Hippie Jack: The Writing
Early on Hippie started to try to capture in words the hill country life he was also capturing in photography. Turns out, he’s a pretty damn good writer, too. Enjoy.
Excerpt from Hippie Jack's "Moving to the River"
Most of us were fatherless or motherless or both. Few had big loving families holding down the fort in some middle class refuge. Hard core dropout hippies running from as much as towards. Either by coincidence or design we landed in a place with surrogate grandparents. And though the old folks had been there forever, we were the same. As our society's political philosophies changed, we all stayed the same. We cooked on wood stoves, canned our sauce and juice. We filled our trucks with firewood for heat, and we filled them with manure for the garden. It was all a political act.
Benton Lee Hammock
He was raised way up in Copeland Cove. One of six children born to Judge and Willie Pearl Hammock. His sister Katie told me he was always full of mischief and fire. Quick to avoid certain chores and charming enough to escape punishment. This account of his childhood confirmed the adult I knew. Avery
us. Firstborn child of Jack and Lynne. I never called her Lynne . . . . She’d been Munch almost since the day I met her. It was a nickname that might have been lost had her mother not hated it so. Munch, short for Munchkin, meaning small and such. We were living in the log cabin on Highland Mountain with an outhouse and water on a rope. We heated with a wood fireplace and pretty much adopted the old ways. We did have a phone, a party line complete with a real old woman who not only listened, she included herself in our conversations. Claude Ramsey
The poni
es were gone. Escaped in search of a better deal. No longer held captive by the wrong minded city hippies prone to singing and reading Mother Earth News. Our magazine money would have been better spent on hay and fencing. They weren’t my ponies, but I decided to go find them. I followed their tracks around the big bend in the road maybe a mile from our little camp. From there, it was my decision to go on farther away from Nobody’s Mountain. Actually it was Eric’s and Larry’s mountain. The hustle for yearly payments was constant. It probably would have been easier to work. It was sawmill or shirt factory work in Overton county back then. Hell bent to create a working hippie community out of the stream of easily influenced urban dropouts, Eric tried hard to out-Gaskin Steve himself.
Clarence “Rooster” Hammock
He was our first instructor in the school of country living. Full of love’s mischief, son of Alec, husband to Lois, and father to Jerry and Patsy. Living in the farther of the two small houses located next to nobody’s mountain. Always dressed in his bib overalls. His hair thinned and combed. His complexion an indicator of his first heart attack. He was great without arrogance. Hippie Jack
Featured Friend
Jack is a true 21st century Renaissance man, whether he's documenting the vanishing rural life of the Cumberland Plateau with his sixty-year Leica camera or creating a jammin' Americana music festival.
Lois Riggins-Ezzell
Director
TN State Museum
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Fall Festival 2010
September 24-26
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