“Jeee…zus loves the little chillll—drennn; all the chill—drennn of the world; red, brown, yellow, black and blue; some say he loves a few white folks too”…  Is that the way you remember that little melody? It’s likely to have been commonplace during your youth.   At any rate, that’s not exactly how it went during my youth, but it’s close, on-a-count-a I grew-up on Ball Creek in Southeast Kentucky!

And if you were raised in Kentucky (especially in the southeastern region), you may have wondered why the song didn’t say something like that because you were well aware of the fact that there were blue people; long before the advent of the Smurf’s.  In fact the “blue’s” referenced herein were or are real folks; particularly during the 1950’s and 1960’s who lived in the community known as Lick Branch of Ball; Lower Ball Creek; and the 99 mile long Creek that’s called Troublesome all located within Knott, Perry, and Breathitt Counties of South Eastern Kentucky .

Shortly after a young Frenchman (it’s said he came from the Picardy Provence of France) named James Fugate arrived in Virginia, he married a young lady named Dorothy Petty in 1675. Their 2^nd son, was named Josiah Fugate (1680 – 1759) who setup house keeping with his wife (Mary Martin) on the banks of eastern Kentucky’s Troublesome Creek in present day Breathitt County. A few years later Mary gave birth to a 3^rd son who they named Martin.  

Some years later Martin married a redheaded bride and began a tradition of staying or living in the Troublesome Creek area. Many years later his great-great-great-great grandson (Benjamin Stacy) was born in a hospital just a few hundred yards from the creek banks of Troublesome.

The boy-child inherited his fathers “gangly” features, and a slight nasal tone of speaking from his mother.   What he apparently acquired from his distant grandfather, Josiah Fugate, was dark blue skin. “It was almost purple,” his father recollects.

The doctors were so dumbfounded by the color of little Benjamin Stacy’s skin that they quickly transferred him by ambulance to a medical clinic in Lexington, Kentucky.   After two days of testing procedures, there was no explanation found for his blue colored skin.

The “Lexington” doctors had decided to try a blood transfusion to see if that would help, when Benjamin’s grandmother spoke up. “Have you ever heard of the blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek?” she asked one of the doctors.  

She went on to say: “My grandmother Luna on my dad’s side was a blue Fugate. It was real bad in her.”  Alva Stacy, the boy’s father, later explained: “The doctors finally came to the conclusion that Benjamin’s color was due to ‘blood’ inherited from generations back.”

It turned out that Benjamin’s blue skin tint just went away within a few weeks, and he became about as normal a looking boy as you could find anywhere.  Except that his lips and fingernails continued to turn a shade of purple-blue each time he got cold or angry.

Dark blue lips and fingernails are the only obvious traces of Josiah Fugate’s legacy that’s left; it has been determined that he most likely carried a recessive gene that has resulted in shading many of the Fugate’s, and their kin folk, blue, for more than 300 years.

There has been much speculation up and down the hollows and creeks of east Kentucky about what made the blue people blue; some say heart disease, a lung disorder, or as one old-timer explained the condition: “their blood is just a little closer to the skin.”

A hematologist from the University of Kentucky by the name of Madison Cawein first heard rumors about the blue people when he went to work at the University of Kentucky’s Lexington medical clinic in 1960.  As a result he traveled to Hazard, Kentucky (the county seat of Perry County) in the late 1960’s to try and learn more.  

You see, The American Heart Association had a clinic in Hazard at the time, and it was there Cawein met “a great big nurse” who offered to help.  Her name was Ruth Pendergrass; and yes her “shots” were dreaded by  many a Perry County grade school student, like myself, and yes she was a very large woman.

Ms Pendergrass had been trying to promote an interest in the medical community regarding blue people since the early 60’s after a dark blue woman had walked into the county health department one cold winter afternoon and asked for a blood test… “She had been out in the cold and she was just blue!” recalled Pendergrass.  “She told me (Ms Pendergrass) that her family was the blue Combs’ who lived up on Ball Creek and that she was a sister to one of the Blue Fugate women.”

To make a really long story short, after several years of investigating numerous blue people in the area, including Ritchie’s, Combs’s, Stacy’s, and Fugate’s; Dr. Cawein finally determined that the disorder was caused by an extremely rare condition of possessing two recessive genes that can only be passed on to another when both the biological father and biological mother “carry” the recessive gene.

Here’s the simplified version of the “condition’: If only your father or mother carries this particular gene it is passed on to their sons and daughters with no disquieting effects at all . . . But in the extremely rare event that your father and your mother both carry the notorious “blue” gene, then you wind up with two (2) such genes; one from each parent. When this happens, there is a pretty good chance (1 in 4) that you will be blue.

Some self-professed Fugate “family tree” specialists argue that Martin Fugate who lived until 1759 and described herein as being one of Josiah Fugate’s sons was himself blue.  But there is no written record of it.  However there is written record that 4 of Martin’s 7 children were blue (see intro image).

Still, it’s a mystery which set of parents: Josiah & wife Mary Martin, or possibly Martin Fugate and his wife Mary Elizabeth Smith, that spawned the “blue people syndrome”.

Regardless, the odds against such a union are so high that they are said to be incalculable, but Martin (or Josiah) Fugate managed to find and marry a woman who carried the same recessive gene which created a long line of blue people.

By the way, the medical name given to the condition is methemoglobinemia; the term is pronounced: met′hē·mə·glō·bə′nē·mē·ə and is often described as a blood disorder in which an abnormal amount of methemoglobin, which is a form of hemoglobin that’s produced. Hemoglobin is the molecule in red blood cells that distributes oxygen to the body. In methemoglobinemia, the hemoglobin is unable to release oxygen effectively to the various body tissues.

Sources: