To present his 3 wishes, Pete (puppet) begins the show with a 3 minute résumé of what happened, in 3 basic parts, to the beautiful North American continent :

The Region

The southern Appalachian Mountain region  includes east Kentucky and Tennessee, western Virginia and West Virginia, western North and South Carolina, North Alabama and Georgia. It covers 200,000 square miles of mountains, valleys and plateaux. In the northeast lie the Blue Ridge Mountains, and between these two mountain ranges is the Great Appalachian Valley.

Much of this was occupied by Cherokee  Indians for centuries.

Early in the early 17th century, England  suppressed a rebellion in northern Ireland by driving the Irish off their lands and bringing in over 60,000 lowland Scots to replace them. These immigrants were hard working and successful ;  but in the late seventeenth century the English government imposed rigorous sanctions and taxes upon them, and so in the early 18th century these Scotch-Irish began to cross the Atlantic to America, where they settled all along the eastern seaboard. ( at the outbreak of the Revolution, they composed about one-fourth of the entire colonial population)

The Great Appalachian Valley was settled in the first half of the 18th century by very many of these Scots and Irish, as well as English , Germans, some Dutch and French. These were all accepted reluctantly by the Cherokees. In all, some 250,000 people migrated there between 1730 and 1750, taking with them their cultures and traditions.  Reluctant migrants were the African slaves brought to work on the plantations of lowland Virginia and the Carolinas. Though there were fewer of them in the mountain regions,  their traditions of polyrythmic music, the banjo and animal tales were quickly assimilated there.

Thanks to Nick Blanton