Appalachian Figures Series
If you drive the switchbacks up Pine Mountain long enough, you reach a hand-painted world: pink flamingos in the fog, a homemade stage, a sign that says you are at the end of the whirled. For more than twenty years that ridge was Jim Webb’s chosen home and battleground, a place where poetry, radio, and resistance came together under one name: Wiley Quixote.
Webb’s work is scattered today in chapbooks, radio playlists, oral-history reels, and memories from seedtime festivals and late-night “swarps.” Put together, they tell the story of one of the region’s most inventive poet-activists, a man who turned a hillbilly pun into a life project of defending mountains and mountain people.
From Jenkins to Shadyside to the Mountain South
James Watson Webb was born September 24, 1945, in the coal camp town of Jenkins, Kentucky, and spent much of his boyhood across the river in Shadyside, Ohio, where the strip-mined hills and big machines of the Little Egypt Valley lodged in his imagination.
He earned a biology degree at Berea College and a master’s in English at Eastern Kentucky University, combining a scientist’s eye for detail with a teacher’s ear for story. After teaching college for several years, he returned to the Tug Fork and Kentucky mountains in the 1970s, just as strip mining and flood disasters were reshaping the region. That choice to “stay put,” to be responsible to place rather than chase a safer academic career, is a theme friends would later stress in memorials and essays about him.
Flood, Strip Mines, and a Poet Radicalized
In April 1977, the Tug River Valley flooded hard. Residents in and around Williamson, West Virginia, blamed not only heavy rain but the stripped hillsides and valley fills hanging above the river. Webb helped organize relief through the Tug Valley Recovery Center and turned his grief into printed protest by co-editing Mucked, a small anthology of flood-anger poems that linked strip mining to the devastation in people’s kitchens and hollows.
Around the same time, Webb began experimenting with a new persona in the pages of the Sandy New Era in Williamson. Under the byline “Wiley Quixote,” he wrote a column titled “Ridin’ Around Listenin’ to the Radio,” a mix of road stories, coalfield gossip, jokes, and sharp commentary about strip mining, crooked politicians, and everyday survival. Wiley’s voice let Webb say hard things with humor, turning an angry environmental critique into something a neighbor might actually read over coffee.
Elmo’s Haven and the Theater of Resistance
Wiley did not stay on newsprint for long. By 1979, Webb had built a full play around him, Elmo’s Haven, first staged in Williamson, West Virginia. The play imagines a small mountain community facing off against corporate coal and corrupt officials, using comedy to make clear what is at stake: land, water, and the right to stay in place.
Later, the name “Elmo’s Haven” would be recycled for a writers’ cabin at Wiley’s Last Resort, the off-grid retreat Webb helped create on Pine Mountain. The retreat, built with friends and fellow Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (SAWC) members, kept the play’s spirit alive as a quiet place where writers and activists could work while looking out over the same ridges Webb was trying to protect.
Small Magazines, Swarping, and Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel
Webb believed the region needed its own platforms as much as it needed its own heroes. In the mid-1970s he helped launch Mountain Review, one of the first Appalshop-affiliated little magazines that treated Appalachian writing as serious literature and organizing tool at the same time.
As a founding member of SAWC, he went on to co-found and edit Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, a long-running journal of contemporary Appalachian writing. The early volumes, including the 1980s issues Webb co-edited with Gurney Norman, are thick with coal camp memories, strike poems, and stories that refuse the usual stereotypes of the region. Appalachian Voices+1
These small magazines functioned as what scholar Chris Green later called “little institutions” of community, using poetry, essays, and cartoons to keep mining families, environmentalists, and writers in conversation. Inside NKU+1
“Get In, Jesus” and the Poetry of Everyday Holiness
For many readers, Webb’s name is tied to a single poem: “Get In, Jesus.” The piece, based on a long-haired hitchhiker mistaken for Christ and picked up by two Detroit auto workers, circulated for years in photocopies and on T-shirts before anchoring his 2013 collection Get In, Jesus: New & Selected Poems from Wind Publications. Sabneraznik+1
Critic Scott Goebel calls “Get In, Jesus” “the most famous poem in Appalachia,” arguing that its mix of humor, class commentary, and spiritual longing distills Webb’s wider project. Inside NKU In place of hellfire, Webb gives readers a back-seat communion of out-of-work, working-class men who share a paper bag and a question about what it would mean if holiness really did thumb a ride through the coalfields.
