The Singer

Thank you, Reverend Bullard. Your introduction was exaggerated, of course, but I won’t say it made me mad. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to say first what splendid work your church has been doing. And I’m speaking now not as a P.R. man but as a citizen and a Christian. As the reverend was saying, the church must play a role in the important issues of this changing world of ours. Now don’t anybody go away and tell it on me that Pete Simpkins talked here tonight like some radical. Politics is one thing, and the hard facts of social life is another. You can’t legislate morality. But now you can educate people about the facts of their state government and where it’s not doing right by the people. So “Christian Program on Politics” is a good, 100 per cent American name for what you’re doing in this election year. Now with the ward your church is in, I don’t have to guess how most of you folks have voted for the last half-century, but tonight I just want to show you some of the mistruths that the present administration is forsting upon the people, and you can vote accordingly. Because this movie I’m going to show you—which I was in on making—is to show you the truth, instead of what you read in the papers, about how they’re wiping out poverty in eastern Kentucky.

You know, in spring, when the floods aren’t raging, in summer when there isn’t a drought, and in the fall, when the mountain slopes aren’t ablaze, eastern Kentucky is beautiful. In the winter, though, I don’t hesitate to call it a nightmare landscape: nature hides herself under a mossy rock and you see the human landscape come into focus, especially in this winter’s record cold and hunger. We took these movies all this summer and fall, off and on, up the narrow valleys, creeks, and hollers of the counties of eastern Kentucky: McCreary, Owsley, Bell, Breathitt, Perry, Pike, Laurel, Lee, Leslie, Letcher, Clay, Harlan, Knott, Floyd, and let’s see, Magoffin, Martin, Whitley, and Wolfe.