Step into Eastern Kentucky’s Carcassonne Community Center, home to the state’s longest-running square dance, and explore Appalachia’s rich musical and cultural heritage as Sound Files visits Appalshop and tours their archives in Whitesburg, Kentucky. This episode highlights the resilience of Appalachian culture through powerful stories and music—from coal miners’ ballads to local storytellers—and the urgent work to save fragile archives. It’s a tribute to how music and storytelling connect generations and sustain a community’s identity through times of change.
Step into Eastern Kentucky’s Carcassonne Community Center, home to the state’s longest-running square dance, and explore Appalachia’s rich musical and cultural heritage. Join Leo Shannon and the Appalachian Film Workshop as they preserve rare recordings and stories that keep this vibrant tradition alive amid challenges like flooding and funding cuts.
This episode highlights the resilience of Appalachian culture through powerful stories and music—from coal miners’ ballads to local storytellers—and the urgent work to save fragile archives. It’s a tribute to how music and storytelling connect generations and sustain a community’s identity through times of change.
Credits:
Jesse Johnston, creator of Sound Files and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, hosts the podcast. Teresa Carey is the senior producer, editor, and creative lead for Morse Alpha Studios, which produced this podcast. Writing is by Ashley Hamer Pritchard, editing by Jacob Pinter, and sound engineering by Steve Lack. Original music by Evan Haywood.
Host: This is the Carcassonne Community Center in Kentucky, home of the longest running community-sponsored square dance in the state. It's been taking place once a month, every month since 1969. But the dance, and the music, is much older.
Leo Shannon: I'm really into like creating music that's involves looking into the past and trying to like feel the things from the past in the present I guess.
Host: That's Leo Shannon, a musician who can often be seen playing fiddle or banjo as the Carcassonne square dancers circle the floor. Even though Leo carries on a Kentucky tradition … he’s not from here. He grew up playing Bluegrass and Old Time music in Seattle, until the Appalachians began calling his name.
Leo Shannon: I think this place in particular like Eastern Kentucky is a place where the past is felt more intensely than it is in maybe in cities like where things are changing so constantly.
Host: Leo's day job is spent preserving that past. Just down the road in Whitesburg, Kentucky sits the Appalachian Film Workshop, also known as Appalshop. Leo is the archive collections manager. With more than 30,000 items, including music, films, photographs, and folk art, the Appalshop archive may be the largest collection of Appalachian media in the world.
Leo Shannon: There's some old Appalshop archive recordings of this square dance and, uh, Lee Sexton and Marian Sumner playing at this square dance. And all the guys up there they like, they knew Lee and, uh, Morgan, who was Lee's Uncle, Morgan Sexton, one of my very favorite musicians of all time. He's buried up in this graveyard, on the road up to Carcassonne so it's like, the stuff is in the archive, you know, digitally and physically, but also it's like in people's lives still. Like everybody knows these people.
Host: The importance of these archives reaches far beyond Eastern Kentucky. The stories, music, and art preserved here are part of the nation's shared history. A stark reminder of the importance, and fragility, of preserving this history came when this archive was threatened by a natural disaster, reminding us that what happens in one community can resonate across the entire country.
Host: In 2022, a devastating flood put all of that history at risk. People in the community and organizations across the country took quick action to save what they could. But the rescue work isn't over. Appalshop faces other threats, as government funding for culture and the arts has been reduced, or in some cases stripped away altogether … leaving cultural treasures like these in Appalachia in danger of being lost forever.
Host: I’m Jesse Johnston, and you’re listening to Sound Files… a podcast about the preservation of recorded sounds supported by the National Recording Preservation Foundation. We’re hoping the podcast offers our listeners a chance to hear some of the amazing stories preserved in audio, as well as to meet some of the people involved in helping to give us new ways to preserve and access these sounds! In this episode… Settle in and let the timeless echoes of rural America fill your senses.
We’re exploring the sounds of Appalachia – an American culture that's often been disregarded and underestimated.
We’ll learn how a vast collection of Appalachian sounds resonates far beyond this Great Valley Region.
Host: In the 1960s, folks in Kentucky and other parts of the Appalachians had a problem. The media had plenty of stories about the Appalachians … and the people who lived there. But most of those stories came from outsiders.
