Here in Hampshire County West Virginia, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, music has always been a conduit for our spirits, an expression of our hopes, an antidote for despair, fatigue, and loneliness. Singing a great old song or fiddling a favorite dance tune transports us instantly to the sunny side of life, no matter what the weather or season. And in Hampshire County you can always find friends ready to kick back and pick a few tunes.
Settled originally in the mid-Eighteenth Century by German, English and Scots-Irish immigrants, along with, in many cases, their African and African-American slaves, Hampshire County has enjoyed a cultural evolution rooted in the folk musical traditions of both Western Europe and Western Africa. Immigrants wandering into the wilderness of the Appalachians experienced a longing for old homelands an ocean's crossing away. Family repertoires of songs and stories sustained newcomers facing the desolation of the frontier, and helped them feel connected with what they had left behind, even as they struggled to build interdependent communities in the New World. While comforted by tunes they had brought with them, pioneering families began to compose songs and tunes descriptive of their wild surroundings: “Possum Up a Gum Stump,” “Tearing Down the Laurel,” and “Wayfaring Stranger.” The gruesome war years resonate with “Hell on the Potomac,” “Abe’s Retreat,” and “Darling Nellie Gray.”
The wide, fertile river valleys of what became Hampshire County were always accessible to travelers, well before Europeans came. Native people criss-crossed ridges and hollows in search of good hunting. White settlers followed Indian paths and fished the creeks and rivers of the people they had displaced. In the early Nineteenth Century, Hampshire County hosted the construction through its borders of a major East-West turnpike, the Northwestern Grade. Built with Federal funds to connect the Valley of Virginia with the Ohio River, the new, Trans-Allegheny wagon road broke the bonds of geographic isolation in the region. Known today as U.S. Route 50, the historic road paved the way for successive changes that followed, from the movement of troops through the South Branch Valley during the American Civil War to the arrival of urban refugees from overcrowded Baltimore and Washington DC in more recent times.
Each wave of newcomers brought its own cultural influences and innovative musical styles to be shared with neighbors and incorporated into local repertoires in many corners of our hilly terrain. The tape-recorded recollections of Israel Welch, who died at the age of 92 in October of 2003, provide a sense of how music sharing occurred in his own, pre-radio childhood in neighboring Mineral County. Uncle Jake Welch who traveled throughout the region by foot, heard tunes fiddled by distant neighbors, and upon returning home, whistled these tunes to Israel, his brothers, sisters and cousins. Israel recalls that:
. . . he was a big, tall man, had a big, sandy moustache. And he knowed these tunes and he’d whistle them to us kids
when we were trying to learn. . . .I’ll never forget it: sounded like a cyclone coming through a big pine tree. But still we could learn the tunes from the old feller. He done the best he could. And now I don’t know whether we played
them just exactly right. But we picked them up the way he whistled them. And we played them.
Interviewed at his home by Gerry Milnes, recorded by Flawn Williams (8/26/95)
Years later, as a young soldier stationed in Nova Scotia during the Second World War, Israel learned an extensive repertoire of Canadian tunes, which he brought home to be intertwined at the New Creek dances with the more familiar tunes of his eastern West Virginia childhood.
I remember from my own childhood partially spent in Capon District in the late 1940s, when telephones in Parks Hollow were hand-cranked and from eight to twelve parties shared every phone line. I remember two aging brothers, Henry and A. B. Slonaker, who loved to sing duet versions of old church songs and for some years were parties on the same phone line. It was told that in bad winters when people couldn’t get out, the brothers would call one another and commence to sing old favorites over the phone. Everyone else on the party line would pick up and join in the singing. The phones are all different now, and those who sang together have gone on. Still, I am haunted by this vivid detail of community interdependence and the creative use of this early technology, so imaginative to consider.
We know that this legacy of homespun music handed down from our fore parents is sown like seeds of humanity in our lives. Music and stories which help us access our own past provide a solace, a sense of continuity, which is missing from much of mainstream American life. This melodic flow out of our pasts is what makes West Virginia so special and artistically dynamic. We are driven to participate in music making by long-established notions that anyone can pick up an instrument and join in and everyone has something to contribute. When stringed instruments are in short supply, grab a pair of spoons, or rake thimbled fingers across an old wash board for catchy rhythm. Often starting young, we learn by listening, by remembering musical phrases and chord progressions, and by playing along. You’ll hear performers on this anthology from ages eight to eighty-eight.
We hear in old fiddle tunes reflections of our inspirational landscapes, images of water cascading down over rocks, of wind howling in treetops, the soft symphonies of crickets, frogs and night birds in our misty hollows. We find in these old melodies the echo of murmuring story lines that have passed with the years. We hear in our county’s music a diversity of sources and renditions. Versions of old ballads and hymns may vary from family to family.
The poignancy of Negro Spirituals reminds us of our own chapters in the epic of American slavery, and the various ways we have and haven't progressed since then. The persistence of these African-American images in our midst inspires us to engage the values embodied in our state credo, that Mountaineers are always free. All of us. As free neighbors, we are worthy of each another's respect and compassion. Sharing music can lay the groundwork for other kinds of involvement and community building.
Our music has always been free to change, to open itself to individual interpretation, to depart from established and overlapping traditions. Imagine the impact of the first Sears & Roebuck catalogues on rural Hampshire County musical traditions during the era of the First World War. Suddenly mass produced guitars, fretted banjos and factory-made fiddles were available at affordable prices to replace old, homemade banjos stretched with cat hide and strung with cat gut or screen wire--or cigar box fiddles.
