Part 1. Harlan County, U.S.A.

Class War with Musical Accompaniment: Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)

The protracted historical disintegration of most authentically popular forms of American working class culture in the face of expansive cultural industrial subsumption marks out those peripheral cultural movements that have actually managed to retain an oppositional character as truly exceptional in the precise sense of the term. Most of these movements in recent decades have been tied to the experiences and liberation struggles of nations and otherwise racialized peoples—one can think in the 1960s and 1970s of the flowerings of Black, Chicano, and Asian American arts—as well as to radical women’s and queer cultures that were for the most part concretely proletarian in economic terms (and often politically so in self-conception). Amongst the diverse cultural fronts during this radical postwar period, however, there is a notable anomaly, significant for its articulation of a regional traditionalism reflecting a particular, subaltern formation of U.S. whiteness: the persistence in Appalachia of white proletarian cultural forms, which harkens back explicitly to the revolutionary unionism of the interwar years and beyond.

Appalachia, the rugged, landlocked region snaking through the eastern United States along the 2400 km mountain and valley system for which it is named, extends, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission, from southern New York all the way down to northeastern Mississippi. In the public imagination, however, it is primarily the states of Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia that constitute the heart of Old Appalachia as a cultural region. The focus on these particular states is determined to a large degree by the local dominance of resource extraction and heavy industry, namely coal mining and iron ore processing, which in turn frames the image of Appalachian rural life as being entirely one of extreme poverty, desperation, and illiberal backwardness. At worst, unadulterated and contemptible white trash, “failed” whiteness undeserving of its ostensible racial distinction; at best, a hardscrabble anthropological curiosity, or, as Grace Elizabeth Hale explains this fetish, “a reservoir of primitive and authentic culture” (2017, p. 14). This discrimination heaped on Appalachians by many urban middle-class whites is in reality largely an ideological expression of the core-periphery asymmetry (Nyden, 1979; Perry, 1982) that has systemically underdeveloped the region since at least the end of Reconstruction. This is the period during which “[t]he Deep South and Appalachia were penetrated by Northern capital”, resulting in what sociologist Paul J. Nyden (1979) terms an “[internal] colonial relationship” (p. 33). Nyden summarizes,

When one […] examines the social and economic structure of society in West Virginia and Central Appalachia, the image of the region as a colony is strengthened. The area’s colonial status is highlighted by looking at the following: 1) the particularly exploitative and brutal nature of the capitalists dominant in central Appalachia and the company-town system they created, 2) industrial underdevelopment based on the extraction of raw materials in the one-industry economy predominant in so much of the region, 3) absentee ownership of natural resources and land, and resulting absentee control over capital investment, 4) corrupt politics, 5) regressive taxation, 6) poor educational systems, 7) inadequate social and cultural services, 8) the negative identity ascribed to Appalachians, which is so often used to “explain” the region’s poverty and underdevelopment, 9) outmigration from the region, similar to the migrations of Black people from the Deep South to the North and West or to the migration of Puerto Rican people from the island to the mainland, and 10) the nature of popular resistance to this exploitation. (p. 34; emphasis added) 

It is this regional isolation and history of popular resistance on the part of the predominantly rural "white working class"--if we can excuse the expression--of Appalachia that provided the basis on which the region’s folk and hymnal music was taken up during the rank-and-file miners’ struggles of the 1970s as, in Stuart Hall’s (1998) words, “cultural expressions register[ing] for socialism, […] linked as the practices, the forms and organisation of a living struggle, which [have] succeeded in appropriating those symbols and giving them a socialist connotation” (p. 452).    

Midway through Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976), director Barbara Kopple's ground-level documentary about the prolonged and violent 1972-1973 Brookside coal miners’ strike, Kopple captures the elderly Harlan resident and community leader Florence Reece singing for a United Mine Workers of America (UMW) rally in Brookside, Kentucky the famous union standard “Which Side Are You On?”, which she wrote in 1932 during the Bloody Harlan Coal War. Despite her age, small stature, and the frailty of her voice, Reece clearly commands the attention of the camera and the union crowd, who are shown in reverse shots before the performance loudly cheering her speech and during the song singing along in respectful awe. As a living reminder of the Coal Wars experience, and as a vernacular and participatory cultural production (the tune is taken from an old Baptist hymn), the unadorned performance of Reece’s song affectively binds the miners and their supporters—and, by extension, the film’s viewers—together in solidarity through the formal charge of the repeated titular question. Reece figuratively forcing the listener's moment of political decision between the workers and coal operators, emphasizing the subjective dimension of class consciousness (that is, class interest and political will) in excess of  the basic fact of working class belonging as the non-ownership of property and the necessity of selling one’s labour-power. (She says in preface to the song, “I can’t sing very well, but you can ask the scabs and the gun thugs which side they’re on, because they’re workers too.”) 

Kopple fixes in on Reece for two choruses and verses, allowing almost no other sounds to appear in the track, until the second verse when the Harlan elder sings: “They say in Harlan County / There are no neutrals there / You’ll either be a union man / Or a thug for J. H. Blair.” At the conclusion of the verse, Kopple smash cuts from the close-up on Reece directly to the immediate aftermath of a picket line confrontation. The camera operator scrambles to clearly frame the strikers and their wives in a medium-wide shot as they in turn frantically attempt to explain to the camera what has just taken place outside of the camera's gaze: for the first time, a company man has pulled a gun on them in broad daylight. It will not be the last, but this scene is exemplary of the film as a whole, insofar as the audience is asked to consider the verbal testimony of poor rural Kentuckians as evidence of actuality, as “experts” by virtue of their experience of class struggle whose speech Kopple grants the representational equivalent of her own camera’s images. Against the short-sighted adage that cinema ought be a matter of showing, not telling, the absence of visible evidence, of both the coal wars of the past and the present threat, here becomes an opportunity for the democratization of narrative authority. The cut from one scene (and one speaker) to the next is sharp and abrupt, but there is an undeniable continuity of purpose.

            Although Reece's song as an instance of diegetic musical commentary is relatively unique within the scope of the film, Harlan County, U.S.A. is nevertheless filled from beginning to end with what could best be described as narrative balladry.[1] The non-diegetic soundtrack lyrically contours itself to the movement of the strike narrative, interweaving with the filmmakers’ interactions and interviews with the on-screen subjects. The songs are a combination of older standards and more contemporary tunes, often with verses added or changed to lyrically carry on the labour struggle narratives of yesteryear and emphasize generational and historical continuity within a shared place. A number like “Which Side Are You On?”, which is repeated multiple times with updated verses, conveys a sophisticated dialectical movement between didacticism and reflexivity through the phrasing of its central refrain as a question directed to the audience; the affective charge it creates in the viewer is thus inseparable from its estrangement effect. Harlan County, U.S.A., though essentially realist in the common sense of the term, here testifies to and makes good on Bertolt Brecht’s claim that “[r]ealism [as a normative aesthetic] is not a mere question of form” and that because “[r]eality changes […] modes of representation must also change” (1977, p. 82). Hale argues of the film’s music that, in tension with the stereotypical images of dilapidated buildings and soot-smeared faces trapped temporally in a permanent Depression, images which Kopple cannot help but tarry with as a documenter of the extreme poverty and underdevelopment before her camera,

the repetition of songs and stories and other sounds in the film also suggests the opposite, that time does matter and all these pasts and these people who cannot quite get a firm purchase on the present are […] not going to disappear and thus must have a future. (2017, p. 28)

            Although Kopple’s voice appears in diegetic conversation at certain moments, it is these songs that do most of the rhetorical work in lieu of authoritative or auteurist voice-over; more importantly, they do so through the actual voices of the Harlan community. In a 1977 interview with the socialist magazine Radical America, Kopple notes, “All of the music in the film, except Merle Travis’s ‘Dark as a Dungeon’ [which plays during the opening montage], was written by miners, miners’ wives, and their daughters” (Pellet, 1977, p. 39). As part of the diegetic content expressed through the formal procedures that Hale identifies as emphasizing the theme of life's historical continuity, it is actually a handful of the women who come most clearly into focus as characters on the side of the union. The workers’ and wives’ strategy meetings, which as spaces of debate take on a secondary narrative and political expository functions, are more often than not dominated by the voices of women like Lois Scott, who can be heard in one scene excoriating a group of men and women for failing to join an early morning picket. In a later sequence, after the strike breakers have escalated from threats to actually firing on the picketers, she is shown pulling a loaded handgun from her bra to the shock and wonder of her fellow women. Most of the women interviewed by Kopple actually identify their own class identities, their socially reproductive labour, their roles as mothers and wives, with the mine and with the union. This is not represented by the film as a failure of feminist analysis or imagination on their part; on the contrary, the circuits that connect productive and reproductive labour are taken as given, and thus solidarity with the miners is understood as expressions of advanced women's and class consciousness.