Chad Hunter: Appalshop started as a way for youth in the region to tell their own stories, rather than have other people from other parts of the country tell their stories for them, which often was done with stereotypes.
Host: That's Chad Hunter, director and co-founder of the Appalshop Archive.
Chad Hunter: So, this was a way to get film equipment into the hands of the youth of the area, to teach them how to shoot film, how to tell stories, how to do editing.
Host: In the 1960s, a group called the Community Film Workshop Council funded job training programs to teach film production across the country. In 1969, the Council set its sights on the Appalachians. It hired Bill Richardson, a Yale graduate who moved from Connecticut to Whitesburg – a town of 1,200 along Kentucky’s eastern border.
With the help of federal grant funding … Richardson’s workshop began to attract young creators. By 1975, youth at Appalshop were creating art, music, theater, photography, and other creative work. They founded a roadside theater, a literary journal, a community radio station, and even a record label: June Appel Recordings, which has put out more than a hundred albums of traditional music.
Host: Eventually, the need to preserve all these materials became clear.
Host: In 2005, Chad moved to Whitesburg to start sorting through everything.
Chad Hunter: When I went down to help start up sort of the official archive at Appalshop, I found films and audio tapes, and you can name it up in the rafters. That's where they were located in the Appalshop building, in staff people's offices, in their homes. It was everywhere.
Host: The three-story Appalshop building was first an RC Bottling plant. It has weathered wood paneling and rustic charm, making it blend right in with the landscape just outside downtown Whitesburg, where it is perched beside the North Fork of the Kentucky River.
You can feel the history in the air. The place has this authentic, raw vibe—like every board and beam has a story to tell. It’s got that old industrial backbone, but it’s been transformed into something alive with creativity.
When Bill Richardson bought it back in 1979, it was actually one of the biggest buildings in town—a real landmark. And its million-dollar renovation told the town that Appalshop was here for the long haul.
Chad Hunter: Beautiful building. It had many film editing suites, offices. Had a performance theater where Appalshop had regular bluegrass, it's called, it was called Bluegrass Express Live, bluegrass performances, that were extremely popular. And then on that same floor was WMMT, the Community Radio Station Studio, where people would come in and sign up to be volunteer DJs and have their own radio programs. So that's on the, that main floor. There were actually two more radio studios up on the second floor, where everything that was prerecorded, um, would be made there and including production of some of Appalshop's June Appal recordings, our record label.
Host: One of the young people who got to know Appalshop … was Derek Mullins. Derek grew up in Eastern Kentucky.
Derek Mullins: I was born and raised here. My dad's, well, he's a retired coal miner.
Derek Mullins: When I was a kid, I didn't care at all about local music, like I didn't care at all about old-time music. I didn't care about bluegrass. They never taught like local history in school. They never really taught us like local music in school. In a lot of ways, I was ignorant of my culture. But that was by design.
Host: Besides Derek’s dad, there were a lot of coal miners around here. And in time, Derek began to see how disregard for local culture … could lead to disregard for the people who created it.
Derek Mullins: Especially living in like an extractive community. Like when you live in like a, like a coal mining community like this to where it's like, if you can convince everybody that the culture isn't worth anything, then what does it matter that you're blowing up mountains?
Derek Mullins: What does it matter that you're giving like all of these people health problems? What does it matter that you're poisoning? What, like, you know, like if you can really devalue the culture or if you can at least take that away from people locally, then it kind of makes people give up the fight a lot easier, because it's like, okay, well this is worthless.
Derek Mullins: Like we're worthless people. Like this is a worthless thing.
Host: Derek’s outlook started to change once Appalshop gave him more control over his own story … and stories of the other people around him. When he was a teenager, Derek worked with Appalshop’s Appalachian media program.
Derek Mullins: I made a documentary about snake handling churches, and, I just really enjoyed the experience and like, you know, I just wanted to stick around Appalshop. I was supposed to be there for like, maybe like four months, and I ended up being there like eight years.
Derek Mullins: A community becomes dangerous when they understand their culture. 'Cause then you have something to fight for.
Host: Coal mining has left a deep imprint on the culture of this community – especially its music. Some of the first recordings made by Appalshop’s record label came from coal miners themselves. Like this, from Nimrod Workman.
Chad Hunter: Nimrod Workman was a coal miner. He had black lung. He was a ballad singer.
