West Virginians are known world-wide for their talent and skill in folk music whether that’s instrumental or vocal. Sadly - and oddly - they are all often but unheard of in the towns from where they came.
Passionate about helping communities tell their stories and promote themselves using music-based resources, West Virginia University’s Chris Haddox wants to put these folk singers on the map - literally.
Haddox is an associate professor of sustainable design and will use a National Coal Heritage Authority grant to help him discover, uncover and showcase the rich folk music traditions that flourished in the coalfields of West Virginia and show there is more to coalfield culture than, well, coal.
“My interest is more in the everyday person and their everyday music that, in some cases, has ended up influencing folk musicians around the globe. I’m not talking about the well known musicians like Bill Withers or Little Jimmy Dickens,” he explained. “What about Kate Toney? Kate Toney was this woman who, in 1940, recorded 85 unaccompanied ballads for a musicologist here at the university. Her collection of songs is second to none on the planet.”
That WVU musicologist was Louis Watson Chappell who went around southern West Virginia
in the 1940’s recording the older generation who still sang folk songs. Toney’s
songs are part of an extensive collection still housed at the university.
In his quest to find people related to those old folk singers and people who knew them, Haddox met with a woman in the summer of 2019 whose grandfather, Lum Pack, was recorded by Chappell. She thought she was the only person in the world who knew.
“She was in tears talking about her grandfather and how much she loved his singing and how sweet he was, and she wondered how we knew about these songs,” Haddox said. "Then, we showed her a CD of a friend from New Zealand who’s a wonderful singer of traditional music. She sings three songs she learned from this woman’s grandfather off those recordings. It just blew her away.”
With the National Coal Heritage Authority grant, he plans to do more than speak with people one-on-one.
“My director was working on a project called a story map. Basically, you can open up a topographic map like a Google Map, and you can click on the pushpins on the map. For example, you’ll see the town of Williamson, an old coal camp, coal towns and coal infrastructure in old historic photos. So I thought, ‘Well, what else can we have on that map?’”
Kate Toney. Dick Justice, a coal miner from Logan.
Even Haddox, a Logan County native, was in the dark about the famous singing talent from his hometown. In fact, he only found out about Justice after browsing in a Morgantown record store and happened to find the Smithsonian’s Anthology of American folk music made in the mid-1950’s. It had multiple songs by a few Logan County natives: Frank Hutchinson, Justice and Williams Brothers and Curry.
“The first cut on that anthology - that’s a pretty big deal - was Dick Justice,”
he said. “We have a treasure trove here! We have collections here that are just
amazing. They were just normal folks who sang. Some of these variations are really
unique.”
Finding information and links to the past to include on the map hasn’t been easy for Haddox. Time and fading memories are the enemy; people who may have remembered someone, or who may have had a photograph, or a home recording are quickly disappearing. Although he’s focusing on singing, Appalachia and West Virginia are known for amazing musicians and fiddlers.
He recently reconnected with James Howes, a fiddler in his nineties whom Haddox first met more than 20 years ago at the West Virginia Folk Festival in Glenville.
"Most of the old folk musicians were still around. You knew who they were, but this guy stood out to me," he said. "He held his fiddle down; a lot of old time fiddlers held their fiddles down in the crook of their arm, kind of against their chest - not up under their neck. So here's this old guy doing that and he has a little circle around him."
He calls Howes “a living link to another era.”
“His mom got him interested and he learned a little from her, but he’s pretty much self-taught. He plays in church a lot now; he plays hymns, old tunes, whatever he hears,” Haddox said. “There aren’t that many old musicians left. People like me are becoming the old musicians. Howes, though, is a link back to that time. He’s an outstanding fiddler who was never trying to make a living out of it. He is definitely of a different generation of musicians.”
Haddox is glad to have found Howes and to include him on the map, but he’s the only living musician on the map so far and that raises questions and concerns for the project.
“There are a lot of people who play music. Are we trying to put everybody from the coalfields who played a guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo or something? The answer is no,” Haddox said, adding that he’s considering several criteria including an age cut off.
The musicians he wants to promote are not necessarily known commercially, but known or would be enjoyed by traditional music enthusiasts around the world.
“We’re not looking for country music stars,” Haddox said. “It’s a cultural resource we want to create. We’re trying to give people another reason to go to the coalfields and look at something and be exposed to something that’s not just another run down coal town, another dilapidated coal tipple, another fallen down company store.”
As much as coal is a major part of West Virginia history, Haddox wants more of the culture promoted and celebrated to aid in economic development in southern West Virginia. The story map he envisions would allow people to hear stories, read biographies, look at pictures, listen to recordings of the folk songs and include modern artists singing the same versions.
“We just want people to know this history,” he said. “It’s an understanding of your heritage. It’s a realization that there was something else here besides just coal mines. I think it’s important that people understand the contributions of southern West Virginia to the world’s understanding of traditional folk music.”