            As E. Ann Kaplan (1977) among others have noted, Harlan County, U.S.A. bears a striking narrative resemblance to Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1954), perhaps the most famous fictional radical labour film in American cinema, and certainly the most famous of the McCarthy era. In the earlier film, a miners’ strike of mostly Chicano workers is caught in a legal bind after a Taft-Hartley Act injunction makes it illegal for the employees to picket the work site. To continue the strike, the women of the community band together to hold the line while their husbands take on the responsibilities of providing reproductive and domestic labour. Salt of the Earth is thus a sophisticated political melodrama of the highest order, directly problematizing the gendered, racial, and class coding of the domestic/unwaged and waged labour spheres via a highly charged narrative and emotional affective-mimetic register. Although the women of Harlan rarely articulate their political or social responsibilities in the familiar language of ‘70s feminism—bodily autonomy, the critique of unwaged labour, the politicization of personal life, et al.—the explicit intertext Harlan County, U.S.A. makes with Salt of the Earth, in conjunction with way that Kopple films the women collectively in their homes discussing their families and the strike, serves to underline the awareness of the dialectical interdependence of production and reproduction already implicit in the women’s unionist stances.

            Harlan County, U.S.A. won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1977, and in 2006 was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, which is as close to a de facto canon as exists in contemporary film distribution. That the film has been heralded as a pillar of American documentary is in one sense heartening, but it also marks a gap between the concrete gains achieved by the actual production and the retrospective (and even some contemporary) appreciations of the textual document, the latter of which is clearly invested as much if not more so in fetishistic appreciation of Appalachian culture’s so-called authenticity, or even the historical novelty of the industrial labour movement, as it is in “any radical commitment to social change” (Hale, 2017, p. 17). This popularity, therefore, ironically underlines and reinforces the internal or semi-colonial separateness of Appalachian culture from the rest of the U.S. In this particular case, I argue it was the very act of filming that demonstrated the greatest concrete solidarity possible for the filmmakers as artist-intellectuals and outsiders. “I guess we kept down a lot of the violence by being on the picket line,” Kopple acknowledges in the Radical America interview. “Even if we didn’t have any film we would go out there and pretend to be filming” (Pellet, 1977, p. 37). And after completing post-production, she continues,

I left [the Brookside miners] a print, a projector, plus rewinds and materials they would need to clean and repair the film. It’s being shown all over the coal fields. Miners and their wives are going around as speakers with the film. They’re using it for study groups to raise consciousness—and funds. It’s bringing the people in the coal fields together. (p. 40)

Here in local distribution through UMW organizational networks, immeasurably more so than at the New York Film Festival where Harlan County, U.S.A. received its premiere, was the pedagogical structure of the screening experience such that the problematics of counterpublic formation and political organization could be raised in a practical sense: what does the film signify and whom is it really for? 

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[1] Hale (2017, pp. 12-20) provides an excellent historical contextualization of Kopple’s use of folk music, highlighting the anthropological obsession since the turn of the 20^th century with music as an avatar of Appalachian culture and pre-modern "authenticity." This external, often academic interest was expressed early on in practices like song catching (recording music that existed principally or exclusively as oral or performance tradition), and later expanded into visual documentation and similar archival projects during the Depression, followed still by the explosion of documentary film interest in Appalachia and the Deep South beginning in the 1960s.

Works Cited

Hale, G. E. (2017). Documentary noise: The soundscape of Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, U.S.A.. Southern Cultures 23(1), 10-32. doi:10.1353/scu.2017.0002

Hall, S. (1998). Notes on deconstructing 'the popular'. In J. Storey (Ed.), Cultural theory and popular culture: A reader (pp. 442-453). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Kaplan, E. A. (1977). Harlan County, USA: The documentary form. Jump Cut 15, 11-12. Retrieved from https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC15folder/HarlanCounty.html

Nyden, P. J. (1979). An internal colony: Labor conflict and capitalism in Appalachian coal. Critical Sociology 8(4), 33-43. doi:10.1177/089692057900800403

Pellett, G. (1977). The making of Harlan County, U.S.A.: An interview with Barbara Kopple. Radical America 11(2), 33-44. Retrieved from
https://libcom.org/files/Rad%20America%20V11%20I2.pdf

Perry, C. S. (1982). Coal production and socioeconomic development in southern Appalachia: The case of eastern Kentucky. Social Indicators Research 11(2), pp. 193-205. doi:10.1007/BF00302749