Clara Haizlett, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Chair Caning Provides Employment And Community For Folks With Visual Impairments In Wheeling, W.Va.

In 17th century Europe, caned chairs were all the rage. You know the kind — a wooden frame with a seat woven onto it. Nowadays though, you don’t see many caned chairs around. That’s because cane doesn’t last forever. Eventually the material breaks down and needs to be replaced. Here at the Seeing Hand Association in Wheeling, West Virginia, folks are giving new life to these old chairs, and finding community along the way.

This story originally aired in the March 31, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Bianca Miller is standing eye level with a wooden chair that’s been placed on top of a table. Now, usually chairs go under the table and usually chairs are for sitting. But if you sat on this chair, you’d fall right through. The seat is gone.

Miller is weaving a new seat onto the chair’s empty wooden frame. She’s using a material called rush, which looks almost like a long, thick shoe string.

“Under, over, under, over,” she says to herself, weaving along in synchrony.

Hammer in hand, Miller secures a piece of rush along the seat’s perimeter.

“Let’s say a little prayer,” she says as she swings the hammer. “I like my fingers.”

Bianca Miller (left) and Debbie Hatfield are chair caners at the Seeing Hand Association in Wheeling, West Virginia.

*Photo Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

In 17th century Europe, caned chairs were all the rage. You know the kind — a wooden frame with a seat woven onto it. The trend spread to Appalachia, where chairs were often woven with strips of hickory bark. Nowadays though, you don’t see many caned chairs around, except for maybe at your grandma’s house or the occasional garage sale. That’s because cane doesn’t last forever. Eventually the material breaks down and needs to be replaced. That means a lot of caned chairs end up in the trash. But here at the Seeing Hand Association in Wheeling, West Virginia, folks are giving new life to these old chairs, and finding community along the way.

The Seeing Hand Association in Wheeling, West Virginia.

*Photo Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

As Miller weaves, she pulls at the rush to tighten it.

“Super duper tight, super duper tight. Make sure your fingers turn the darkest red they can possibly turn. And if you lose the first few layers of skin, it’s okay, because that means you’re doing the best thing you can,” Miller says. “It’s all for the chair.”

Miller canes by memory, touch and whatever level of vision she has that day.

“With my disease, I never know if I’m going to wake up with vision or not,” she says. “Today I have floaters and flashes and it’s a little bit cloudy, almost as if you’re looking through a lava lamp. You just never know what to expect.”

In 2020, Miller was diagnosed with an inflammatory eye disease called Uveitis. In the process of getting treatment, she ended up going totally blind for 10 months. Eventually she did regain some vision, but it’s unpredictable.

Although Miller’s sight isn’t guaranteed day to day, it’s not really necessary to do this job — and to do it well. In fact, everyone in this workshop has limited visual ability.

Seeing Hand is a nonprofit that provides employment and specialized services for folks that are blind or visually impaired. Employees are trained in skills like refurbishing fire extinguishers, making and restoring mops, and caning chairs.

“The fire extinguishers, the chairs, the mops, the brooms, it all makes sure we have a job,” Miller says. “It’s job security.”

Miller came to Seeing Hand about two years ago.

“I kind of forgot about this place until my mother had reminded me that my grandfather was here,” she says. “He had went blind all of a sudden in his early thirties, which is when I went blind.”

It’s been years since Miller’s grandfather worked here, but Seeing Hand is still around — marking nearly a century of providing services and support in the community.

Mike Cunningham joined Seeing Hand last year. He works three days a week at the workshop. It’s the first job he’s had since 2012.

Employees restore caned chairs at the Seeing Hand workshop in Wheeling, West Virginia.

*Photo Credit: Employees restore caned chairs at the Seeing Hand workshop in Wheeling, West Virginia.*

“Before this job, my activities outside of the house were 45 minutes to the grocery store, and that was it,” Cunningham says. “Basically, I was stuck in the house for ten years.”

