Don't Go Up Kettle Creek is a historical portrayal of a river and the people who made their living along its banks and tributaries. Drawing upon the personal recollections and oral traditions of longtime residents, William Lynwood Montell describes a century and a half of life in the Upper Cumberland.

Montell organized his material according to the topics that dominated his tape-recorded conversations with residents of the area -- farming, logging and rafting, steamboating, the Civil War -- topics that the people themselves saw as important in their history. In reconstructing this past, the author also illuminates the relationship between geographic and economic factors in the region; the prolonged effects of a cataclysmic event, the Civil War, on this isolated area; and the impact of modernization on the traditional ways of the people.

First published in 1983, this book is now available in paperback for the first time. Included with this edition is a new foreword in which Montell and Mary Robbins, executive director of the Tennessee Upper Cumberland Tourism Association, describe changes in the area that have occurred since the book's initial appearance.