![]() He was a genius when it came to defrauding the system and had some of his kids receiving Social Security checks by the time they were 11 years old. Ray White, the inventor of 35 Appalachian Mountain dance steps never seen before his day. The Whites are their own worst enemy and best friend rolled up into a package of birthday parties and shootouts death threats and worshiping Jesus entitlement and destitution. They’re always expected to resort to violence or childish behavior to fix a situation, so nothing is ever fixed, only put off until it tries to bite their hand off again. More than anything that’s the feeling that I got from this documentary: That because the White Family is alive to see their outlaw ways become legend, they’re stuck in this never ending cycle where they repeat all the same mistakes over and over because it’s expected of them. It’s a haunting moment as he looks into the camera, watery eyed, almost beseeching the viewer or even the cameraman to let him in on the secret of whether or not he’s a ghost. The film doesn’t pity them, but it’s not interested in helping us understand them, either.ĭuring one of his more lucid moments, Jesco White (arguably the most famous White due to his Hank III connection and a previous documentary made about his native Appalachian clog dancing) makes a comment that he feels like he’s already dead and watching his legend unfold before him and sometimes he has to ask himself whether it’s his fame making things happen or some sort of memory of when he was alive that he’s witnessing. The problem for me is that the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia doesn’t really portray them as outlaws so much as drug addled and depressed hillbilly’s who are living their own posthumous legend instead of their lives. Everyone in Boone County, West Virginia knows who you are and looks at you as a local embarrassment but, on the same hand, you’ve got Hank Williams the 3rd and The Kentucky Headhunters writing songs about you and how amazing it must be to be an outlaw and free in 2011. It must be simultaneously wonderful and awful to be a White. ![]() He died for you on the cross, you don’t wanna serve him then when you die you’re gonna have to pay the consequences like me. You go this way and you go this way and you don’t live for the Lord and you gonna go that way to hell. You know we’re all gonna die and we’re gonna all have to be risen and judged. It's the stuffed animals, isn't it? They're right behind you!!"
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