Courtesy Hunter Library, Western Carolina University
Muse of the Mountains
John Parris and Western Carolina University Chancellor Harold F. Robinson at the Mountain Heritage Center at WCU, when Parris was the recipient of the 1976 Mountain Heritage Award.
Like countless other North Carolina mountain folks, I grew up reading John Parris’ “Roaming the Mountains” column in the Asheville Citizen-Times. Devoted Parris fans knew they could rely on one of their own, an individual whose exceptional literary gifts melded perfectly with the background of his mountain raising, to capture the folkways and folk wisdom they so cherished. Through more than 7,000 columns and five books based on them, Parris preserved knowledge of a rapidly vanishing way of life. In doing so, the storyteller of the mountains also became its sage. In many senses he was also the savior of treasured mountain traditions.
Early success
A native of Jackson County, John Alvis Parris Jr. was born prematurely, so small at birth that a shoebox lined with cotton wool served as his crib. He grew up in Sylva and attended public schools there, graduating from high school in 1932 during the depths of the Great Depression. The normal pattern for journalists of his era would have had him then attend college, but not young Johnny. He was already an established journalist.
In his early teens, Parris had begun writing two columns for a county weekly, one dealing with sports and the other with local historical matters. The latter subject area would loom large in his later endeavors. Before finishing high school he had a column titled “Looking Over My Shoulder” in The Ruralite, a newspaper serving Sylva and Jackson County, and periodically his byline appeared in regional and even national newspapers.
His real breakthrough came at the age of 16, when he wrote a story about Albert Teaster, a Holiness preacher living on nearby Cullowhee Mountain who let a rattlesnake bite him as a test of faith. It was an above-the-fold, front-page piece in newspapers across the country. Demands for follow-up material flowed in, and Teaster refused to speak with anyone but the local boy. As a result, Parris was offered a job by United Press, and on his 17th birthday he went to work for them in Raleigh as the nation’s youngest press association reporter.
For the next two decades, Parris lived a peripatetic existence while honing his journalistic skills. After covering state politics for two years, UP transferred him to New York and gave him a nationally syndicated human-interest column. A dizzying array of transfers and job changes ensued until 1941, when he set sail for Europe with an assignment to cover diplomatic affairs from London with special emphasis on European governments in exile.
This would be the core of his work for the next six years. In vintage Parris fashion, he later described the experience: “(I) played Cupid to a king, sipped brandy with Winston Churchill, counted the royalty of Europe—kings and queens, lords and ladies—among (my) friends, played Santa Claus to the cockneys of Lambeth Walk, traded stories with George Bernard Shaw, witnessed the burning of the City of London, and scooped the world on Wally Simpson’s trousseau.”
During those hectic years of World War II he lived through the blitz, witnessed the invasion of North Africa, was the only journalist allowed to attend the wedding of King Peter of Yugoslavia and Princess Alexandra of Greece, and received Belgium’s highest award, the Chevalier of the Order of Leopold II. His byline appeared several times weekly in U. S. newspapers and overseas, and in concert with other journalists he wrote Springboard to Berlin, recounting experiences connected with North Africa. All this time, the banked fires of his love for the mountains burned deep in his soul.
Courtesy Hunter Library, Western Carolina University
Muse of the Mountains
John Parris.
Coming home
At war’s end, Parris left UP and went to work for the rival Associated Press, first in their London Bureau and then covering the United Nations organizational conference in San Francisco. During this period he also met and married Dorothy Luxton Klenk. Marriage and the 1947 death of his father proved major landmarks in the mountain boy’s life. As he later wrote, despite growing fame, to home folks he remained “Johnny Parris, born and raised in Sylva”—and he was homesick.
The wandering mountain lad came home for good shortly after his father’s passing, initially traveling the freelancer’s road, crafting articles for newspapers and magazines along with writing a short history of the Cherokee people, The Cherokee Story, for the newly founded Cherokee Historical Association. Soon thereafter he began working as director of public relations for the association and its recently launched drama “Unto These Hills.”