Host: Nimrod Workman was born in Eastern Kentucky in 1895. He started working in the coal mines when he was just 14 years old.
Nimrod’s family was full of musicians, and he picked up banjo and songwriting.
By the 1970s … when he had retired from being a coal miner … Nimrod’s music had earned him roles in a few Hollywood movies.
Chad Hunter: He appeared in Harlan County, USA, I think he makes an appearance in Coal Miner's Daughter. He's singing Amazing Grace at the funeral scene.
Host: Nimrod’s ballads reflected life for Appalachian coal miners – and a slice of history that might otherwise be lost.
In 1921, tension between miners and mine owners in West Virginia exploded into a frenzy of violence. Dozens of coal miners began a shootout with local law enforcement who were allied with the mine owners. The fighting lasted for days, with each side firing rifles and gatling guns. The local sheriff even dropped bombs on the miners from airplanes. The hostilities finally ended when federal troops intervened … which the miners took as a sign of victory, because it would force the sheriff to stop denying their constitutional rights.
Today, that fight is called the Battle of Blair Mountain. And Nimrod Workman was there—taking up arms to fight for his fellow coal miners.
Chad Hunter: Appalshop wrote a grant through the NEA to launch June Appal recordings, our record label. And June Appal won. The very first recording was of Nimrod Workman. It was called To Fit Our Own Category.
Chad Hunter: It is a really beautiful record. He's singing and talking about unions and miners' rights and black lung. It's a really great album.
Host: Just this year, in 2025, Appalshop's Nimrod Workman collection was named to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress.
Host: Appalshop is full of recordings from people like this—capturing the lives and music of people who might otherwise have gone unheard. According to Leo Shannon … banjo player Morgan Sexton is a perfect example.
Leo Shannon: Morgan spent his whole life mostly playing by himself, just like on his porch or wherever.
Leo Shannon: So his nephew, his younger nephew, Lee was like maybe a lot more gregarious, seems like, and was kind of just, like, out performing and playing and just like a big personality. He would talk about having learned music from his Uncle Morgan. And then at some point somebody, uh, realized that Morgan was still alive and some folks from Appalshop went out and, and found him and befriended him, and he ended up recording two albums with June Appal Records.
Host: Those recordings led to him winning a National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In fact, the NEA described Morgan’s fingerpicking technique as “liquid and serene … each melody using its own particular tuning in the old-fashioned way.”
Leo Shannon: And now like his music has spread all over the world. Like people, I've met people in California who remember hearing him play and like Lori Lewis, who's a great bluegrass musician out there. She was telling me about hearing Morgan play Little Birdie and she just broke down in tears, even thinking about this like 20-year-old memory of this man playing.
Host: In all, Appalshop’s record label has released almost 100 albums. And it's not just music. Derek Mullins says the Appalshop archive is also home to a wealth of spoken word and storytelling from the region.
Derek Mullins: I think another part about the archive is that like this is a storytelling based community. Is there a James Joyce here? Uh, there's a couple of people I could put up against him. That's not to say that we haven't produced that kind of material, but at the end of the day it's like, it's a storytelling community.
Host: Ray Hicks was one such storyteller. He was most known for his "Jack" tales, similar to the Jack who climbed beanstalks and slayed giants, but with a more Appalachian bent.
Depending on the story, Jack would outwit thieves, witches, or ogres … often with the help of magic.
Hicks had about 50 of these tales in his repertoire, some of which he learned from his grandfather and some he conceived himself.
Derek Mullins: Having something like Appalshop, you're catching all those talkers. That's something that could easily be lost. It could be so easily lost. You know, because it's just like the spur of the moment.
Host: These audio treasures sat in the Appalshop archives alongside films, photographs, and folk art, much of which had yet to be digitized and represented the world's only copies. They were protected in a climate-controlled vault on the ground floor of the building.
Their location along the Kentucky River was prime real estate, just a few blocks from city hall. But a few years ago, disaster struck:
Chad Hunter: In July of 2022, um, I started seeing notifications, uh, my phone started blowing up that Appalshop, the entire building, had been flooded. Eastern Kentucky experienced a one in 1000 years flood.
Host: By then, Chad Hunter had actually left Appalshop. Even though the new archive director took the lead on the ground … Chad returned to help with the aftermath.
Chad Hunter: I went down, three or four days after the flood and just jumped into work. It was a terrible mess.
Leo Shannon: Yeah, it was crazy [laughs].
Host: Leo Shannon remembers the first days combing through the mess.
Leo Shannon: Very kind of like meticulous, stinky. It's like everything is disgusting and to try to save anything you have to like, yeah, do all this stuff. And also, honestly, it's hard to be working on tapes and media when there's like so much suffering happening around and it's like, that's my job.
Leo Shannon: And it's like, we need to do these things. But like there's so much more important stuff in a way that's happening like right next door. People were hit really bad. People are still, their lives are completely messed up from just that one flood.
Leo Shannon: That was definitely a moment for me of like, you see why this stuff is really important, but also it has to be more than just media. Like it has to make that leap into human lives.
Host: Once they had done what they could for their neighbors, the archivists turned their attention to the vault. The flood had churned up nearly anything that wasn’t nailed down, so it took a few days to clear out the entrance and make a path to the vault doors.
Also … flood water often carries feces, caustic chemicals, and other unknown contaminants. So everything was caked in toxic mud. The staff had to get tetanus shots to protect themselves before they started cleaning.
Host: But finally, after days of work, Chad says they opened the doors to the vault.
Chad Hunter: It was as bad as we expected. I think maybe 85% of the collections in the vault had been underwater. And so about 15% on the very top of the shelves weren't. But the problem was the power went down and well this is July in eastern Kentucky, and humidity levels soared.
Chad Hunter: And so, we knew that this was gonna be detrimental to the collection in addition to having been underwater. So, after a few days started to remove materials from the vault and simultaneously making phone calls to experts in the field.
Host: Derek remembers that at first … the extent of the damage didn’t really sink in.
Derek Mullins: It was devastating. It really was, it was devastating. Once the shock wore off, then it's like, oh God, wait. Like what have we lost? Like what can we save? You know, that all of a sudden like, here's this historical asset, that's so important to this community. And this is our history, mine and yours. So you lost things in the flood.
Derek Mullins: A lot of the times people wanna say American history and I, I get that, but it's not American history, it's our history. These types of collections, I think that they're like just so important because it's our history, you know? It shapes us as a country, like it shapes us as communities.
Host: People from all over the area showed up to help—including some of the filmmakers whose films were at risk in the archive.
Appalshop got ahold of refrigerated trucks, where they could store some items while they figured out what to do with them.
Chad says volunteers formed long chains, sometimes up to 30 people long … like a bucket brigade passing boxes and film reels out to the trucks.
Chad Hunter: We had protective devices and, and respirators and such. Everyone had on these white coveralls, and gloves.
Chad Hunter: So there were people all the way in to the vaults, in the back of the building and high humidity and temperatures in there. We had some big fans in there that was moving, air around and trying to dry things off.
Chad Hunter: So then that would extend out, all the way out through the loading dock into the parking lot and all the way up into the trucks.
Host: Beyond that … it wasn’t clear what the next steps should be. The Appalshop team had done plenty to preserve materials damaged by age, but never by flooding. They called in just about every expert they could, and in the end it turned out that every type of media had different approaches to keep it from deteriorating.
Host: Film preservation experts told them to keep the films wet, since if they dried out the emulsion could crack and separate from the film carrier. Photography experts told them to keep their photo negatives frozen until they could be handled in a lab.
Host: The reel-to-reel audio tapes posed other preservation challenges. They didn’t need to be frozen, but they still needed to be dried, cleaned, and cared for. All of these materials required attention soon, as the longer they remained wet and out of climate-controlled storage, the more possible it was for mold to grow in the Kentucky humidity, and other problems to set in.
The audio recordings on reel-to-reel tapes faced threats of degradation and many would require specialized treatment before they could be played again.
Chad Hunter: There's something called sticky shed syndrome. If you've ever looked at a cassette tape, you'll see the brown oxide material that's on the tape itself.
Chad Hunter: If you start to see bubbling or flaking of that brown oxide material, that means that if you put it up on a reel to reel player and digitize it, it could come off the entire way through while you're playing it. And so you'll lose the tape completely.