Jude and Pauline Whitaker, living on a small, hillside farm at Loom, could remember the date in the early 1930s when they acquired their mail-order Sears & Roebuck banjo for $17.35. That banjo, which hung on their parlor wall, rang for decades with strains of “Mississippi Sawyer,” “Ricketts Hornpipe,” “Eight in the Boat,” and “Old Man, Old Man, Can I Have Your Daughter?” In those days, Jude’s uncle, Bern Whitaker, a wheelwright from Hanging Rock, played “Durang’s Hornpipe,” “Revised Kingshead,” “Chinese Breakdown,” and “Tennessee Wagoner,” which he learned from an old, fiddling, African-American teamster in Winchester, Virginia. Music sessions moved from house to house. The table was pushed back. Harry Pennington, slightly bent at the middle, with long fingers jammed deep in his waistcoat pockets, flat-footed “The Soldiers Joy” on the springy kitchen floor while the children laughed and jumped for joy.
Our present generation of music makers has been heir to these vibrant traditions. They have also been influenced by decades of recorded and televised music, as well as State and regional festivals: The Vandalia Gathering at the State Capitol, The Glenville Folk Festival at Glenville and The Old-Time String Band Festival at Clifftop. Our own Pigtown Fling, hosted over the past twenty-five years by Paul and Lisa Roomsburg at their home near Forks of Capon, attracts performers from many parts of the region. The Augusta Heritage Center at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia has for the past quarter century featured summer classes and workshops where students can learn directly from Old Masters in residence the larger repertoire of West Virginia songs and dances tunes, as well as the dances themselves. Augusta also offers Blues, Irish and Cajun music weeks, to name a few, attended by students from all over West Virginia and beyond. The possibilities for cultural synthesis and cross-fertilization, bolstered by digital technology, are boundless.
When we talk about “old-time” music in the mountains, we sometimes overlook the modern technologies by which everyone can access music of this region, evidenced by urban artists who master rural instrumental and vocal techniques for commercial gain. We see many instances in which the music is commodified, independent of the social contexts in which it originated. It becomes harder and harder to distinguish what is authentically ours. Modern influences and techniques, such as commercial Bluegrass, impose on down-home hoedown tunes. Our music often accommodates innovations from other places, reinventing itself with each new generation.
Along with music we perceive as our own—the old pieces we were raised with--we celebrate the richness of songs and styles brought by newcomers. This project is a blend of many influences and a suggestion of our present Hampshire County sound. But this 250th Birthday Celebration is just a moment in the unfolding drama of how we are changing.
Twenty-five years ago this project would have sounded very different. Israel and Tom Welch would be sparking the New Creek dances. Sloan Staggs would be making the hills around Middle Ridge ring with his mandolins. Fiddling Uncle Bern Whitaker from Hanging Rock and guitarist Jack Shaffenaker from Cold Stream would be playing for dancers in the fire halls at Augusta and Capon Bridge and church suppers at Loom, Rio and Parks Hollow. We know they have taken their music with them to play forever among the stars. Israel Welch joined them in death while this recording project was in full swing.
Those musicians who have passed have left their mark on the music we play today. Hampshire County enjoys a spirited musical community which is accessible to newcomers. On warm summer evenings you can hear a crowd jamming on the streets of Romney outside Steve Dawson's music store on Main Street, or at the Dairy Queen. In mid-summer outstanding local musicians congregate at the Pigtown Fling, now in its twenty-sixth year at Paul and Lisa Roomsburg's farm near Forks of Capon. In August fiddles, banjos, dulcimers, guitars and bass fiddles join in late jam sessions at the Hog Barn every night of the Hampshire County Fair at the Fairgrounds in Augusta.
Paul Roomsburg, a Vo-Ag teacher at Hampshire County High School, sparks music playing wherever he opens his fiddle case. Paul plays with Andy Herbaugh and Steve Ritz in "Our Wives Think We're Working String Band." This dedicated threesome is responsible for the selection of musicians featured on these recordings and for providing a comfortable old hillside log farmhouse where the recording sessions could take place. Steve Ritz arranged the recording schedule and supplied both transportation and musical back-up where needed. Joe Herrmann, fiddler extraordinaire with "Critten Hollow String Band," was also on hand with musical support for his students. Joe remarked that this project was reminiscent of the Bristol Sessions of 1927, when A P. Carter set up a wax-cylinder disk recording machine and immortalized much of the music of the surrounding countryside. Participants in this project were asked to perform selections suitable for Hampshire County's 250th Birthday. None of us could have imagined the vast array of Hampshire County musical treasures that would come together in this effort. The music recorded here is just what it is. No tricks, added tracks or effects other than live-mixing in the sessions, the careful positioning of the musicians around one or two microphones, to get the best possible balance of sound.
Ten years hence, styles and repertoires will have changed again. But we take comfort that the songs and tunes, which have passed to our youngsters, will provide continuity for Hampshire County music, just as the South Branch flows unrestrained through the valleys of our imagination. With our music we take wing and soar above the constraints and fatigue of everyday living. We celebrate the seasons and cycles of our lives, the quality of our neighborliness, the depth of our faith, and the connections with past generations, which have endured in the old songs and tunes we love to play together.
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