Wayne Winkler, the director of the WETS-FM 89.5 MHz radio station, can recall a time in his childhood where he would return to Sneedville when school was out and enjoy an outdoor drama about a disenfranchised group of people.
These people are the Melungeons, which his family shares ancestry with. Winkler gained interest in his family lineage after discussing their heritage with his mother. This quest for knowledge inspired the writing of two books, his most recent being “Beyond the Sunset: The Melungeon Outdoor Drama, 1969-1976.”
The outdoor drama featured a cast with a variety of people. It included students from universities such as Carson-Newman and the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, as well as Volunteers In Service To America volunteers.
“I started doing interviews with people who were cast members,” Winkler said. “Several of those people had been VISTA workers in Hancock County during the summer of 1969 …When I interviewed them, this perspective of people who were completely unfamiliar with Hancock County came in and were working and wound up being a part of this drama.”
“It just became an amazing story, a lot more inspirational,” Winkler said. “To see these people from Hancock County who had absolutely no experience, no familiarity with any aspect of show business … and they managed to do it.”
He said that the drama inspired the change in the connotation of the word Melungeon from being negative to positive.
“It used to mean something, not just your ethnic background, but it was sort of your socioeconomic standing as well,” Winkler said. “When the outdoor drama started, that attitude began to change when people started acknowledging their own Melungeon heritage, and the rest of the county at one time did not want to talk about it. … By the time the play ended, there were signs as you went into the county, ‘Welcome to Hancock County: Home of the Melungeons.’”
In Winkler’s pride of his own history, he wants to inspire others to learn about their ethnic background.
“One of the remarkable things is that there were about 200 similar groups living in the United States, primarily in the Southeastern United States of mixed ethnic background. None of those groups are identified today,” Winkler said. “No one knows of their history really, particularly the people who are descended from them, but the Melungeons do. I contended that it is directly because of this play and the change in attitude that came about because of that.”
The book is available through Amazon or through the Mercer University Press website, www.mupress.org.