Cunningham is totally blind in his left eye. The vision in his right eye is slightly better, but not great.

“I split my eye on my bedside table in 2012. And when they sewed it up, the scar goes right down the center of my vision,” he says. “So I have zero straight lines. Every straight line is curved. So it’s more of a distortion than it is blindness. It’s a definite impairment.”

The frame of a wooden chair that is ready to be recaned.

*Photo Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Cunningham is nearly done with the chair he’s working on. He’s using cane, a material that’s thinner and more delicate than rush. Following an intricate pattern, he carefully threads a strip of cane under, over, under, over. He says this has been his hardest chair yet.

“Sometimes you talk to the chair,” he says with a chuckle. “If it’s not going very easy, you don’t say very nice things.”

Cunningham’s work table is right across from Jeannine Schmitt. Now 82, Schmitt learned to cane chairs over 40 years ago, before experiencing vision loss. These days, she largely relies on muscle memory.

“You almost can feel if it’s right after a while,” she says. “It’s like second nature. Your fingers are on automatic.”

Jeannine Schmitt weaves a new seat onto an old hand caned chair.

*Photo Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

The chair she’s working on is probably 100 years old, she says. Once repaired, the chair will have a new life ahead of it. But not all caned chairs are so lucky, especially as the skills needed to repair caned chairs become less and less common.

Miller points out a row of chairs that are patiently waiting their turn to undergo chair surgery. There’s an old rocker, covered in dust. There’s one with a fist sized hole right through the cane.

“I love the dirty and ugly… or I wouldn’t say ugly — unique,” Miller says. “It’s actually beautiful. And we get to work on these. You know how old these chairs are?”

Most chairs here are brought in by customers from around the Ohio Valley but the chairs themselves come from all over.

“Some of them are stamped Italy or Germany, and some of them are stamped like Indiana or New York,” Miller says. “And you wonder how did this even come about? My brain can go on forever about it and it’s just a chair, for gosh sakes!”

When Miller started working at Seeing Hand, she was struggling to adapt to her vision impairment.

“I was depressed. I gained a lot of weight. I was on a lot of meds,” she says. “Some days I’d come here and just cry, like I shouldn’t have even came.”

Watch this special Inside Appalachia Folkways story below:

But in time, things started to change.

“Then you meet these people and you hear all their stories and you see what they’ve had to overcome and that they smile and they laugh every day,” she says. “It got me out of my funk. It brought my confidence back.”

Schmitt says her fellow employees are like “brothers and sisters.”

“Most people really have no idea of what certain things can do to you when you’re vision impaired,” Schmitt says. “It’s nice to have people, that if you explain to them, they know what you mean. This is my second home, let’s put it like that.”

Schmitt and Cunningham are nearly finished with their chairs. When they’re done, the chairs will be sent downstairs, to join the ranks of the other finished chairs, all freshly stained and tightly caned. And in a few weeks, Miller’s chair will be done, too — repaired and ready for another 100 years.

——

Production assistance for this story was provided by Ella Jennings.

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.

The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.

Sounds Of The Mountains Part 2: Ukrainian Folk Musician Reflects On A Year Of Change

Last year, Folkways Reporter Clara Haizlett met with Ukrainian tsymbalist Vsevolod Sadovyj over Zoom to understand the connection between the Appalachian hammer dulcimer and a Ukrainian folk instrument called the tsymbaly. At the time they met, it was just a few months after the war in Ukraine started. Haizlett caught up with him again this year to see how he and his family are doing.

This story originally aired in the July 23, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

In a story from Inside Appalachia that aired last year, Folkways Reporter Clara Haizlett explored the connection between the Appalachian hammer dulcimer and a Ukrainian folk instrument called the tsymbaly. Over the course of her research, she met Ukrainian tsymbalist Vsevolod Sadovyj over Zoom.

When Haizlett spoke with Sadovyj in May of last year, it was just a few months after the war in Ukraine started. At the time, Sadovyj was living in his hometown of Lviv. Now, Sadovyj is in Ireland.

Sadovyj and his family are among the millions of Ukrainians who have left their homes since the start of the war. It’s caused Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II, displacing people within Ukraine, across Europe and around the world.

Just days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sadovyj’s wife and children crossed the border into Poland, eventually making their way to Ireland. Sadovyj helped them with the move, but then returned to Lviv, alone.

Ukrainian Tsymbalist Vsevolod Sadovyj (left) and his family.

*Courtesy of Vsevolod Sadovyj*

“Then I had to go back to Ukraine, because we had still some concerts and touring and recordings to do,” he said.

Sadovyj was separated from his family for almost a year.

“So all the year, we were speaking in the messengers and video calls, and mostly I’ve been living alone,” he said.

During that time, his work as a professional musician and music teacher was actually thriving. With the onset of the war, COVID-19 took a backseat. People began gathering again, organizing benefit concerts to support troops on the front lines — some of whom were musicians prior to joining the armed forces.

“So we gathered a lot of funds to support them in the special needs, which are not covered by the government,” he said.

Things like night vision scopes and drones.

“The concerts were even more soulful,” he said. “Because it’s not about only the entertainment, but the point was to support our friends and our relatives.”

Sadovyj says it was a critical moment to be a part of his community — but at the same time, he was separated from his family.

“I was at a crossroads of some sort…should I stay or should I go?” he said. “I missed all the year of my little son growing up, which is like something which will never turn back.”

He decided to go, leaving behind students and bandmates and a thriving career. He joined his family in Galway, Ireland. It’s a colorful coastal city known for folk music.

Ukrainian Tsymbalist Vsevolod Sadovyj now lives in Galway, Ireland.

*Courtesy of Vsevolod Sadovyj*

“Galway is a really good place to play on the streets and I saw a lot of musicians,” he said. “A lot of guys with guitars are singing songs. A lot of guys are playing traditional [music].”

Sadovyj says he’s always felt a strong connection to Irish folk music. It was actually one of the reasons he and his wife decided on Ireland instead of another European country.

“In Ukraine, we were really fond of Western European folklore, and especially northern folklore,” he said. “Irish was this special one from the favorite lists.”

Since moving there, Sadovyj has started playing the mandolin.

“My wife’s mandolin, which I never touched before, it’s so well fit to Irish music,” he said.

He brought his own instruments from Ukraine, too. He’s been busking on the streets, playing tsymbaly and sharing Ukrainian folk music with passersby.

“I’ve decided also to share something because I have this instrument, which would be interesting for people to see,” he said.

There is an Irish version of the hammer dulcimer, but it’s not common in traditional Irish music.

“It was something really unusual [for a street instrument], and a lot of people were just staying for a while just to see, just to hear,” he said.

It’s not the first time Sadovyj has introduced Ukrainian folk music to people outside of Ukraine. He’s traveled extensively, sharing his music and culture on tour in the U.S. and other parts of Europe.

“It’s something natural for me but the difference probably is that I change the point of where the home is,” he said.

Now home is Ireland. He’s met several people while playing tsymbaly on the streets in Galway, including a couple from Appalachia and a woman from Iran.

“I met the woman from Iran and she said it reminds her of her motherland,” he said. “Because they have a very similar instrument in Iran which is traditional for them, the santur…that means ‘the sound of sea waves.’”

Well before the hammer dulcimer arrived in Appalachia or the tsymbaly found its way to Ukraine, it was called the santur. It’s thought to have originated in what is now Iran, where it then made its way around the world.

Sadovyj is now part of this process: of people coming and going, leaving behind and starting anew — with instruments in tow and music stored within.

——

Tree Syrup Producers Experiment With Techniques And Traditions Amidst A Warming Winter

In late winter in Highland County, Virginia, maple syrup production is a visible part of the landscape. There are maple trees everywhere, adorned with metal buckets and laced with blue tubing.