Parris worked for Cherokee some five years. Then early in 1955 he began the job for which he was ideally suited. A former boss at AP, Robert Bunnelle, had become publisher of the Asheville Citizen-Times. Eager to improve circulation, he decided to expand its regional voice and asked Parris to “roam the mountains and tell the story of the region in terms of what it was like then and now.”
Courtesy Jackson County Genealogical Society
Muse of the Mountains
John and Dorothy Parris.
Finding his voice
For the next 42 years, John Parris roamed. Bunnelle shrewdly recognized that for Parris “the grandeur of The Mall in London and the sparkle of the Seine and its environs never quite came up to the grandeur of the Nantahala Gorge and the sparkle of the Tuckaseigee River.” The global traveler had returned to the place of his roots for good.
As any careful analysis of his columns soon reveals, Parris had wide interests. Among favorite subjects were food lore, holiday traditions, mountain crafts, fishing and hunting, the Cherokee, music, local history, regional idiom, mysteries, ghosts, and distinctive personalities. He utilized some people repeatedly because they were colorful characters and born storytellers, with deep knowledge of high-country people, places and perspectives.
His short, sprightly, and skillfully crafted columns became a window into traditional mountain ways. Time spent with his maternal grandfather, William Tallent, known as “the old man of a thousand tales,” suggested to Parris a writing approach he appropriately described as “folksay.” He had a reporter’s knack for being a good listener and for eliciting information with the right questions. Few outlanders could have accomplished what he did, no matter their skills, because they would never have been able to get taciturn mountain folks to open up. With Parris, they recognized one of their own, relaxed, and talked with a will.
Parris employed stylistic tricks which make his words sing. At times his columns are so lyrical they pass for poetry. He embraces a subject and, in one colorful sentence after another, paints a verbal picture. A splendid example is “The Typical Hill Man Is a Myth.” Parris offers distinctive characteristics of mountaineers in a fashion providing real insight on a special breed.
He’s the hero of a thousand stories and a thousand legends.
He’s got hayseed in his hair but is sharp as a briar.
He’s a distinguished gentleman with calluses on his hands.
He’s thrifty as a squirrel but he will give until it hurts if he agrees the cause is good.
He walks tall and he tells tall tales.
He’s a man who fears the law but does not always respect it.
He’s a sparkin’ fool with the ladies, a defender of womanhood.
He’s a man quick to anger, but he speaks softly.
October may well be the most magical of months in the mountains, and Parris knew how to sing the praises of golden hickories and scarlet sumac serving as sentinels of fall. To him, “October whistles a soft melody as old as autumn on this earth,” and in “The Sweet Season” the bard of the Balsams gives verbal beauty to that melody.
The sweet season is upon the land.
The hills are full of wine and gold.
The mountain streams flow quiet and cold.
Frosty asters are like a smoke upon the hills.
Morning glories twine around the corn.
The days grow shorter, the shadows grow longer.
The stars ride in on the wings of dusk.
The corn is shocked, the molasses made, the cider jugged.
The kraut is in the crock and the apples are in the bin.
The frosts walk the hills, the persimmons ripen, the buckeyes fall.
As October whistles a soft melody, autumn begins to creep away in moccasins woven of milkweed floss.
If those words don’t stir your soul and evoke fall’s fullness, you’ve got a cocklebur in your character.
Management at the Asheville Citizen-Times soon recognized that Parris’ columns merited compilation in anthologies. As a result, five such books appeared over the years—Roaming the Mountains (1955), My Mountains, My People (1957), Mountain Bred (1967), These Storied Mountains (1972), and Mountain Cooking (1982). His wife illustrated all five books with attractive little sketches of mountain wildflowers. Their material comprises but a tiny percentage of Parris columns and, strangely, many columns appear in more than one book. Since he did not retire until 1997, obviously nothing from his final 15 years was included. (It seems high time someone produced a book—or several—with a title such as “The Lost Classics of John Parris.”)
