Beth Howard discusses Song for a Hard-Hit People with Shawna Kay Rodenberg

An Appalachian organizer's excavation of the past, her own and her people's, to spark a collective fight for a future where we all have what we need and deserve

In Song for a Hard-Hit People, Beth Howard shares her story of growing up in Appalachian Kentucky--the economic struggles, trauma, and ever-present sexism along with the loving care of her close-knit rural community. These complex people shaped Howard's sense of justice and solidarity, and taught her about the inextricable bonds working-class people share, despite our differences. But her childhood also left her with emotional wounds that threatened to destroy the life she built for herself. While healing her wounds is deeply personal, there's no separating it from the people and place that made her.

Appalachia is often framed as a place to escape from, where people are hateful, lazy, and bring tragedy upon themselves. But in her quest to understand her home and her people, Howard uncovers the powerful history of white Appalachians fighting alongside Black and Brown people, pushing back against billionaires who gain power by using racism to divide them. Appalachia, she realizes, has not only been hit hard; it is the place to wage a freedom struggle.

Too many of us are denied the basic necessities of life: somewhere decent to live, good food to eat, health care that doesn't break the bank, jobs that don't K*ll us. As Howard reminds us, we haven't got a chance--unless we organize.

In the midst of divisive rhetoric, violent repression, and grifters writing elegies, may this story be a song.

Beth Howard is the Cultural Strategist for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice. She grew up in a rural white working-class community in Eastern Kentucky and has organized in the American South for two decades, primarily in her beloved home state of Kentucky.
Beth has been a lead organizer on campaigns to raise the minimum wage and restore voting rights. She's also engaged white working-class Southerners on successful electoral campaigns, including ones that defeated an abortion ban ballot initiative in the 2022 Kentucky midterms and reelected Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in 2023—and ran a rural field office in the 2020 Georgia runoff election.
Beth is the creator of the viral narrative campaign Rednecks for Black Lives, and has been featured on the NBC News National Day of Racial Healing special, Matter of Fact’s Listening Tour with Soledad O’Brian, NPR’s Here and Now, Now This News, in the book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, the New York Times, and The Boston Globe. Beth lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Song for a Hard-Hit People is her first book. You can find her on Substack at Working Class Love Notes and online at bethhowardky.com.

Shawna Kay Rodenberg is the author of Kin, a debut memoir deemed “essential reading” by the Washington Post and “gorgeously gritty” by Oprah Daily. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she now teaches nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in Salon, the Village Voice, and Elle. In 2016, Shawna was awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship, and in 2017 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A registered nurse, mother of five, and grandmother of two, she was raised in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and, briefly, on a cluster of religious communes in northern Minnesota. She’s obsessed, universally, with mysteries and mystics. She lives on a hobby goat farm in southern Indiana. Her second book, a sequel to her first, is in progress.

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