Chad Hunter: Prior to the flood, and this is, you know, 20 years ago when I was there, we used food dehydrators, in which you would take a, you know, it's like a spool of film, but it has a quarter inch audio on it. And you would put them in a food dehydrator and, you know, essentially bake it for 24 hours overnight. And then do a little testing and see how it feels.
Chad Hunter: If it looks like it's stable, if it's not flaking off, you would immediately run it with the idea being that you're gonna get one chance at this, one pass. So you put it up and you digitize it right after you're done baking it and, uh, hoping for the best that you're gonna capture it.
Host: Every mud-caked reel had to be cleaned, then baked, then digitized. Then dirt would inevitably get on that equipment, which itself would have to be cleaned for the next recording. If they were going to digitize the collection before it degraded in the Kentucky humidity, they were going to need a professional lab. So they shipped some of their highest-priority reels to be digitized by a specialist in North Carolina. Leo Shannon says most of the audio and video materials turned out fine.
Leo Shannon: So far, a lot of the audio and most of the video has been pretty fine. Like the magnetic material is still intact and, sometimes there's funkiness 'cause it's been sitting in mud for a few years. But it's been very inspiring and informative for what materials last and like. If we had, I mean, any like hard drive that got thrown in the river is completely toast. But, apparently tape is very resilient.
Host: Still, they couldn't send everything at once. Chad and the Appalshop team had to make some tough choices about which recordings to prioritize and which could wait for later.
Chad Hunter: I remember early on, my colleague Caroline was just scrolling through all the lists of the material and being like, this is important. This is important.
Chad Hunter: You know, we have, tapes that are associated with numerous National Heritage Award winners, interviews, field recordings of performances, performances at our Annual festival called Seed Time on the Cumberland.
Chad Hunter: It was easy to start targeting all of those performances and just saying, you know, we gotta save these.
Chad Hunter: And then there was a whole bunch of materials, we just didn't know what it was. It wasn't, you know, accurately described and they would've been over time, you know, as we looked at them and digitized them. And so, we were just looking for things that resonated with us based on um, what we knew about Appalshop's work over the years and also just taking some chances. Hey, this sounds interesting. Let's throw that in there.
Host: That was one unexpected result of the flood: old recordings that might have lain unheard in the vaults for years to come now had to be brought out to be digitized, listened to, and heard afresh by new audiences.
Some of the discoveries in the archive even came as a surprise to the people who work at Appalshop.
Leo Shannon: So there's this one recording I found of the Foghorn String Band. They kind of come from the northwest. Like I came up listening to their music and seeing them play around at festivals. They began as a Portland based band. And really kicked off a whole generation of like young punks who started playing old time music and really like, created a regional sound in Portland.
Leo Shannon: They toured all over the world and came and played on Bluegrass Express in the Appalshop theater. And I was so excited to hear these people play in this place that I live now. I mean, people loved, like you can hear the crowd is so into it. Their music is very just kind of like, bumping old times string band music that like, feels like a freight train. Anyway, there's this part of the end of the concert where I think it's Buck Maggard who he's like announcing and he's like…
Willard Hall: Would you come out and bring your friends and neighbors and everything?
Leo Shannon: Oh, will you come back and, and bring your friends and neighbors?
Leo Shannon: And it kind of like made me tear up a little. 'Cause it's like, oh yeah, now I'm here.
Host: But as they worked through their flooded collections, finding hidden gems here and there, the urgency of the situation hung heavy. They just didn't have time to go through it all. The longer these materials stayed out in the air—or even in refrigerated trucks, which were burning diesel by the second—the more likely it was that the archival materials would degrade beyond saving.
Chad Hunter: And so we approached numerous archives, at the federal level. Also, private archives, commercial archives.
Chad Hunter: We tried to find someone who would be willing to partner with us to store our flood damage collections until we could raise further funding to work on them. You know, it wasn't a huge surprise. Nobody was really interested because who wants to introduce dirty, contaminated items into their clean vaults and potentially expose their own collections to it.
Chad Hunter: But, we were desperate to save these collections. 'Cause if they just sat out in the open air, they would be rotten within a few weeks. And so, we needed somebody to help us.
