabeth Jayne Henderson followed a circuitous path to the workshop: Little girl in the back corner of her dad’s shop. Budding environmental activist at top-rated Vermont Law School. Grant writer at an Asheville nonprofit. 

Looking to raise some funds to help pay off her steep student loan debt, she asked her dad to make a guitar that she could sell. He agreed, with a caveat: She had to make it herself. In the process, she made $25,000 on the finished product—and discovered her artistic calling. 

Not too long after, she quit her day job. In 2012, she officially launched her luthier business under the name EJ Henderson, specializing in smaller-bodied guitars and ukuleles. These days, Henderson receives some 70 orders a year. Her waiting list averages four years. Grammy Award winner Zac Brown held one of her guitars while being interviewed on “CBS Sunday Morning.” One of her earliest guitars was intended as a gift for Doc Watson, who she describes “like a grandfather” to her. Though he passed away before she could finish, the flatpicking legend talked about his excitement for the guitar during his final performance at MerleFest, in 2012.  

Though Henderson is a grateful apprentice, a clone of her father she’s not. For starters, she brandishes a knife with pink polka dots, a purple apron, and a respirator mask with pink filters. More importantly, that environmental law and policy degree of hers influences the most fundamental part of making an instrument—the type of wood she chooses. 

Henderson eschews exotic varieties such as Brazilian rosewood because of their carbon footprint and opts instead for responsibly harvested woods such as oak, ash, walnut, and maple. “You can make an amazing guitar with what you have outside,” she says. “It’s about the way the instrument is made, and the love you put into it.”

She makes all her mother-of-pearl inlays by hand—a rarity in the industry—and creates the inlays for her dad’s instruments, too, such as the guitar that country star Vince Gill played at the Grand Ole Opry. In fact, learning the intricate inlay process is what first hooked Henderson. “I’ve always liked things that are sparkly,” she admits, with a laugh. Her inlays reflect the personality and interests of her customers, which has meant everything from a catfish or a goat to a Robert Frost–inspired acorn. On a ukulele for 11-year-old Tennessee prodigy Emi Sunshine, Henderson inlayed the rising star’s name on the fingerboard, Elvis style.

Another difference between Henderson and her finger-picking dad: She can pluck out a few chords—enough to check the tuning—but brings an artist’s passion to the craft rather than a musician’s ear. In fact, the 30-year-old is as versed in Taylor Swift and John Mayer as Doc Watson, the Harris Brothers, and Conway Twitty.

Even as she blazes her own path, Henderson undeniably roots herself in her father’s tradition. In practice, that means splitting her time between the home she shares with her husband in Asheville and her father’s shop in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia. “If I can use a tool that my dad made, or sleep under the quilt that my granny made, then I’m going to,” she says.

She’s particularly proud of the support she’s received from guitar expert George Gruhn, an old family friend who has run an acclaimed guitar shop in Nashville since 1970. “George told me that the difference with my guitars is that they have a soul.”

For more information, see ejhendersonguitars.com and theluthiersapprentice.blogspot.com. 

Outdoor Gear Builders

Adam Masters ////// Bellyak

A lot of folks tinker, their garages lined with works in progress and failed experiments. Back in 2004, when Adam Masters started playing around with an old kayak, several cans of expandable foam, and some duct tape, the lifelong kayaker was simply looking for a fresh way to ride rapids. In the process, he invented a new sport—and built a pioneering business. 

A Bellyak, as it sounds, is a kayak you ride on your belly, providing as tranquil of a float on flat water as it makes an exciting run on whitewater. The kayak hull acts as an interface between body and water, with an ergonomic, contoured design that lifts the chest. “Lying down to paddle is intuitive, like swimming, so it makes water sports feel really natural,” says Masters, who designs, prototypes, and distributes his unique boats from a warehouse in Weaverville, North Carolina. 

The close connection to the water that’s inherent on a Bellyak “makes small stuff exciting again,” says Masters. “You’re using your hands so you can feel the currents. When I get into my [traditional] kayak now, it feels as if I’m driving a school bus. On a Bellyak, it feels as if you’re flying.”