This story originally aired in the June 4, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

In late winter in Highland County, Virginia, maple syrup production is a visible part of the landscape. There are maple trees everywhere, adorned with metal buckets and laced with blue tubing. There’s a Maple Sugar Road and a Sugar Hollow and a Sugar Tree Country Store. There’s wood smoke hovering over the sugar houses and tree sap oozing from the taps, slowly making its way to becoming maple syrup.

Highland County and its neighboring counties in West Virginia are some of the southernmost areas in the United States where you can make maple syrup. It’s become a deep-rooted tradition in these communities, but these days, producers are experimenting — both out of curiosity and out of necessity.

Traditions With A Twist

Pat Lowry checks for sap in buckets.

*Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Pat Lowry and his wife Valerie operate a sugar camp in Highland County called Back Creek Farms. Like many in the area, their family has been making maple syrup here for generations.

“[Pat] has maple syrup in his veins,” Valerie Lowry said. “And he would make syrup 365 days a year if he could.”

Each March, Back Creek Farms takes part in the Highland County Maple Festival, where different sugar camps demonstrate the process of making syrup. Throughout the county, people make and sell all things maple — from maple donuts to maple barbeque.

The festival has been a staple for over sixty years in Highland County and the tradition of making maple syrup here started well before that. But over the years, practices have evolved, as people like Pat and Valerie Lowry apply new ideas and techniques to syrup production.

“People kept asking me, ‘what do you have that’s new?’ Nobody had anything that was new! It was light syrup, medium syrup or dark syrup,” Pat Lowry said.

So they started experimenting. They aged syrup in whiskey barrels and infused the pure maple syrup with natural flavors like elderberry. Valerie Lowry calls their approach “traditions with a twist.”

At this year’s maple festival, Pat Lowry boiled down sap — or around here what they call “sugar water” — while Valerie handed out samples of syrup to visitors.

“Now we are going to do chili pepper and ginger,” Valerie Lowry said, passing around the sampling spoons. “And you all are going to try hickory syrup. Hickory syrup is made from the bark of a hickory tree.”

Valerie Lowry offers samples to visitors at the Highland County Maple Syrup Festival.

*Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Tapping Black Walnut Trees, A New Frontier

Gary Mongold of Petersburg, West Virginia has been going to the Highland County Maple festival since he was a kid. But this year Mongold didn’t make it to the festival. He was busy with his own operation — it’s his second year of making black walnut syrup.

Mongold showed me around his sugar grove in his side-by-side. His property was full of walnuts situated along a steep hillside that opened out to a panorama view of Petersburg, Moorefield and Mount Storm.

The process of making black walnut syrup borrows the basic principles of maple sugaring. You drill a hole, tap a tree, and out comes the sap. Plastic tubing funnels the sugar water down the hill into a collection tank. When the sap is boiled down, it transforms into a dark syrup.

“I can’t describe it,” Mongold said. “It’s awesome. I think it’s different. It might be a little sweeter.”

Mongold drizzles the syrup over a bowl of ice cream every night.

”I just dearly love it. I better watch or I’ll eat my profits up!” Mongold said.

Gary Mongold in front of his Sugar Shack in Petersburg, West Virginia

*Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Black walnut syrup is an emerging industry and Mongold’s one of just a handful of producers in the region. He’s been working with Future Generations University out of Franklin, West Virginia to conduct research on the process. They’re trying to figure out the best techniques for production.

Walnut trees don’t produce as much sap as maples, and the sap has less sugar. In short, it takes more to make less. And unlike maple, walnut sap contains naturally occurring pectin, which when it’s boiled down, becomes a thick goo — making the syrup difficult to filter.

But Mongold is undeterred by these challenges, and he’s even found a creative use for the pectin.

“About a year ago, I was listening to 89.5 PBS here in Petersburg,” Mongold said. “And it was talking about the Mayo Clinic working with pectin for arthritis and gout.”

