Your reblog hit on one of my main frustrations with the Covey - it takes the music OUT of Appalachia. Nearly anyone in District 12 with musical talent is connected to the Covey who go out of the way to say they don’t consider themselves Districts 12.
EXACTLY. 💯
Suzanne Collins may have researched Appalachia, but she clearly hasn't spent much time in the region if she's pushing the narrative that the Covey are so separate from the rest of District 12.
ABOSAS would have been the perfect opportunity to show just how important music is to Appalachians, but Collins chose to inflate the lore of the Covey instead. Haymitch is considered to be a far more observant narrator than Katniss. If we accept this as true, then the love of music is once again missing from story.
By connecting Katniss to the Covey, Collins robbed herself of the chance to show the readers the importance of music amongst the culture of the people who make up District 12. Instead of being a random girl from the districts who found solace in the music she learned from her father, another random district man, she is now the daughter of a man whose relatives have been noted as the only musicians of the district.
I have core memories of my uncles and cousins all coming over just to play music with my mom and her dad. They'd bring their guitar or banjo or just their voices, and everyone would sit together as they all bickered over which song to sing first. They weren't practicing for anything, not even for singing at church. They were just singing to sing because that's what the family does. Nobody was playing like they were performing, or they were somehow better than the rest. At the end of the night, the family was there because they wanted to be there, and that's what they wanted to do. Like when everyone goes out to a trad pub in Ireland. The pubs where someone always has some instrument and others always start singing some song or the other.
That part of Appalachian culture was taken from the people of District 12 , which seems particularly cruel when you consider how much has already been lost. All while building up a small group of people who only work to isolate themselves from the rest.
I can not and will not accept that the rest of the district people have given up on their love of music and the love of performing alongside one another. If anything, music is something that would have brought them closer together as generations fought to survive nuclear war, famine, and oppression. District 4 has their sea shanties. District 11 has the songs they sing while working in the fields. Both are cultural traditions that have been carried down from generation after generation. Why is District 12 excluded from that when their bluegrass music is woven into the tapestry of the region's modern-day culture?