Tinkering comes naturally to Masters. When his father, Bill Masters, founded Perception Kayaks in the 1970s, he revolutionized the water sports industry as one of the first to use rotational molding to manufacture plastic kayaks. Also in the family arsenal is Uncle Allen Stancil, a longtime kayak designer for Perception and Liquid Logic. With advice from both family patriarchs, the 36-year-old Masters launched Bellyak in the summer of 2012 with two models: the Frequency made for flat-water paddling and the Play built for speed (available in three sizes).

According to Masters, the Bellyak’s lack of a spray skirt and ease of getting on and off has particularly endeared the boat to novice kayakers, women, and kids. The boat’s shape and stability lends itself well to swiftwater rescue situations. And only a couple of months after introducing Bellyak, he received a call from a volunteer with Team River Runner, a program that provides water therapy activities for disabled veterans and injured service members. The Bellyak, it turns out, provides an ideal option for everyone from double amputees and paraplegics to those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. 

“Adaptive sports typically imply a lot of adaptations, but the Bellyak levels the playing field off the shelf,” Masters says. “It’s really easy to slide underneath you and provides a good counterpoint to sitting in a wheelchair all the time. And a traditional kayak, with legs out of sight in a spray skirt and the possibility of flipping over, can be a [trauma] trigger. The Bellyak solves a real need for that segment of the population.”

Last summer, Masters witnessed the transformative power of his creation firsthand while running rapids with a friend, Ian Engle, who he had met at a Colorado conference for adaptive sports. Paralyzed from the waist down since college, Engle remains a thrill seeker at heart. Together a group of Bellyak friends and Engle tackled the Class III rapids of the Pigeon River Gorge in the Smokies. “The boat was the great equalizer. That entire day, nobody else knew that Ian was disabled,” says Masters, who still marvels at the way Engle’s face lit up once he hit the water, his mobility restored while the rest of them scrambled to keep up.

In addition to the Pigeon River Gorge, Masters tests his boats on the French Broad, Ocoee, and Chattooga Rivers. “We’re in the mecca for paddle sports here in the Southern Appalachians,” Masters says. “There are so many beautiful places around here that a boat can take you. I couldn’t imagine being somewhere else.”

For more information, see bellyak.com.

Textile Artists

Marcus Hall ////// Marc Nelson Denim

Marcus Hall doesn’t mind living and working in someone else’s shadow. In fact, that’s all part of his plan. As the designer and founder of Marc Nelson Denim, Hall returned to his native Knoxville after a stint in Los Angeles in order to start his label. He headed straight to East Knoxville, lucking out on a warehouse around the corner from where his great-grandparents once lived. 

The Levi Strauss & Co. plant long anchored this neighborhood and employed Hall’s brothers, cousins, and countless family friends and neighbors. That all changed on a November Monday in 1997, when a voice over the factory’s intercom instructed workers to turn off their sewing machines. Some 1,800 Knoxville employees had lost their jobs; declining demand for American-made denim forced the iconic brand to shutter this factory and 10 others across the country.

Today at the warehouse flagship of Marc Nelson Denim, sewing machines hum and oversize rolls of denim and spools of red, white, and blue thread line the walls. In the retail showroom, pairs of high-end jeans hang on a rack underneath an American flag, a nod to the brand’s made-in-the-U.S.A. mission. A photo of L.C. Nelson, Hall’s natty grandfather and partial namesake to the brand, hangs over the vintage cash register.

As a kid, the burgeoning fashion lover hid his creative side rather than showcase it. “Instead of playing football with my older brother, I was inside the house with my mother, and she was teaching me how to sew,” recalls Hall. Now he speaks as passionately about the joy of taking a piece of fabric through every step of the design and production process as he does about the satisfaction of knowing exactly who sewed on the buttons or attached the rivets to his jeans. 

Customers can know that feeling, too. Folks with a couple of hundred dollars to spend can walk in off the street, have their measurements taken, and hang out for a few hours while a pair of custom jeans are made in front of them. 

“Part of what we’re missing—not just in Knoxville but in America—is people making things with their hands that they can be proud of,” Hall says. He says the influences for his products can be found all throughout the Smokies, from the changing colors in the fall foliage to the designs of Cherokee weavings and the craftsmanship of his grandmother’s quilts. 

