Qualla: Johnson County, Kentucky

Johnson County, Kentucky: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. If you wanted to measure American country music by the highway it came off of, you would draw a line down U.S. Route 23 through eastern Kentucky and trace your finger along the holler creeks that empty into the Levisa Fork. Within thirty miles of Johnson County's courthouse in Paintsville, the dirt produced Loretta Lynn, her younger sister Crystal Gayle, songwriter Jim Ford, bluegrass star Hylo Brown, and Chris Stapleton. Tyler Childers went to Paintsville High. There are 22,680 people in Johnson County as of the 2020 census. The Smithsonian could fill an exhibit just with the songs they wrote.

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Johnson County, Kentucky: A County Named for a Vice President

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Kentucky General Assembly carved Johnson County out of Floyd, Lawrence, and Morgan counties in February 1843 and named it for Richard Mentor Johnson - a colonel in the War of 1812 who later served as Vice President under Martin Van Buren. By the time the county was formed, Pa...

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Johnson County, Kentucky: Mayo and the Coal

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HiB2Bornot2B at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Then John C. C. Mayo arrived. A schoolteacher with a sharp mind for property law, Mayo spent the 1880s and 1890s riding the hollers of eastern Kentucky buying broad-form deeds from mountain farmers - paying small sums for the mineral rights under their farms while leaving the sur...

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Johnson County, Kentucky: The Country Music Highway

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steven Williamson (HiB2Bornot2B) - talk ▓▒░ Go Big Blue! ░▒▓, Public domain. Loretta Webb was born in 1932 in Butcher Hollow, just up the road from Van Lear. Her father was a coal miner. Crystal, her youngest sister, was born in Paintsville itself in 1951. Loretta married Doolittle Lynn at fifteen and moved away, but the songs she wrote came from this cou...

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Image: Steven Williamson (HiB2Bornot2B) - talk ▓▒░ Go Big Blue! ░▒▓ | Public domain

Johnson County, Kentucky: Jenny Wiley's Long Walk

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HiB2Bornot2B at English Wikipedia, Public domain. In 1789, A multi-tribal raiding party — Cherokee, Shawnee, Wyandot, and Delaware — attacked the Wiley family cabin in what is now Virginia, killing several of Jenny Wiley's children and carrying her into captivity. She escaped after eleven months and eventually settled in Johnson...

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Image: HiB2Bornot2B at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Johnson County, Kentucky: What the County Holds

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. Johnson County is a Republican county now - reliably so, with only Bill Clinton ever winning a plurality in modern times and Lyndon Johnson losing to Goldwater by twenty-two votes in 1964. It is also a moist county, dry except inside Paintsville's city limits. Stuffley Knob, at 1...

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Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0