The full collection pulls from decades of Webb’s work. It moves from political pieces about strip mining and mine safety to intimate lyrics about family, grief, and music, showing how he refused to separate “poetry” from the rough edges of daily life. LINK nky+1
From Column to Airwaves: Wiley Quixote on WMMT
In 1985, Wiley Quixote jumped from print into the air. Webb joined Appalshop’s community station WMMT-FM in Whitesburg, Kentucky, where he eventually served as program manager and became one of the most recognizable voices on the mountain dial. Wikipedia+2WMMT 88.7+2
His long-running show, Ridin’ Around Listenin’ to the Radio with Wiley Quixote, aired mid-week, typically in a three-hour block. Spinitron playlists from the 2010s show his blend of Americana, zydeco, polkas, protest songs, and “regular irregular features” like “Speak Your Pieces,” where he read calls and letters from the Mountain Eagle’s famously cantankerous readers. Spinitron+2Spinitron+2
Journalists who visited the station during these years describe Webb in the tiny control room, headphones on, toggling between records and commentary as coal companies shifted tactics and new waves of mine layoffs and environmental fights hit the region. Columbia Journalism Review’s 2016 profile of WMMT places him squarely in the middle of a larger experiment in rural, community-run media that insisted mountain people could frame their own stories better than any national outlet. Columbia Journalism Review+2wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu+2
Wiley’s Last Resort: A Campground, A Stage, A Counter-Story
In 1996, Webb took his Wiley persona back up the mountain and turned ninety acres on Pine Mountain into Wiley’s Last Resort, a “private nature and wildlife preserve” and primitive campground. Wiley’s Last Resort+1
He hung a tagline that sums up his humor and politics: the resort sits “at the end of the whirled.” The place hosts the Pine Mountain Tacky Lawn Ornament and Pink Flamingo Soiree, music festivals, and artist retreats that deliberately treat joy, kitsch, and community as tools of resistance against both despair and extractive industry. Wiley’s Last Resort+2Wiley’s Last Resort+2
More recently, the M.A.R.S. Collective (Music, Arts, Re-Creation, and Sustainability) has grown out of Wiley’s Last Resort, using the property as a hub for education and creative work that links environmental justice to local food, music, and media. Mountain Association+1
The 2023 documentary Wiley’s Last Resort, part of PBS’s Reel South series, introduced Webb’s mountain project to national audiences, portraying him as a playful but serious steward of land and community in a coalfield landscape still shaped by strip mining scars. Reel South+2Rocky Mountain PBS+2
Fire, Loss, and Staying Put
Webb’s career is haunted by fire. In addition to the Tug Valley flood, he suffered a series of suspicious fires that destroyed homes and archives in the 1990s and 2000s, including burns on Pine Mountain that cost him manuscripts, books, and personal papers. Inside NKU+2LINK nky+2
A 2014 profile ahead of a reading from Get In, Jesus notes that friends believed his politics and outspoken criticism of coal company practices likely played a role in those fires. LINK nky Webb himself kept joking and building anyway, piling new flyers, posters, and flamingo statues into the small cabin he lived in on the ridge. Oral history interviews and essays by contemporaries suggest that for Webb, staying put on Pine Mountain was both stubbornness and strategy: if the fight was over what strip mines were doing to the land, he refused to leave that land behind. nunncenter.net+2AVANTAPPAL(ACHIA)+2
Oral Histories and Remembering Jim Webb
Webb died October 22, 2018, at age seventy-three, after decades of work as poet, playwright, radio host, and community organizer. letcherfuneralhomeinc.com+2Find a Grave+2 His obituary from Letcher Funeral Home, the Find A Grave memorial, and local newspaper coverage from The Mountain Eagle and regional TV station WYMT emphasize the same key points: his role at WMMT, his founding work with SAWC and Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and his creation of Wiley’s Last Resort as a place where misfits and intellectuals could gather. Mountain Association+3letcherfuneralhomeinc.com+3https://www.wymt.com+3
Since his death, friends and fellow writers have worked to capture his story in more permanent form. The Louie B. Nunn Center’s Exploring the Legacies of Appalshop oral history project includes long interviews with Webb about his childhood, his move into activism, and his time at Appalshop and WMMT. UKNow+2Kentucky Oral History+2 Appalachian Journal carried J. W. Williamson’s formal “In Memoriam” alongside a “Dispatch from Wiley’s Last Resort,” while Avant Appalachia devoted a special “Jim Webb Is(sue)” to reflections from those who knew him. JSTOR+2dspace.nku.edu+2
Taken together with his poems, radio archives, and surviving plays, these primary sources give future historians and readers a clearer sense of how one mountain poet used every medium he could reach to argue that what is done to the hills is done to the people.