Even his denim washes are saturated with regional character—sometimes literally. His whiskey-stained jeans get their amber hue by soaking for 30 days in a barrel of Smooth Rambler artisan whiskey from West Virginia. Hall says the idea came to him in a dream and reminds him of watching his grandfather concoct batches of homemade wine.

More significantly, Hall puts his money where his ideas are. Custom work takes place in-house at the Knoxville shop, while larger scale production happens at a manufacturing plant in Blue Ridge, Georgia, followed by washing at a finishing plant in Winder, Georgia. 

In short: Denim once again thrives in East Knoxville, thanks to Hall. “I moved back here with the goal of hiring some old Levi’s employees and some new people, too, so we could bring production back to this city,” he says. “The satisfaction of establishing a staple building in this neighborhood and creating jobs for this community is amazing.”

This past May, the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce honored Hall with the Minority-Owned Business Excellence Award during its annual black-tie-optional Pinnacle Business Awards Gala. 

For more information, see marcnelsondenim.com. 

Foodstuff Artisans

Joel & Tara Mowrey ////// Smoking J’s Fiery Foods

Planted in neat rows on Joel and Tara Mowrey’s mountain-framed farm in the Hominy Valley of Western North Carolina, some 50,000 pepper plants ripen in the sun. Just be careful which vegetable you bite into—and don’t go looking for a green bell pepper. You won’t find any here. What you will find: bhut jolokia ghost peppers, fatalii peppers, and the Trinidad Moruga scorpion—the world’s hottest chili pepper.

“As a small business, being different is where you have to be,” explains Joel, a horticulturalist for North Carolina State University who grew his family garden into a popular hot sauce company, Smoking J’s Fiery Foods. “It’s hard to compete with mega farms that grow thousands of acres of bell peppers.” At the Mowreys’ farm, jalapeños are left on the stem until they’ve turned red, then smoked. Red bell peppers are harvested and fire-roasted. “We’re always trying to value-add, to do something that requires a little extra effort that not everybody is willing to do.”

When they were fresh out of college, the Mowreys moved to Western North Carolina from Ohio; soon after they bought their 10-acre farm. The first-generation farmers began a business selling rare and unusual trees and shrubs, such as Japanese maples and weeping redbuds. After a few years, as the housing crisis swept the nation and landscaping fell by the wayside, the Mowreys looked to their family garden for a new direction. 

In 2009, around 500 pepper plants fueled Joel’s hobby mission: to replicate and tweak his favorite spicy sauce from the downtown Asheville restaurant Salsa. Ultimately, he added carrots and mangoes—and Smoking J’s signature product, Smoky Mango Habenero Hot Sauce, was born. By 2011, the Mowreys’ little garden plot had expanded to 20,000 plants, a number that has more than doubled today.

With the help of Blue Ridge Food Ventures, a shared-use food processing center housed at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, the Mowreys have learned how to translate recipes perfected on their own stovetop into 80-gallon batches of sauce to be sold commercially.

Mowrey calls Smoking J’s a “slow-growth company” by design. “We try to do the best we can for the land by taking the best care of it we can,” he says. And though the mountains of Southern Appalachia aren’t typically associated with hot peppers, Mowrey calls warm days followed by cool nights an asset. “The variation sweetens up peppers and adds a complexity of flavors,” he says.

Smoking J’s product line consists primarily of mild and medium sauces that emphasize flavor over burn. The company now offers ten hot sauces, four salsas, and four BBQ sauces, including popular flavor collaborations with Highland Brewing Company (Black Mocha Stout) and Asheville Brewing Company (Ninja Porter). In addition, Smoking J’s sells dry seasonings and pepper mash. The addition of their Trinidad Scorpion hot sauce—“an absolute scorcher,” as Mowrey puts it—helps satisfy those “gluttons for punishment” who want their heat to hurt. 