Mongold has had both. So ever since, he’s been taking a teaspoon of walnut pectin in his morning coffee. While pectin isn’t FDA approved for this purpose, Gary says it has relieved pain from his arthritis.

Using the pectin — like making the syrup itself — is an experiment. And this season, there was another unpredictable variable at play.

Adapting To A Warm Winter

“It hasn’t been a very good season for sap to run,” Mongold said. “Mother Nature has not given us very good weather.”

Last year, Mongold got about 17 gallons of syrup. This year he added even more taps but by mid-March, he’d only gotten five gallons.

In order for sap to run, temperatures need to reach below freezing at night and above freezing during the day.

“When we get this climate change like we’re having and get three 70 degree days in February, that just puts a stop to everything,” he said.

Back in Highland County, Virginia, temperatures in February averaged 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit, making it the second warmest February on record, followed by 2017.

“Honestly, in my 71 years, I’ve never seen a February like this,” Pat Lowry said, shaking his head.

Even the more conventional maple syrup producers were forced to adapt — like Terri Puffenbarger and her husband Doug. There’s a long legacy of maple syrup production in the Puffenbarger lineage but they’re not interested in making different types of tree syrups or trying out infusions.

“We don’t want to do that,” Terri Puffenbarger said. “We just want the real deal and that’s what we’re doing.”

Watch this special Inside Appalachia Folkways story below:

This year, however, the warm February dried up maple production mid season. So when a cold snap hit in March, right around the maple festival, Doug Puffenbarger decided to try something different. He re-tapped his maple trees — drilling new holes in hopes of collecting fresh sap.

“He’s never done that before,” Terri Puffenbarger said. “But with the warm temperatures in February, the climate is changing and that might be a new thing we’re gonna do.”

Mongold ended up re-tapping his walnut trees, too. He got 5 more gallons of syrup, bringing his total for this year up to 10 gallons. And although it’s significantly less than last year, he’s optimistic.

“It is kind of risky, I reckon,” he said. “But you know, I don’t look for every year to be bad. There’s gonna be a lot of good years.”

Mongold’s already thinking about next year. Around this area, tree sap generally runs from the end of January through the end of March. But Mongold thinks that pattern might be changing. So this coming year, he plans to start tapping the first week of December.

And in Highland County, there’s talk of switching the March maple festival to earlier in the season, too — when there’s a higher likelihood of cold nights, warm days and sugar water on the boil.

Maple Sugar Road in Highland County, Virginia.

*Credit Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

——

Between The Worlds: A Lost Bird In Appalachia

In the late 1950s, the federal government established a program called the "Indian Adoption Project.” Throughout the nearly decade-long initiative, hundreds of native children were removed from their communities and placed with white families. The children were called “lost birds.” Lena Welker, now 66, was one of them.

In the late 1950s, the federal government established a program called the “Indian Adoption Project.” Throughout the nearly decade-long initiative, hundreds of native children were removed from their communities and placed with white families. The children were called “lost birds.” Lena Welker, now 66, was one of them.

Lena now lives in Amherst, Virginia, where she runs “Medicine Lake Herbals” and “Blue Heron Outdoor School” along with her husband Dave.

Watch this special Inside Appalachia Folkways story below:

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, which is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation.

Subscribe to Inside Appalachia to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

Sounds Of The Mountains Part 1: Appalachian And Ukrainian Musicians ‘Play Their History’

You might be familiar with a traditional instrument called the mountain or lap dulcimer. But there’s another, lesser-known dulcimer in Appalachia called the hammer dulcimer. It’s a bigger, stationary instrument that isn’t related to the lap dulcimer at all. In fact, it’s a relative of a Ukrainian instrument called the tsymbaly.

The Hammer Dulcimer And Its Ukrainian Relative

When I first learned about the connection between the Appalachian hammer dulcimer and the Ukrainian tsymbaly, I was intrigued. With just a quick glance at the two instruments, there’s no doubt they are related. But how? With 5,000 miles of ocean and a land mass in between, where was the link?

