The inspiration for 'Mountain Mama' was literally a real find. Shopping for custom cabinetry with friends building a new home, I was drawn to a slab of granite countertop hanging on the wall, intrigued by what seemed a seam of coal against a warm ochre background. It conjured up old memories of flying over West Virginia, a beautiful state yet one scared by strip mines reducing mountains once thought higher than the Rockies to piles of rubble.  With a bird's eye view, I could see the scars; it was a snowy winter, so the trees had shed their leaves and a landscape of utter devastation passed beneath the wing tips. Sometimes with the trees offering cover, one might see what the first settlers and native Americans gasped at, a carpet of hilly wilderness rolling away in all directions.  So it was, a homage of sorts to John Denver's West Virginia Mountain Mama, we despoil our neighborhoods and then flee to the last vestiges of a virgin continent, the hills, mountains, beaches and wide-open spaces, only to turn those back roads into congested pathways of vacation & retirement homes, wilderness lost - sadly man's last refuge in a world of overpopulation. 

It's said the shadows come quickly in the Appalachian hills. Dark and mysterious its best be home before the shadows grow deep. Then again, the closeness of it all, the claustrophobia of never seeing the horizon beyond, brought folks together in prayer and song. A magical world of folk stories and lore, its slipping away, taken down by the ever urbanization of what was country. Be thankful you had the chance to see it before the only remembrance comes from faded pictures of a landscape lost in time.