‘Let the Mountain People Tell Their Own Stories’

The world of cultural research in the Great Smoky Mountains lost one of its foremost scholars with the passing of Dr. Michael Montgomery, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina, on July 24, 2019. Montgomery taught English linguistics for nearly 20 years before retiring. His specialty was the study of the language and culture of the people of the southern Appalachian Mountains, with a particular emphasis on the residents of the pre-national park Smokies.

I first spoke to Montgomery by phone in November of 1995. I’d gotten his phone number from a supervisory park ranger in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with whom I’d visited in his office regarding a book I was writing called Old Smoky Mountain Days. My research was focused on the writings of Horace Kephart, Joseph S. Hall, and Harvey Broome, three 20th century writers on the people and places of the Smokies. The ranger and I chatted for a while about my project, and then he leaned forward, looked me in the eye, and said, “You know, if you’re going to write anything about Joseph S. Hall, you’ve got to talk to Dr. Michael Montgomery, the authority on Hall and his pioneering work in the Smokies.”

I knew something of Montgomery’s work in documenting the connection between southern Appalachian English and the British Isles, so a day or two later I made a call to him. I didn’t know how he, a respected professor, would respond to an unsolicited phone call. I half-expected to hear an arrogant professor dismiss my call as a waste of time, all in a stentorian voice. But Montgomery answered the call in a pleasant tone, and, far from being a boorish bully, he seemed interested in what I was doing. I told him of my interest in the work and writings of Hall, and he graciously gave me his time.

We chatted for about half an hour. Montgomery said he was also fascinated by the extremely important work which Joseph Sargent Hall performed in the Smoky Mountains as a folklorist and linguist from 1937 onward. Over his years in the Smokies, Hall had interviewed and audio-taped well over 100 Smoky Mountain people who either still lived in the newly established Great Smoky Mountains National Park or in the general vicinity.

Montgomery mentioned that Hall’s field notes and his audio recordings—made on battery powered tape recorders—along with the glossary of Smoky Mountain words and phrases that he later composed based upon his field work, were extremely important contributions to the cultural knowledge about the hill people of the Great Smokies. Montgomery said he had communicated with Hall by mail and phone from the late 1980s up until Halls’ death, and had even traveled to California where Hall lived to meet him and review his research. In 1990, two years before Hall’s death, he gave Dr. Montgomery formal access to his entire Smoky Mountain research and his glossary. Montgomery said he had been extremely honored by Hall’s action, and was personally using Hall’s pioneering research, along with his own, to compose a dictionary of Smoky Mountain speech. He said it was a “big” project which would take years to complete, but he was working on it diligently.

During our first phone conversation, Montgomery also said he would mail me some of his own writings on Hall and the language and customs of the Smoky Mountaineers, and he gave me the phone number and address of Hall’s surviving sister, Helen, who lived in Virginia, so that I could also contact her for information and permission to use his work.

Montgomery and I had a couple more phone calls not long thereafter. In our final conversation I asked if he would be so kind as to provide a summation of Hall’s work in the Smokies which I could quote in my book. He said “Yes,” then paused for a moment, and said: “Joseph S. Hall was the pioneer researcher of the speech and culture of the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina.” Coming from such a respected professor, that was high praise, indeed.

I finished my research and the next year my book was published. With that accomplished, I didn’t have occasion to call Montgomery thereafter, but I did see that his “big” project came to fruition when his Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2004. Even though Hall had died in 1992, Montgomery listed him as the posthumous co-author of his dictionary, a very gracious and professional thing to do.

The last time I talked to Montgomery was in the summer of 2008 when he visited the Smokies’ library at Sugarlands Visitor Center, where I worked as a park ranger. I heard that he was in the building doing research, so I sought him out and introduced myself, telling him about our prior phone conversations. He looked like the professor I imagined, with very thick eyeglasses and a proper professorial voice. But he appeared somewhat frail and stooped-over, surprisingly, since he was only in his late fifties at the time. He also used a cane to walk about the visitor center.

I made a point to eat lunch with him that day in the small employee break room, and we talked about some things we were working on. I told him I’d written another book about the geologic rock features of the Big South Fork area on the Cumberland Plateau along the Tennessee/Kentucky border. He raised his eyebrows at this and said he was working on enlarging his Smoky Mountain dictionary to include other parts of the southern highlands. He asked me about cultural researchers in the Big South Fork area, and I provided several sources. He said he hoped he could travel to that area on research trips, although he mentioned that his eyesight had deteriorated and he couldn’t drive a vehicle. But then his eyes beamed behind those thick spectacles and an impish smile crossed his face, and he said he hoped that he could get the field research on other areas of the southern mountains done for his new project, and that he planned on giving it his best shot.

Later that afternoon after lunch, the librarian for the Smokies came to my office and asked if I could drive Montgomery to his lodging at the Gatlinburg Inn, where he always liked to stay when he was in the area. The librarian had picked him up that morning and brought him to the center, but she had to go elsewhere after work. I told her I’d be glad to drive him to his lodging.

So around 5 p.m., I loaded up a box of research materials that Montgomery had checked out of the library and escorted him to my car. At the Gatlinburg Inn, we entered the lobby and Mrs. Wilma Maples, the owner, hailed Montgomery from her rocking chair where she sat and knitted most every afternoon, saying, “Hello, Michael!”

I helped Montgomery to his room on the first floor and put his box of research on his nightstand. He then asked if I would like to join him for supper at a seafood restaurant within walking distance. I said it would be my honor, and called my wife to let her know I’d be arriving home later on.

We walked back through the lobby and slowly ambled outside to the sidewalk that led to the restaurant. I remember he asked if he could hold on to my arm as we walked through the throngs of summer visitors on the sidewalks of Gatlinburg, since he didn’t see very well. We had a pleasant dinner and talked about the Smokies and the mountain people of the past, and about his work.

Montgomery mentioned that he grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and had become particularly fascinated with the language of the East Tennessee hill people, and especially that of the Smoky Mountain folk. He said he had even traveled to the British Isles in the past to document similarities of language, song, and folklife between the Smokies and that part of the world. He said his field work in Britain had led him to document a real connection between the folklife and culture of the Ulster region of Northern Ireland and that of the Smokies.

We finished supper and Montgomery said he needed to get back to his room to survey the materials he’d found at the park library, so we walked back to the inn. As I watched him slowly walk down the hotel corridor to his room, stooped over and using his cane, I have to admit that I felt sorry for him due to his physical condition. But I also thought that I was very privileged to be able to spend a day with this important chronicler of the people of the Smoky Mountains. I realized then that Dr. Michael Montgomery, through his long-time study of the language and culture of the Smoky Mountaineers, had truly accomplished in his work just what researcher Joseph S. Hall had earlier stated as his own goal when he penned the following advice: “Let the mountain people tell their own stories.” Both Joseph S. Hall and Michael Montgomery had done just that in their important research on the people of the Great Smoky Mountains.