To start my investigation, I talked with Lynette Swiger, a hammer dulcimer player from Fairmont, West Virginia. She’s a retired elementary school teacher and adjunct professor at Fairmont State University’s West Virginia Folklife Center.

I visited Swiger at her farmhouse in Marion County. She sat on a stool behind a large wooden board laced with exposed strings. The afternoon sunlight illuminated her hands as they moved across the board, gently drumming the strings with wooden hammers that resemble little skis. The music rippled and rolled, resounding into the air.

Lynette Swiger is a hammer dulcimer player from Marion County, West Virginia.

Swiger was introduced to the hammer dulcimer when she was a teenager.

“My mother was the local 4-H leader and there was a man from Manninton called Russel Fluharty,” she said.

At the time, the hammer dulcimer tradition in north central West Virginia was beginning to fade away. According to Swiger, Fluharty single-handedly kept it alive. He was called “the dulcimer man.” When Russell played for Swiger’s 4-H group, it was the first time she had ever heard the hammer dulcimer.

“And when he left, I wanted to play that instrument,” she recalled.

Swiger had her eye on a dulcimer made by a local woodworker, which cost $125. She said she got down to pennies to make up that $125.

“I remember I poured it all into a brown paper lunch bag and tied it at the top with a piece of string and took it to Ralph Campbell’s house and plunked it down on his coffee table,” she said.

A Common Ancestor

Swiger learned to play hammer dulcimer in the traditional West Virginia style. And although the approach is unique to the region, many versions of the instrument are played across the world. Swiger told me our hammer dulcimer is a descendant of the hawkbrett, an old German instrument.

“Hawkbrett means chopping block, so you would chop with your little hammers,” she said.

As people migrated, the hawkbrett did, too. It made its way west, through Great Britain, Ireland and eventually to Appalachia, where it became known as the hammer dulcimer. It also migrated to the east, taking root along the way, including in the mountains of Ukraine. There it was known as the tsymbaly.

When European immigrants came to work in the Appalachian coal fields, they each brought their own version of the hawkbrett — the tsymbaly and the hammer dulcimer.

“The two instruments existed, side by side, right here in Marion County, West Virginia and really never crossed over for a variety of reasons,” Swiger explained.

As a musician and teacher of folklore, Swiger wanted to figure out why. Through her research, she found that the hammer dulcimer is a simpler instrument, while the tsymbaly evolved to be larger, more elaborate and ornate. The isolation of the mountains and the ethnic separation in coal camps also impeded cross pollination between the two.

Appalachian Music Makes Its Debut In Western Ukraine

In 2013, Swiger presented her research about the differences and similarities between the tsymbaly and hammer dulcimer at a conference in western Ukraine. So, of course, she packed her dulcimer.

“So I’m going down the Pittsburgh Airport, wheeling this trapezoid on a wooden box, it’s half as big as me, and people are giving me the oddest looks,” she said. “And then I’m telling the airport workers, ‘please be careful with it’ … I have ‘fragile’ written all over it. And they’re saying ‘what is it?’”

But when she got to Ukraine, it was a different story.

“I get it off the luggage rack and one of the handlers hands it to me. And he says ‘tsymbaly!’ And I said, ‘Yes! Yes!’ And I’m wheeling it down the airport and people are saying ‘tsymbaly, tsymbaly!’ … They knew exactly what it was,” she said.

Swiger recalled that she felt right at home in the mountains of Ukraine.

“When we walked into the mountains, the people were just common mountain people, just like they are here. People would come out of their house and wave to us…their laundry was hanging on the lines,” she said. “I mean it was just like being at home.”

At the opening session of the conference, Swiger and her hammer dulcimer took center stage.

“Everyone was there,” she said. “And it was very hushed and quiet. I sat down with that instrument, and they really wanted to hear Appalachian music played on their national instrument.”

Her performance was so well received it even played on national television.

