Crankie Power: Turning the Pages of Appalachia

If you've spent any time in Virginia's Appalachian towns, never mind lived there, you have heard ballads--songs about real people and their real life struggles and dreams. These story songs are composed of short stanzas and are essential conduits in the passing of history and culture across generations. Beyond their role as conduits though, ballads are keepsakes of the Appalachian spirit and ethic .

Another keepsake that has kept the ballads relevant in modern Appalachia is the crankie (aka krankie). Catherine Schrenker has the insider perspective on how crankies are intertwined with the culture. As Director of the Henderson School of Applachian Arts in Marion, Virginia, Schrenker has not only intently studied, but also presented and preserved those keepsakes through an array of hands-on experiences ranging from guitar building to stained glass and mosaic construction to soap and quilt making, a working letterpress print shop and beyond at The Henderson. And the artifacts produced from those experiences continue passing on stories worth sharing and remembering.

Schrenker describes the crankie as a kind of "Appalachian motion picture." It existed before electricity with the first wave of Scotch-Irish immigrants to the region and embodies two key principles of that lifestyle. One is economy; the other portability. The portability comes in using swaths of either decorated fabric, like a quilt, or paper rolled up on both ends like a scroll. The scroll can be easily carried from place to place, even stored inside a box, or whatever is being used as a performance stage.

To work the crankie, the storyteller installs the scroll in the box and turns the "pages" by slowly cranking the scroll so one scene of a story or stanza of a ballad are revealed in the frame at a time. And the economy comes from using old suitcases or dresser drawers for stages, Schrenker explained. "You never threw anything away." The idea was that if something was no longer useful in its original form, you found a way to repurpose it into something else that would be useful.

Besides its value as a portable and economical art form, the crankie also "fires every aspect of the brain," Schrenker noted. It combines the visual, auditory, mechanical and kinetic experience of animation, while also tapping into both creative and critical sides of the brain in problem solving to make a complete art form, she explained.

Combining her professional background in graphic design and communication with her experience of the craft culture of Southwest Virginia, Schrenker brings a unique perspective to the value of crankies not only in storytelling but also in our experience of communication in general. "I had seen Elizabeth Laprelle's quilt crankies and envisoned creating the crankie with typography, " Schrenker recalled. "It's a touchstone to the way things were" but it's also a way to preserve [and reignite] what we've lost in our digital culture. " So, in that sense the crankie reconnects our modern brain with a more sensory experience of communication--not unlike touching the keys of a typewriter to bring each word--each letter to life. There was a pause as I could see the wheels turning for Schrenker. "That's the power of the crankie."