At the height of the coal boom—around 1920—a farmer who seldom had owned a dollar bill could earn from $20 to $50 a day and buy more from the commissary in one week than he could grow on a farm in a year. Then, in the late 1920s the demand for coal decreased. Some mines closed permanently, and those that continued to operate worked from one to three days a week at reduced wages, and then usually only during the spring and summer months to stock coal for the winter demands, forcing the few men who owned land to choose planting and harvesting or digging coal.

The result was a landless, jobless, hungry, perplexed people. Ruined for a way of life they could control, they were betrayed by this new, quicksilver promise that left them idle much of the year.

The sureness with which James Still weaves his patchwork of light, shadow, and colors into this drab, joyless landscape surely creates one of the presences of artistry that we can recognize and appreciate in all the arts but cannot isolate and define. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings had this quality in mind when she referred to Still’s work as “vital, beautiful, heart-breaking, and heart-warmingly funny,” as did poet Delmore Schwartz who called River of Earth “a symphony,” and the Time reviewer who considered it “a work of art.”

Still’s “secret” lies in his ability to use language so that it performs the functions of both music and painters’ pigments. Whether the individual words are strange or familiar, it is the manner of expression that gives them conviction and demonstrates that Still is a creator as well as a listener, and that he sees and hears with the senses of a poet.

His words can create a picture filled with the brilliance of an impressionist painting:

Morning was bright and rain-fresh. The sharp sunlight fell slantwise upon the worn limestone earth of the hills, and our house squatted weathered and dark on the bald slope. Yellow-bellied sapsuckers drilled their oblong holes in the black birch by the house, now leafing from tight-curled buds.

And a sound: “January was a bell in Lean Neck Valley. The ring of an ax was a mile wide, and all passage over the spewed-up earth was lifted on frosty air and sounded against fields of ice.”

His scenes can be filled with factual knowledge, as in the account of the father removing a cob from a calf’s throat. And he can give an idiomatic translation of the Old Testament that retains the rhythm and power of the original, as in Brother Mobberly’s sermon: