OUR STORIES ABOUT THE HISTORY AND THE FUTURE OF WORK IN KENTUCKY

These past few years, as we’ve seen such constant change in the economy, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of work — for myself, for my children, and for my place. As I’ve done so, I’ve inevitably thought often about those global developments in relation to my own family’s experience with work in the past century, and my own career journey to date. 

I share that personal story with all of you today, in hopes that it might inspire some of you to share your own family and personal journeys as well.

(Note: This approach is inspired by a workshop I helped organize with the University of Southern California’s Civic Imagination Project a few years back, which invited everyone to imagine work in Kentucky in 2040 through first introducing themselves through physical objects from their, or their family’s, history of work. See more at the MacArthur Foundation.)

The Story of Where I’m From

I grew up in the Western Kentucky Coal Field region, in Ohio County.

We Kentuckians outside major metropolitan areas tend to define ourselves by county, rather than by town. Perhaps it’s because, through consolidation, there’s often only one county middle and county high school for many of these places. Or maybe it’s because Kentucky has 120 counties, and that’s a lot to keep up with on its own. But it’s mostly because the towns we’re from are not large enough for people from very far away to have necessarily heard of them.

In any case, Ohio County is the birthplace of Bluegrass Music. Bill Monroe, widely agreed to be the pioneer of the “bluegrass” style along with his various band members, was born in Ohio County, in the small town of Rosine (population less than 200), on Jerusalem Ridge. If you listen to much bluegrass music, you’ll hear Jerusalem Ridge and Rosine evoked as sacred places. A few years back The New York Times even named the small barn (which hosts a jam session there every Friday night in good weather)—the “Rosine Barn Jamboree”—one of the 52 places in the world you should visit. And you should. Magic happens there. Especially if young Mackenzie Bell is on the fiddle that night.

The next county over — Muhlenberg County — was the birthplace of musician Merle Travis, known widely for his fingerpicking style, and of the Everly Brothers. (If you haven’t before, listen to the duo’s Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, released at the height of their rise to international popularity — a bold choice in album for the brothers at the time, and a great snapshot into the music they grew up on.) 

Outside the doors of the church that I grew up attending, you could see the towers of the coal fired power plant in Paradise, Kentucky. John Prine made the town famous with his song “Paradise,” about the negative effects of coal mining on the place his grandparents lived growing up. (Prine and Lawrence County native Tyler Childers released a limited edition version of their singing “Paradise” together in Ohio County in 2018, with proceeds going to the Appalachian Citizens Law Center.)

In short, it’s a place where storytelling through music runs deep.

A Family Story of Resilience through Kentucky’s “Past of Work”

My pappaw, C.W. Ford, retired from that TVA power plant in Paradise--a plant whose closures have been national news in recent years, alongside the decline in coal mining operations across the state.

He was a lifelong farmer, too. He and my mammaw, Anna Belle, had 15 kids in 16 years. The joke was that they were the only family around who got a new Ford every year but never traded one in. When times were tough, he headed north, working in the steel mills outside Chicago. But Kentucky was home. And they soon found their way back to the farm. 

The local parkway ended up coming right through the farm, as new infrastructure began to make traveling (and shipping goods) across the country more possible. The coal company bought the farm from them in the early 1980s to strip mine, and relocated them to a nicer farm on the other end of the county. And it wasn’t so long until the local industrial foundation came along to buy half of that farm from them, for expansion of a large park meant to woo factories into the county, at a place where two parkways that cross the state meet. 

Cattle was Pappaw C.W.’s main livestock, and burley tobacco was the cornerstone crop, as was the case for many small family farms in Western Kentucky at that time. But, as the U.S. government ceased subsidizing tobacco as a crop and a variety of other social and economic factors impacted burley farming (See Ann Ferrell’s book on the matter.), many of those family farms folded, struggled, or had to find new ways to pivot. It’s what drove my dad, for instance, to insist that he didn’t want to manage a small farm as his side hustle, like his father and all of his brothers had done. (My dad has spent decades at a local factory making door jambs, stair treads, and other products for homebuilding and renovation, working his way up to a building foreman in the last few years.)

While Pappaw C.W. completed high school before he served in World War II, Mammaw Anna Belle did not finish high school when she married my pappaw. However, she insisted that all of her 13 children who lived past infancy to do so, and she herself earned her GED. Her 13 kids went on to get various jobs in factories, in government, in banking, and--yes--in the mines, while some of the children and grandchildren still run family farms as well. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have a wide range of careers that have taken them into diverse fields--from agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, and teaching to nursing, physical therapy, and public health--and, at times, required living anywhere from the East Coast to the West, from Korea to the Netherlands. 

Despite that drive toward potential brain drain, I also see the tendency of most of that family to be back around Kentucky (or not too far across a state border) when they can. It reminds me of the ”Happy” Chandler quote, “I never met a Kentuckian who wasn’t either thinking about going home or actually going home.” Sure, that quote could be a little bit of an embellishment. But I’ll admit it’s held true in my own life and career so far.

My family’s journey and story captures many of the struggles of rural Kentucky as social and economic forces shifted the economy. But it also captures the strength and resilience. And, for me, that story of work is also heavily interpreted through storytelling traditions of where I’m from.

The Importance of Storytelling Traditions

The way I think about storytelling is inspired in part by Pappaw C.W., known as he was across Ohio County and beyond as a world-class BSer, but in the best of ways. No one could tell a story like Pappaw. With the characteristic exaggerated, emphatic slur in his voice, you had to learn the C.W. cadence to properly interpret his stories. Maybe you had to go consult anyone you could to fact check what you heard. But they were almost always based on the truth, and the details were embellished a bit for dramatic effect. The takeaway I learned from him is the importance of a good story to get something to stick in people’s minds. We’ve certainly seen in recent years that facts aren’t going to inspire if they aren’t tied to a compelling narrative.

But my notions of storytelling are also inspired by my maternal grandmother--Mammaw Beulah. I never knew my grandfather, as he had passed away when my mom was in high school. But Mammaw Beulah demonstrated a resilience of her own. She was born in 1917 and was married at 17 to a husband considerably older than her, during the Depression. From early marriage until her death, she lived close by where she (and her husband) were both raised, in the small town of McHenry (pronounced Mac-Henry by the locals), population 400 or so.

The road she lived on was even named after their two families--the Hillards and the Moesleys. She drew well water, stoked a coal fireplace, collected eggs from her chicken coop, cooked up the rabbits and squirrels the family hunted, washed clothes with a ringer washer and hung them to dry, and kept lots of hand fans around (usually supplied by the local funeral home), since she didn’t have central HVAC and wasn’t much for using a window unit, unless company was coming to stay.

Life wasn’t always easy. But Mammaw Beulah didn’t dwell on that. In fact, I remember her telling me once about her favorite Depression Era poster. It was more off-color than her normal joke, so that really stuck in my mind. She said it had a naked male child, with his hands at his midsection, and it said, “Times are tough, but I’m holding my own.” Mammaw always found something that made her laugh.

Beulah’s brothers played in bands, and--when she went to hear them--she danced, too. 

But, when the summer days were their hottest, she sat on the front porch, rocking in her swing, and she sang. Many of her family, and her in-laws as well, all lived close by. People walked by. They stopped for visits. They “sat a spell,” as the saying goes. Maybe they sang a bit.

At least I did. When I’d go visit with her, I’d sing with Mammaw Beulah. It would be gospel hymns. Or some Hank Williams classics. Something that gave her a chance to throw in some yodeling. Or maybe my personal favorite--Harold Cole’s “Chicken Rooster Blues,” a song that I’m guessing her husband Hubert had picked up from time spent working in West Virginia along the way. From what Mammaw told me, and Pappaw C.W. confirmed (perhaps, again, with some details embellished) Hubert had a renowned chicken thief in his family. So maybe that’s why the song stuck in Beulah’s repertoire.

When cassette players became popular, Mammaw Beulah filled up tapes recording herself singing at home. Those tapes still travel around our family (and, I know, we need to make sure all those not lost or broken get digitized). Here’s her take on “Freight Train Blues.” (She didn’t own the copyright. Don’t sue the estate.) I don’t recall ever talking with her about why she recorded them. For posterity? Maybe just for fun? Or to express what she was feeling.

The important aspect of those songs was that the act of sharing stories is important. It’s how we interpret life. How we share what we’re feeling. And, often, those moments are what we remember about the life we’ve lived. Sitting on the porch, sharing stories, singing songs, and laughing.

But these lively singing sessions weren’t Beulah’s only storytelling outlet. For decades, she was also the McHenry correspondent for the county paper. Back in those days, many of these small towns throughout a rural county (Ohio County, to give you an idea, currently has a population of around 24,000, spread across around 600 square miles.) had a section of the paper dedicated to sharing the news from there. And it was gathered by a community correspondent from that area, who filed a report based on what people called (or dropped by) to tell her (almost always a her). 

These “society columns,” as they were called, were (and, for the few that remain, are) a place where you could learn of a potluck at one of the community churches; any important town announcements; upcoming family reunions; births, deaths, and anniversaries; and people who should be remembered on the prayer list. It reported who had been on a trip out of town, who had visitors in from out of town, and even who, in town, had visited with another family, in town, over the past week. And, as always (although rarely fact-checked), “a good time was had by all.”

In these columns, these communities are not just defined solely by the work people did. They said that the act of contributing to the community; of knowing one another; of living itself, was important and worthy of record. Being part of your place is also an important kind of work.

My Own Story of Navigating the Rapidly Changing Narratives of Work

My career has been spent in storytelling, one way or another. So, these two threads--of the many changes in Kentucky’s economy, and the ways that people shared information and stories throughout all of that change--are especially interwoven.

As I wrote about in my piece in Columbia Journalism Review about society columns, I took over Mammaw Beulah’s newspaper column in middle school. In the mid-1990s, it was a whole set of women in their 60s and 70s, and me, writing these columns. Soon, thanks to a supportive community fixture, Tressie Brown--who sat at the center of the Ohio County news scene for decades, all the way up to her death this year from COVID-19--I had translated my community contributor status to a weekly serialized private eye story with my friend Tyrel Kessinger. (And Tyrel, who lives in Louisville now, has kept at it; check out his creds here.) From there, it was a weekly pro wrestling column--which became an ongoing thread in my career--followed by a school/work co-op program by the end of my senior year of high school.

By the time I was in journalism school at Western Kentucky University, I was working more than 30 hours a week for local newspapers, and did so through most of my college years.

However, that was also the time period (2001-2005) that the newspaper industry was first being significantly disrupted by online publishing. And, as a first-generation college student, it became clear that my dream of a steady, no-question career writing for a living in journalism may not be as easy of a path as I’d thought.

Instead, I ultimately decided to pursue studying media change in grad school. And, despite being turned down by six of the seven schools I applied to, I somehow made it into a program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. My grad school mentors were a media historian who studies the future, William Uricchio, and a communication and media scholar who studies active audiences and participatory culture, Henry Jenkins. In my thesis, I researched why U.S. daytime soap operas were going off the air after weathering so many changes in the radio and television industry (an interest also inherited from Mammaw Beulah; Procter & Gamble’s As the World Turns was “her story”). And I helped launch and later manage a research group called the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, studying the intense change happening across the media and marketing industries and the “futures of entertainment”--research which culminated in our 2013 book Spreadable Media.

Henry and William said they were there for helping us think about jobs that don’t exist yet, and that aptly described the career that has followed. That has included consulting with a wide range of organizations over the years on models, strategies, and implementation for innovation projects, audience engagement initiatives, storytelling experiments, and cultural intelligence initiatives, from The Coca-Cola Company, Lowe’s Hardware, and Microsoft to WNYC, The American Press Institute, and the U.S. Department of State. It also included acting as director of “consumer insights,” “digital strategy,” and “audience engagement” over the course of 7-plus years for strategic communications firm Peppercomm; heading up a Center for Innovation and Engagement as a VP at Univision’s Fusion Media Group; and co-launching a new innovation initiative for major publisher Simon & Schuster. These projects have shifted as the media industries have shifted rapidly--from the continued morphing of business models for online publishing and new initiatives from traditional media companies to navigating the rise of digital distribution and the massive growth of social media platforms. No in-company position or project I have taken existed before I took it, and all my consulting work has been about helping teams navigate change and plan for the future (meaning that these jobs are consistently about change, and not likely to turn into a 40-years-and-a-watch sort of scenario).

While a few of those gigs required a move to New York City at the outset, I found myself back in Kentucky within two years each time--proving Happy Chandler right. Of course, I was very fortunate to be pursuing work that could be conducted remotely, and to have a home in Bowling Green that has good proximity to an airport, strong high-speed internet, and a reliable mobile phone signal--all issues with which many communities in Kentucky struggle.

But, while I’d been fortunate to spend most of my working career doing that work from Kentucky, I also realized at some point a few years back that very little of that work since my early newspaper days was actually focused on Kentucky. Aside from some teaching at WKU, and a few talks here and there, all my clients and projects had been focused outside the state.

It was around that time, in early 2017, that I began to immerse myself in a set of projects about local media and understandings of community here in Kentucky, and to begin thinking about how narratives affect perceptions about the future of work in the Bluegrass State. That has led me to get involved with a slew of projects researching, co-creating stories, and engaging in collective imagining about the Future of Work in Kentucky.

Thinking about the Future of Work THROUGH Storytelling

As I think of my family’s history of work--to earn a living and feed their families, but also to be part of a community--it’s a story that shouldn’t be defined by continued challenges and setbacks but, rather, by the spirit of resilience and regeneration with which they have tackled those challenges. 

In my own career, I have had great mentorship, support, and opportunities afforded to me along the way. They have made my career path possible, and for that I’m quite fortunate (even if I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing a couple of years from now). I want to acknowledge that those privileges have not been available to many, for a variety of reasons.

As we move forward, I believe we, collectively, as Kentuckians must lead the way in dreaming what our economy might look like for the 21st century. It can’t be a future that happens to us. We have to imagine together an economy that seeks to make opportunity available more equally, and one that strives to invite all who will to participate in collectively imagining the future, and then work together toward making it a reality.

We know that societal and regulatory changes, continued shifts in global market forces, the social and health crises we face as a Commonwealth, rapidly evolving technological developments, and continued environmental change will all impact where we are headed in the years and decades to come. Some of that Kentucky cannot change. But, inspired by the serenity prayer, I also believe we can work together to co-create the sort of work and life we want for ourselves in Kentucky, for what we can control.

 The projects I’ve been engaged with around the future of work for Kentucky are all rooted in the idea that we must cultivate a resilient, regenerative economy and workforce prepared for a continued state of disruption—and ready to identify the opportunities in each new change that comes along. After Kentucky became the first U.S. region to go through MIT’s Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, a group of us began building on what we learned through the formation of a non-profit called AccelerateKY.

Truly collaborative efforts must be forward-looking, cross-region, and cross-sector. They must foster, facilitate, and act as a catalyst for developing a culture and capacity for resilient, deliberate innovation. And they must be about designing futures in which all of us can see ourselves. (It’s understandably hard to be excited about a future you don’t see as available to you.) These futures should not merely be open to--rather, I’d argue we’d all benefit when they are significantly driven by--initiatives from voices and communities too often left out of that discussion--innovative efforts/voices from rural communities, communities of color, refugee populations, LGBTQ perspectives, and other groups who have too often not been given equal opportunity to dream what the future might be.

In short, for me, innovation is not just about economic development or workforce development. As importantly, perhaps more so, it’s about the narratives that we hold about our place, and that others hold about it, that help define what we imagine is possible, and who we imagine it is possible for.

In his Brier Sermon, Jim Wayne Miller—a writer whose impact was felt across Eastern and Western Kentucky—says, “Say you were going on a trip, knowing you wouldn’t ever be coming back and all you’d ever have of that place you knew, that place where you’d always lived, was what you could take with you…What are you going to leave behind? What are you taking with you? Don’t run off and leave the best part of yourself.” 

We can’t forget the challenges and the resiliency of our past. What we’re proud of. What we’re ashamed of. What we don’t want to change about ourselves. What we know must. For that, stories are the key. 

Kentuckians--residents of the state, the diaspora outside the state, and the honorary Kentuckians who have a strong tie to the Commonwealth, despite never having lived here--are co-creating the narrative of who we are as a place together.

Let’s roll up our sleeves and make this next chapter our best.

Sam Ford works on models, strategies, and implementation for media innovation, audience engagement, cultural intelligence, and storytelling experimentation. He is a research affiliate with MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing, a Knight News Innovation Fellow with Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and a fellow with AccelerateKY. 

Sam is partnering with Kentucky to the World to launch a new set of programs and stories focused on Resilience in the Face of Economic Change.