Host: Finally, Appalshop did find help. This came in a number of forms, including generous grants from The Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Save America’s Treasures grant from the National Park Service. In addition, the National Recording Preservation Foundation stepped in in 2023, with a grant to support the preservation of critical audio collections. And other organizations offered services: Appalshop obtained space from a company called Iron Mountain – which has an ultra-secure, specialized storage facility in Pennsylvania 200 feet below ground, where it is protected from natural disasters and climate controlled.
Chad Hunter: They are probably the largest commercial storage private company in the US if not the world.
Chad Hunter: Uh, they recognize the value of our collections, the historical and cultural value of our collections and stepped up, partnered with us, and, have provided, donated really deep cold temperature and humidity storage for us.
Chad Hunter: Without that we probably would've lost the collection. That's not to say that they're not degrading in, in those vaults. They are actually, and there's evidence of it. Uh, we pulled some tapes for a particular film called Coal Mining Women several months back and compare all of the tapes that we had on it.
Chad Hunter: We were looking for the best copy of it, and some of them were degrading. And so that's gonna be happening more and more over time. But, you know, we've bought time with the storage.
Host: Appalshop will never be able to come home to its old building—it won't be safe from future floods without some major renovation, and even then, nothing could be kept on the first floor. For now, Appalshop occupies offices above a Dollar General in Jenkins, Kentucky, just a few miles down the road from Whitesburg. But they have plans for something more permanent.
Chad Hunter: 500 feet above those offices in Jenkins, Kentucky is a historic hospital.
Chad Hunter: In fact, one of our filmmakers, Herbie Smith, was born in that hospital. It has been decaying for decades. But it's got a prominent place in the history of Jenkins and it's very well protected from any future flooding. And so we were able to purchase that. And we have dreams of creating a, a new facility up there that's gonna house the archive and maybe some other things up there eventually. We're dreaming about it and we wanna hear back from, um, the Jenkins community, to, find out what they would like as part of that building in the future.
Host: This new facility will help Appalshop continue to preserve the history of Appalachia.
But Appalshop is not just a building—it's the work and the people. And that work is still at risk.
Appalshop has received federal funding going back to the early 1970s.
In the aftermath of the 2022 flood, the team had relied on federal grants to send their flooded materials to facilities that could digitize them before they decayed.
But in 2025 … the federal government canceled several different grants that funded parts of Appalshop’s work.
The problem is bigger than Appalshop. Similar funding cutbacks threaten support for preservation in libraries, archives, and cultural organizations across the board. And the cutbacks put Appalshop in a tight spot.
Chad Hunter: So those materials, yes, we're in the same boat as a lot of other organizations and institutions and archives around the country. What is different for us is that our materials were flooded and they are much higher at risk to degrade than other collections. And so they are sitting on shelves right now, degrading and waiting for further funding to help preserve them.
Chad Hunter: And so that's what we're charged with. That's what we're facing is to try to make up for some of those funds and to get creative and to try to figure out how to clean and transfer as much as we can.
Host: With the help of Appalshop, these jewels of Appalachian culture are still available today.
And the people who grew up in these mountains can still pass them down.
Derek Mullins grew up not caring about Appalachian music.
But after working with Appalshop, he sees his roots in a new way.
Derek Mullins: Those are all of the songs that, like when people came here, they held onto 'em as tight as they could hold onto 'em because it reminded them of the old country, or it reminded them of the culture that they left behind so that they could come to America and have a better life.
Derek Mullins: And that makes it even more important as I see it, because it, it's like, you know, like that's a piece of you that like you're not going to leave behind. So it's like one of those things, you know, like I can leave the mountain. Like, and I have, you know, I've lived all over the place. Like I can leave the mountains, but as long as I hold, hold onto those stories, as long as I hold onto those songs, the mountains never leave me.
Host: The Sound Files podcast is presented by the National Recording Preservation Foundation, an independent nonprofit established by the Library of Congress, with generous support from the University of Michigan School of Information and other NRPF supporters.
To learn more about the Foundation, visit us at recordingpreservation.org, where you learn about other organizations that have received support from the NRPF. Or, you can make a donation to support our preservation programs.
The Sound Files senior producer and editor is Teresa Carey, with writer Ashley Hamer Pritchard, script editor Jacob Pinter, and sound engineer Steve Lack. With original music by Evan Haywood.
I’m Jesse Johnston, creator of Sound Files and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information.
Remember: every sound tells a story—so let’s keep preserving them.