Why Webb Still Matters
Jim Webb’s work pushes against the idea that Appalachian resistance happens only in picket lines or legislative hearings. He shows how a hitchhiking poem, a shy off-grid writers’ cabin, a three-hour radio show full of polkas and “Speaking Your Pieces,” or a kitschy flamingo festival on a reclaimed ridge can all become forms of organizing.
In a time when floods, mine closures, and out-migration keep reshaping the region, Webb’s life offers one model for what it means to stay put without standing still: to keep listening, keep joking, keep editing and broadcasting, and keep inviting people up to the end of the whirled to imagine different futures for the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
“Interview with Jim Webb,” October 20, 2015, Exploring the Legacies of Appalshop Oral History Project (Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky). nunncenter.net+1
Exploring the Legacies of Appalshop Oral History Project digital exhibit (includes Webb’s interviews within a larger Appalshop collection). UKNow+1
Webb, Jim. Get In, Jesus: New & Selected Poems (Wind Publications, 2013). Publisher and bibliographic information summarized in Scott Goebel’s “Jim Webb: A Poet’s Path of Resistance, or The Bigger the Windmill, the Better,” Journal of Kentucky Studies 31. Inside NKU+1
Baber, Bob Henry, and Jim Webb, eds., Mucked (Williamson, WV, 1978), protest-poetry chapbook responding to the 1977 Tug Valley flood. Discussed in Facing South and Goebel’s essay. ScholarWorks+1
Webb, Jim. Elmo’s Haven (play, c. 1979). Background on the play and later writers’ cabin from Bad Branch Institute’s Elmo’s Haven page. M.A.R.S. Collective+1
Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel: Contemporary Appalachian Writing Vol. 2, No. 1, edited by Jim Webb and Gurney Norman, available through used and library sources; general information on the volume appears in regional book listings. Amazon+1
“Ridin’ Around Listenin’ to the Radio” playlists on Spinitron (archived WMMT show logs for Webb/Wiley Quixote). Spinitron+2Spinitron+2
WMMT 88.7 FM – Mountain Community Radio (station site and streaming audio, documenting Webb’s home station). WMMT 88.7+1
Mountain Talk series page at WMMT, which includes an episode that revisits the 1977 Tug Valley flood and incorporates Webb’s oral history recollections. WMMT 88.7+1
Wiley’s Last Resort – Reel South Season 8, Episode 805 (PBS). Reel South+2Rocky Mountain PBS+2
Appalshop news item: “See Our Newest Film, ‘Wiley’s Last Resort’ at Seedtime 2023”. Appalshop
Wiley’s Last Resort official site (history of the property, Webb’s own description of the land, and current stewardship). Wiley’s Last Resort+2Wiley’s Last Resort+2
M.A.R.S. Collective page at Wiley’s Last Resort and Mountain Association story “A Festival & A Nonprofit for ‘Misfits and Intellectuals’”, which document Webb’s campground as a nonprofit hub. Wiley’s Last Resort+1
Obituary for Jim Webb, Letcher Funeral Home. letcherfuneralhomeinc.com+1
Find A Grave memorial for James Watson “Jim” Webb. Find a GraveWYMT story, “Funeral arrangements announced for longtime DJ Jim Webb, ‘Wiley Quixote’”. https://www.wymt.com
Mountain Eagle coverage, including “He’s been ‘speaking pieces’ on local radio for 27 years” and “‘Celebration of life’ will be held here this week in honor of Jim Webb, 73”. The Mountain Eagle+1