Near Greenup, Ky., where the Appalachian foothills meet the broad Ohio River bottomland, the subject was heritage, but the country under discussion at the moment was Greece.

The Hillbilly has become a new tradition. Nearly everyone in the state has heard of it and it's quoted often. But its sagging circulation proves more people quote it than subscribe to it.

"Mountain music will set you free" is a popular message on tee shirts this summer in Appalachia.

"And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover."

St. Mark 16:17,18 (KJV)

The four people whose paths have crossed on The Knob are building an extrapolation of the old Appalachian culture. They are choosing the best of the old ways as building blocks for a society based on independence, self-sufficiency and peaceful co-habitation with delicate Appalachian eco-systems.

Two hundred years have passed since the first white settlers made their early arduous steps into the Appalachian wilderness, but those two centuries have brought America no closer to understanding the people of the Appalachian culture than when the culture was born.

S.D. Courville is anything but a militant. He's a furniture salesman, a fiddler, and a Cajun, but he's not a militant.

Yet, a southern Louisiana movement that borders on militancy makes him feel good about who he La. For the first time in his 70 years People outside his "home country" are applauding his music. And in his native region, he is encouraged to speak French; an irony in that one of his early schoolteachers punished him for speaking his mother tongue.

James Domengeaux, an aging Lafayette attorney, pounded the cluttered desk in his office a stone's throw from one of Louisiana's most impressive cathedrals.

George Rodrigue paints pictures of ghosts.

They hover in his dark Louisiana landscapes, suspended between heaven and earth, not really belonging to this life or the life hereafter.

Saturday night isn't quiet in southern Louisiana.

The sounds of accordions, guitars, fiddles and triangles pierce the air from Houma to Lake Charles, from the tiny French Casino Bar at Mamou to the bigger nightclubs in and around Lafayette.

The Cajuns of southern Louisiana and the mountain people of Appalachia know very little about their heritage. The fact that their histories, customs and traditions are locked away in the past has had a profound impact on the present status of their decaying cultures.

James Domengeaux — Cajun by birth and preference — leaned back in his chair in his Lafayette, La., law office.

"After all," he said, "isn't this what America is all about? I mean freedom. Freedom to be a Cajun, to live the Cajun life without being ashamed of it. Without being forced into the mold that so much of America has been forced into. Why shouldn't I be a Cajun if I want to be? And why shouldn't I be relatively sure that no one, especially the government, is going to take any sanctions against me because of who I am?"