‘Hippie Jack’ helps mountain folk in need
They took him in when he needed it most. Now Jack Stoddart and his wife, Lynne, return that kindness.
They host music festivals on their farm to collect food and clothing, and they drive their rainbow-colored Hippie Bus along the twisting twolane roads to the top of the Cumberland Plateau to help the neediest among them.
“You just don’t understand what the mountain people had to survive,” Stoddart said, “in order to become survivors.”
In the tiny town of Wilder, Steve Sells lives with no electricity. No running water.
His home, barely 400 square feet with chipped aqua paint and a leaking porch roof, hasn’t had any working utilities for almost a year.
He’s made some bad choices in life. Had some tough breaks. He spent 13 months in the Fentress County Jail for stealing scrap barn wood. He had seven days left on his sentence when his wife died.
Life hasn’t improved much since his release.
“I haven’t had nothing but a hard way to go,” the 47-yearold Sells said, peering into his dark kitchen where the stove doesn’t ignite and the refrigerator doesn’t hum.
“If it wasn’t for Hippie, I’d be done had.”
But he doesn’t want to be anywhere else.
He was raised on these ridges, like so many of his neighbors. Their fathers and mothers were born here, their grandparents made a living here. They worked as coal miners, shirt factory employees, meat plant packers. This is home.
“It’s beautiful,” said Alice Vaughn as she sits on her front porch with her son, Jeremy, and a neighbor, Melissa Littzi, down the road. “The country and the trees.”
But it’s not easy. Littzi, too, is without power now, paying $20 here and there for electricity. She needs $148 for the water to be turned on.
Stoddart sits on a threadbare brown couch outside Vaughn’s home and visits with her. Trash burns in a fire near the muddy drive. Discarded furniture and boxes clutter the property. But he does not judge.
“Would it help her to treat her with less dignity and respect?” he asks. “I don’t think so.”
“We’ve lost the ability to have empathy and understand what people went through. I think we would all be better off if we could embrace the people who have the least among us.”
Later, he will stop by the utility companies and pay her bills with a donation he received from a friend.
For now, he offers a hug. He feels their pain because he has had his own.
Stoddart grew up in Florida with upper-middle-class, alcoholic parents. There were nights he was locked out of his house, evenings with
no dinner on the table, and many uncomfortable political discussions.
He felt alienated, at times abandoned.
On the mountain, there were others who knew what that felt like.
He was drawn to them.
‘THEY TOOK US IN’
Stoddart was blowing bubbles in the Florida rain the day he met his future wife.
Both were artists — photographers — who sought to document the disregarded and undiscovered. They fell in love with the work, and each other.
In 1972, the couple arrived in Tennessee and bought 48 acres of land at the foot of Highland Mountain for $7,500.
In the wake of Vietnam’s upheaval, it was an era of artists’ collectives and communes. A time when a swath of American society searched for a broader idealism, one aimed at rebuilding the world from the ground up.
“We moved to Tennessee because ‘Scarface’ was true,” Jack Stoddart said. “The summer of love was over, and Miami was turning into cocaine, bad disco music, guns and money.”
In the unincorporated community of Crawford in Overton County, the long-haired hippie couple set up in a tiny cabin with no running water and learned to cultivate their land.
The mountain people around them, those who had been there for generations, were still making whiskey and raising their own meat. It was subsistence living, and they taught the Stoddarts the same, showing them how to grow tomatoes and cut firewood and sharpen a chain saw.
In turn, Jack Stoddart documented the spirit of life on the plateau.
He took photographs of a vanishing culture, giggling Mennonite girls and an old woman dipping snuff while rocking on her front porch. He created silver-gelatin prints, toned other in sepia hues. He viewed his camera as a way to preserve history.
All the while, he and Lynne raised their four children on the farm, teaching them rural ways, traveling with them to art shows across the country and sending them to college.
And when their house was empty, the Stoddarts wanted to find a way to repay the kindness that was shown to them.
“They took us in. We are paying that back.”
IT CAME THROUGH MUSIC
In 2006, the Stoddart clan began hosting an annual Americana music festival on the family farm.
They called it Jammin’ at Hippie Jack’s.
Featuring renowned singer-songwriters such as Mary Gauthier, Darrell Scott, and Malcolm Holcombe, the festival — at first — was created to preserve roots music.
Stoddart videotaped the concerts, which aired first on the local PBS affiliate WCTETV of the Upper Cumberland and then nationally. He turned the recorded music festival archives into a Saturday night radio show for WDVX in Knoxville.
Along the way, though, it became about more than just the music. It was about the people.
Now, once a month on his land “halfway between nowhere and too far,” Mr. and Mrs. Hippie host old-school concerts they call Sanctuary Shows.
The farm lights up with tiny twinkling bulbs, a bonfire roars and inside a small wooden barn the sounds of guitar and fiddle fill a warm, candlelit room.
The events are free, but Stoddart requests that his guests — many of whom camp on his land for the weekend of festivities — bring nonperishable foods, new or like-new children’s coats, toys, shoes or whatever else they can spare.
“It’s a Tennessee thing to do,” Chris Deck said, his breath making white clouds in the fall chill. “Helping your neighbor and having fun doing it.”
When the music stops and the campers go home, Lynne Stoddart goes to work sorting the donations. Last winter, the Stoddarts and their crew distributed five busloads of food, more than 3,000 books, 45 new bikes, several scooters and Christmas toys.
Most importantly, more than 400 children’s coats.
They have paid for bathroom, hot water heater and roof repairs. They’ve settled phone, water and electric bills. Provided hospital beds and wheelchairs.
There are critics of the Stoddarts’ mission. Some say the Stoddarts give to people who don’t deserve it, helping drug addicts and convicts. Others believe the couple is enabling the poor and out-ofwork and perpetuating the problem.
Jack Stoddart doesn’t believe there are undeserving people.
He operates by a simple mantra of generosity: “You don’t need to pay and you don’t need to pray.”
Truth be told, Stoddart doesn’t know how much of a difference a one-hippie-busoperation can make.
On theplateau, he sees generational poverty and generational drug abuse. He visits homes where children come out to accept food while pilladdicted mothers are passed out on the couch.
It’s not an easy mold to break.
“We’re not changing the world,” Stoddart said with a sigh.
“But,” he adds more optimistically, “we are maybe changing a day or two.”
“And maybe if we keep showing up they will see that someone cares.”