Out of Whole Cloth: The Life of Bettye Kimbrell

This splendid book displays the fabric of a wonderful creative collaboration. Bettye Kimbrell told Joyce Cauthen her life story, and Joyce shaped it for us in book form – but still told in Bettye’s own voice. Bettye’s story provides a broad portrait of life in rural West Alabama. The characters flashing by make for a variegated kaleidoscope: self-destructive and damaging folly and irresponsibility mix unpredictably with creative resourcefulness in making do and generosity toward kin and neighbors. The net result is often painful, often inspiring, but always true to life as Bettye Kimbrell sees it.
In the second half of the book a new story line gradually emerges. Bettye had learned quilting from her stern grandmother, who raised her when her parents could not or would not. That skill was set aside for many years while she struggled to survive and raise a family in the midst of every imaginable adversity. Then quilting sprang up again in the later decades of Bettye’s life, providing the creative lodestar by which she reinvented her life. If quiet suffering while managing life’s vicissitudes dominates her early decades, quiet achievement, growing self-confidence, and public acclaim come to dominate the later decades. As her life shaped her art, simultaneously her art reshaped her life. —Alan Jabbour, Former Director (Retired), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington DC; author (with Karen Singer Jabbour) of Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians

Joyce H. Cauthen wrote With Fiddle and Well-Rosined Bow: The History of Old-Time Fiddling in Alabama, published in 1989 by the University of Alabama Press. She also produced a related recording, Possum Up a Gum Stump: Home, Field, and Commercial Recordings of Alabama Fiddlers, to accompany it. For the Alabama Folklife Association she edited Benjamin Lloyd's Hymn Book: A Primitive Baptist Song Tradition and produced an accompanying CD in 1999. Other CDs of Alabama-based music she produced include Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb: John Alexander's Sterling Jubilee Singers of Bessemer and Bullfrog Jumped: Children's Folksongs from the Byron Arnold Collection. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her fiddle-playing husband Jim Cauthen. In their spare time they play in two old-time string bands, Red Mountain and Flying Jenny. In 2011 the Alabama State Council on the Arts honored her with a Governor's Arts Award.