His literary influence went deeper than Parris likely ever realized. Residents of the region loved his columns, and I suspect I’m but one of a legion enchanted by them. Unquestionably they influenced other communicators—prolific Bob Terrell, Bob Plott, popular blogger Tipper Pressley, the managing editor of this magazine, and the present writer among them. Parris was the face of the Asheville Citizen-Times for decades, and eager readers awaited the appearance of each new “Roaming the Mountains” installment, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Reg Moody Sr., a good friend of Parris and fellow Jackson Countian, fondly recalls how Parris periodically showed up to “gift” him. He would have some token, invariably connected with the mountains, he’d present: “I thought this is something you might like.” Moody fondly recalls how important mountain ways were to Parris, saying “he was tremendously proud of his heritage.” In daily life, Parris clung to that heritage like beggar lice seeds sticking to a cotton shirt. Living in a 150-year-old farmhouse situated far back in a hollow gave him a sense of linkage with the past, a feeling of oneness with pioneering folks. Those were things he held in highest esteem.
Over the course of a long, highly productive literary career, Parris won numerous accolades—the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Award, the North Carolina Folklore Association Award, the inaugural Mountain Heritage Award, an Appalachian Consortium Award, and Western Carolina University’s first ever honorary doctorate. He was included in a 1971 book, 100 Years—100 Men, recognizing the most influential Tar Heels from the previous century. The entry on Parris, written by Thomas Wolfe’s sister, reads: “He always presents our people in a favorable light, a people of great dignity and simplicity of character; he describes vividly the manifold beauties of our wonderful mountain region; he ferrets out and records for posterity the bold stories, traditions, and legends which without his labor of love, would have been lost for all time.”
His work in preserving mountain tales and traditions ensured that John Parris made his mark in deep, lasting fashion, and he took steps to see that the things which mattered most to him would endure. He and Dorothy had no children but in many ways adopted nearby WCU as family. Longtime donors to the institution, they no doubt discussed dispensation of their estate prior to her death in 1995. After their deaths an endowment creating the John A. Parris Jr. and Dorothy Luxton Parris Distinguished Professorship in Appalachian Cultural Studies at WCU was announced. A donation of a half-million dollars from their estate, with matching funds from the state of North Carolina and the C. D. Spangler Foundation, made it possible. Soon afterward, nationally renowned writer Ron Rash was announced as the first WCU Parris Distinguished Professor.
Parris also left memorabilia, his personal papers, and other items to WCU. These included numerous handicrafts from mountain hands, his father’s set of watch-making tools, vintage photographs, and more. A press release from the time says he had collected “a wide range of unique source materials, including manuscripts, correspondence, pamphlets, booklets, reports, photographs and sound recordings.” Those materials have now been cataloged and are available to researchers.
Soon after launching his “Roaming the Mountains” column, John Parris said he had “the best newspaper assignment in the world.” Over the course of thousands of columns and untold “sit-and-whittle” hours listening to the folks he warmly described as “my people,” his opinion never changed. Anyone who delves into Parris’ writings has to reckon that he fulfilled that assignment wonderfully well. He was as much a mountain treasure as a sparkling sapphire or emerald from Macon County, or a speckled trout bedecked in ruby spots from a high-altitude Smokies’ stream. He sang songs of people and places in the Blacks and Plott Balsams, the Nantahalas and the Unicois, and most of all the Smokies, with the sure, pure voice of a son of the hills. His literary legacy is as timeless as the ancient mountains we call the Appalachians. As the headline to the announcement of Parris’ retirement by the executive editor of the Asheville Citizen-Times stated, he was “simply irreplaceable.”
About the author: To order Jim Casada’s latest book, A Smoky Mountain Boyhood, or to sign up for his free monthly newsletter, visit jimcasadaoutdoors.com.