Somewhat ironically, the more painful the pepper’s heat level, the higher the potential for healing. “Capsaicin—the compound found in chili peppers—is very beneficial for your heart and cardiovascular system, and there are cancer-fighting agents, too,” says Joel, who is in talks with Western North Carolina’s nonprofit Bent Creek Institute to possibly create medicinal tinctures from their hot peppers. A few customers already buy Smoking J’s peppers and dry spices in order to concoct their own medicinal powders and pills. “Right now there’s a lot of effort and research going into how to harness capsaicin without the burn. It’s a promising part of the industry.”

For more information, see smokingjsfieryfoods.com. 

Functional Art Crafters

Billie Ruth Sudduth ////// JABOBS

In the foyer inside Billie Ruth Sudduth’s home basket studio in Bakersville, North Carolina, a traditional Appalachian egg basket sits on the bottom shelf of a wooden bookcase. A simple garlic basket hangs to its side. A couple of shelves up, a zigzag basket integrates the Archimedean spiral, a curve named for the ancient Greek mathematician. Rounding out the display is a twined and braided vessel, called the Penland Pottery basket in tribute to Sudduth’s neighbors at the historic craft school up the road. 

It’s a microcosm of Sudduth’s body of work—from traditional and practical to high concept. These baskets find themselves as at home in the mountains as in the homes of NASA and MIT scientists. 

Even the garlic basket appears worthy of a museum pedestal. And for good reason: The 70-year-old artist’s baskets have appeared in esteemed collections such as the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Art and Design in New York City; and the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte. “I make baskets to hold your interest, not your objects,” says Sudduth, who was named a North Carolina Living Treasure for craft excellence in 1997. Her copyrighted holiday ornament, an eight-point woven design she calls the Carolina Snowflake, has hung on three White House trees and appeared on HGTV, PBS, and QVC. 

But here at Sudduth’s studio on a quiet mountain lane, there are no signs of pretension. In her workshop, reed splints hang over a door to dry. Outside, a red garbage can holds homemade dye made of crushed walnut hulls. Even her business name, JABOBS—Just a Bunch of Baskets—seems to imply a shoulder shrug over all the fuss.

In the foyer, Sudduth pulls an overstuffed black binder off another bookshelf and starts flipping through the yellowed pages. “I think basket-making has been a way for me to make a living with my compulsiveness,” she says, running her index finger over this handwritten log of every basket she’s made and sold over the past 33 years—all 10,300 and counting. “I raised two boys, so there was no order. But I know everything there is to know about my baskets.”

Though her work spans a wide spectrum, Sudduth has distinguished herself most in the numerical concepts explored by her weaving style. “From the beginning, I approached basket-making mathematically, with all the parallels and perpendiculars,” she explains. “I started playing with sequences—over one, under one, over two, under three.” 

While she was showing some twill work at a craft show in Atlanta in the 1980s, a man pointed out the similarity of her progression with the Fibonacci sequence, a numerical series that occurs throughout nature such as in the arrangement of leaves on a stem or the scales of a pine cone. “I said to him, what’s that? I was doing it intuitively because of its rhythm, and because it looked good. Subliminally I think I was imitating all the ratios that were occurring in my environment.”

That man soon became a collector and also sent Sudduth books on the 13th-century Italian mathematician who discovered the sequence. “Once I really learned what I was doing, I could take it to the next level,” says Sudduth, who sells her Fibonacci-inspired baskets for upwards of $3,000. A few years ago, a fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council allowed her to explore ways to integrate chaos theory into her work.

Not bad for a former school psychologist. In 1983, after her boss urged her to do something fun over the summer, Sudduth signed up for a basket-making class at the local community college. The class cost $20 and lasted four Mondays. “I was there 15 minutes, and it was an epiphany,” she recalls. “The rhythm of making baskets is like playing music—you can’t hear my music, but you can see it.” 

In the decades since her humble beginning, she has earned a following that has grown to include the likes of stock brokers, university presidents, and the publisher of the New York Times. Part of her delight is changing perceptions of what—and who—a craft artist can be. “Most people think of a little old lady living in the mountains making baskets as toothless,” she says, laughing. “But then they meet me, and I can carry on a conversation about [mathematician Benoit] Mandelbrot and chaos theory.”

For more information, see brsbasket.com. 

Where to Buy Handcrafted Goods Made Here

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