A Celebration of West Virginia Folk Music Traditions

Text and Photos by Jennie S. Williams

On November 14, 2024, a large audience gathered at West Virginia University’s Gluck Theater during Mountaineer Week for “A Celebration of West Virginia Folk Music Traditions.” Dr. Gloria Goodwin Raheja, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, and Dr. Chris Haddox, associate professor of design studies at WVU, highlighted their ongoing research into the folk music history of the southern West Virginia coalfields. Sponsored by West Virginia University Libraries and the West Virginia Humanities Council, the presentation focused on stories, songs, and cultural traditions of the southern coalfields—primarily Mingo and Logan counties—preserved both on commercial recordings from the 1920s, as well as on numerous field recordings in the Louis Watson Chappell Collection of Traditional Music in West Virginia at WVU’s West Virginia and Regional History Center.

The Center’s director, Lori Hostuttler, explained that a strength of the Center is in its rich collections of West Virginia and Appalachian folklore and folklife, particularly early field recordings dating back to the 1930s and 1940s, which contain ballads, dance music, hymns, and more. In 1982, the Center’s former director, Dr. John Cuthbert, published West Virginia Folk Music: A Descriptive Guide to Field Recordings in the West Virginia and Regional History Collection (1982), detailing the archival collections of Cortez D. Reece, Kenneth L. Carvell, Patrick Ward Gainer, Thomas S. Brown, and Chappell. Cuthbert writes about the importance of WVU’s role in advancing scholarship on folk music, citing WVU professor Dr. John Harrington Cox and his Folk-Songs of the South (1925) as precedent to many such publications.

Chappell (1890-1981), a WVU professor, collected more than 2,000 recordings between 1937 and 1947. He is especially well remembered for his research on the “John Henry” ballad. His “John Henry: A Folk-Lore Study” (1933) explored the song’s origins, with convincing evidence the famous ballad originated in West Virginia. Chappell traveled the state and recorded over 90 performers on 647 aluminum discs. Except for some well-known cuts from outstanding fiddlers Edwin “Edden” Hammons of Pocahontas County and John Johnson of Braxton County, the collection is largely unknown to those outside of West Virginia.

At the event, Dr. Raheja presented stories and recordings of unaccompanied singers she has researched. Dr. Raheja’s interest in the folk music of Logan County was sparked after a friend shared a commercial recording of Logan County musician, Frank Hutchison (1897-1945). Chappell never recorded Hutchison, but Raheja pointed to his music as her inspiration for learning everything she could about Logan area musicians, which eventually led her to Louis Watson Chappell and his collected recordings.

Dr. Raheja listed five singers from Logan, Mingo, and Lincoln counties and the folk songs they sang for Chappell in 1940. She shared stories and recordings from her research with the audience, such as the fact that Chappell recorded 85 songs from Kate Toney’s extensive repertoire, one a version of “The House Carpenter.” The other songs included: Sarah Workman’s “The Hatfield Song,” Lum Pack’s “Silver Dagger,” Mary Jane Dyson’s “Poor Omie Wise,” and Rhoda Nelson’s “One Morning in May.” Dr. Raheja’s enthusiasm about these singers captured the audience’s attention in such a way that sounded as if she knew them based solely on her time studying their songs and lives.

The songs ranged from brightly detailed lyrical stories and their variations to ballads based on English, Irish, and Scottish immigration patterns to Appalachia in the 18^th century. She discussed possible ways Appalachian people could have known these centuries-old songs, such as through oral tradition, printed broadsides, and handwritten ballets (song lyrics written on paper). According to Dr. Raheja, Appalachians found connections to the stories in the old ballads. Though many songs are about kings, lords, and other situations irrelevant to Appalachia, mountain people appreciated the ethical dilemmas posed in the lyrics. Some singers often associated their songs with the loved ones from whom they learned the pieces and passed along on the tradition. 

While Dr. Raheja’s presentation took an academic approach, Dr. Haddox used public history and musical performance approaches that aligned with his personal history. Despite having grown up playing music in Logan County, he was not familiar with many of the older folk musicians except for Aunt Jenny Wilson and Hutchison until the 1980s when he became aware of the Chappell collection. He wondered, “Why aren’t these people rock stars?” and so made it a project to platform this music and these stories. Dr. Haddox invited WVU graduate Mary Linscheid to play with him on stage. They performed songs from both the Chappell collection and from commercial recordings that had been sung by other Logan area artists of the time. These songs include Tom Whitt’s “Come on Boys,” Dick Justice’s “Old Black Dog,” Russell Brown’s “Union Blues,” Toney’s “Holland,” Rhoda Nelson’s “One Morning in May,” and “Cumberland Gap” from the Williamson Brothers and Curry. Dr. Haddox performed “One Morning in May” using a fiddle built by JT Doolittle, a blind fiddler from Fairmont who Dr. Cox had encountered in 1918. They dedicated their performance to their friend and colleague, musician and WVU professor Dr. Travis Stimeling, who passed a year earlier on the date of the event and who also researched folk music traditions in West Virginia. In fact, Dr. Stimeling introduced Dr. Raheja to Dr. Haddox in 2019 because Haddox had located Dick Justice’s grave and recorded himself performing “Old Black Dog” beside it in 2018. Dr. Raheja was shocked to learn he located the grave because Justice’s descendants had no longer recalled where Justice was buried, and so began their friendship. 

Since 2019, Dr. Raheja and Dr. Haddox have been compiling their research into the multimedia biographical project “Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields,” which can be accessed online. Their methods are archival but also ethnographic as they reach out to descendants of notable folk musicians to gather more stories, photographs, and genealogical and burial information. Dr. Haddox is leading the production of a documentary film that will take viewers on several trips to visit what is left of the communities where Chappell’s singers lived, worked, and made their music. Several scenes are set in the sometimes forgotten and overgrown cemeteries where Haddox and Linscheid offer up their musical tributes to these wonderful musicians. He is coordinating the production of a mural in Logan to celebrate these musicians and to screen the documentary in several places across southern West Virginia when completed. This work would not have been possible without generous funding from the National Coal Heritage Area over the past 5 years. His and Dr. Raheja’s efforts to shine a light on the important recordings of Louis Watson Chappell from the 1940s has progressed into a wonderfully rich project, connecting songs and singers to their communities, and continuing a tradition of WVU setting a high standard for folk music scholarship.

Recordings and biographies about the mentioned musicians can be found online at https://folkmusic.lib.wvu.edu/ by following the “Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields blog” link. Thank you, Chris Haddox for providing additional context for this article.