A Tsymbalist From Lviv

The hammer dulcimer community is still active in Appalachia, but the presence of tsymbaly has largely faded away. And since I couldn’t find a tsymbalist here in Appalachia, I decided to look to the source. After some intense internet sleuthing, I found my guy.

Vsevolod Sadovyj is a classically educated musician and multi-instrumentalist from Lviv, Ukraine. I met Sadovyj over Zoom, in typical millennial fashion. He wore a hoodie and hipster glasses. A drum set filled the screen behind him, speakers lined the shelves and I spotted a keyboard peaking into the frame. It was the home of a musician.

Sadovyj’s tsymbaly was much more ornate than Swiger’s hammer dulcimer.

“It’s decorated in the mountain style, with a lot of colored glass [decorations],” he said. “It’s got a lot of wooden elements…steel strings.”

Sadovyj lives near the Carpathian mountains of western Ukraine, a terrain which has greatly influenced the traditional music of the region.

“The scale and the tempo is precisely matched to the landscape,” he said. “And you’re always going down and going up and going down and going up. It’s 90 percent instrumental music, really fast and highly decorated melodies, fast tempos and rich in ornaments.”

Sadovyj said nowadays not many people play tsymbaly. It’s heavy and hard to tune.

“There is a joke, it says that the tsymbalist…half of his life, he’s tuning his tsymbaly. And the other part of his life he’s playing on an untuned one,” he said with a laugh.

But Sadovyj has taught himself how to play, drawing inspiration from traditional music and blending it with his classical training and contemporary interests.

“I think one life is not enough for going through all the traditions of tsymbaly just in our mountains,” he said.

Sadovyj is a full-time musician and music teacher. He plays in a group called “Lemko Bluegrass Band,” whose style blends traditional Ukrainian music with bluegrass. In the past several months, he and his fellow musicians have been playing gigs to raise money in support of Ukrainian troops. Lviv, the city where Sadovyj lives, has been mostly spared from the violence in eastern parts of the country.

Sadovyj said there’s a growing trend of young people like him who are interested in preserving traditional music and Ukrainian culture, an act which feels significant, especially amidst the current circumstances.

“The traditional arts, the folk music, the dances…it all matters,” he said. “We have treasures we see around us. I want to listen to it [traditional music]. I want to share it with my friends.”

A Meeting Of The Musicians

Hammer dulcimer player Lynette Swiger and tsymbalist Vsevolod Sadovyj meet over Zoom.

Sadovyj’s passion for the tsymbaly and folk music of Ukraine felt so similar to Swiger’s commitment to the hammer dulcimer and folk music of Appalachia. And after talking to them both, I found it puzzling that both instruments originated from a common source, centuries later nearly collided right here in West Virginia, but then promptly went their separate ways. They were like magnets of the same pole, repelling each other when they got too close.

So I decided to interfere. I set up a Zoom call to bring Swiger and Sadovyj together, along with their instruments.

Swiger was in her farmhouse in Fairmont.

“I live in the mountains on a farm,” she described to Sadovyj. “If you go to your mountains, the Carpathian Mountains, if you go there and look around, that’s what it looks like here.”

Sadovyj was in his home on the outskirts of Lviv.

“I’m now in my place, in my home. It is a small house, a tiny house and outside there is a small village outside the city,” Sadovyj said.

From there, the conversation took off, talking about tuning and melodies and musical terms that went right over my head.

Sadovyj played his tsymbaly for us, cell phone in one hand, and hammer in the other.

We had just a 40 minute time limit on Zoom, which quickly timed out. The next 40 minute call also maxed out. And as we talked, they exchanged knowing smiles, united as insiders with this instrument that has transcended time and place.

“Folk traditions are only by ear,” Sadovyj explained. “We had an attempt to write down the songs, but it is a very interesting quest, because every word, every verse is different. There is some core, and we learn the core. You understand me?”

“Yes! We do the same here… exactly!” Swiger exclaimed in agreement.

‘We Are Playing Who We Are As People’

Throughout my conversations with Sadovyj and Swiger, they both expressed a deep commitment to preserving the heritage of their people through music.

“In Ukraine, we have really deep, deep roots. And we still have evidence in a village,” Sadovyj said. “The grannies are singing in the 9th or 10th century style. It’s really a treasure.”

“This traditional Appalachian music, it’s our roots,” Swiger said. “If you look at the titles, they are named after specific people…events in the area, places, creeks. So when we play those tunes, we’re playing our history. We may not know it, but we are playing our history. And we are playing who we are as people.”

And that, I learned, is what links the hammer dulcimer and the tsymbaly. In both western Ukraine and in Appalachia, these instruments are vessels, holding a history and culture that is so specific yet altogether universal.

As we wrapped up the Zoom meeting, Sadovyj proposed they call again.

“Maybe we will meet once more and you will show me your dulcimer,” he suggested.

Swiger agreed. She’d have her dulcimer ready to go.

——

This story originally aired in the July 29, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

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Beckley Filmmakers Present Ambrosia, A Feature-Length Comedy

An old mansion in Beckley, West Virginia is the set of a new feature-length comedy. It’s a grassroots passion project for two Beckley filmmakers and a cast that’s almost entirely composed of West Virginians.

The film “Ambrosia” is a day-in-the-life story of the owner of the Ambrosia Inn, an up-scale bed and breakfast. On this particular day, there’s a dreadful storm on the horizon and the guests are all trapped inside.

Beckley filmmakers Shane Pierce and Dave Gravely wrote and directed the comedy. They’re not full-time filmmakers – but it’s not just a casual hobby either. Their shared interest in film goes way back.

“Shane and I met in high school through guitar, we had a guitar class together,” Gravely said. “We were just really interested in film, and it ate up most of our conversations.”

Eventually, they decided to try making their own films.

“We got together and we Googled ‘how do you write a script?’” Gravely recalled.

They named themselves Butter Chicken Pictures, in honor of the meal they shared on their first day of shooting their first short film.

On their first feature film in 2017, they brought Beckley photographer Saja Montague on as their producer.

“I was just totally unaware of what I was walking into,” Montague said. “And when I got there, I was like, ‘Man, this is weird.’ I didn’t know there are people like this in Beckley that were doing these cool things.”

When they decided to make their second film, they knew they wanted to shoot it in Beckley. The Ambrosia Inn was the perfect setting. The old coal baron’s mansion turned bed and breakfast was a sort of character in and of itself.

“It’s a very bizarre looking location, its architecture sort of sticks out, it’s kind of isolated, it has a big plot of land, and it kind of jumps up in all these strange directions,” Pierce said.

But making a film in Beckley, and in West Virginia in general, can be challenging.

Saja Montague

Actors in the film “Ambrosia” review the script before the camera rolls.

“There’s a practical barrier of like, well, I’d like to make a film. But there’s nobody else really in West Virginia right now making films, I don’t know how to do that,” Pierce said.

And there was the psychological barrier.

“I have an ambition. But I’m from West Virginia, and people who are from West Virginia don’t do those things,” Pierce continued. “And if they do them, they do them somewhere else. They move to New York and they move to LA and they go to film school.”

But Pierce said community support for their project outweighed the challenges.

“People are hungry for this stuff to happen here,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re involved with it. They see those crazy people across town with their camera crew and they’re filming some slapstick gag in the backyard of this mansion. It’s just, it’s just exciting.”

Gravely recalled an instance during the Ambrosia shoot when a neighbor started mowing his lawn right next to where they were filming. Since they couldn’t shoot the scene with the sound of the mower in the background, they had to ask him to shut it off, all the while anticipating the worst.

“So we go over and we talked to him, and he was excited to shut his mower off so we could shoot the scene,” Gravely said. “And I was just like, ‘Man, it feels really good to be in Beckley right now.’“

The production of Ambrosia was a state-wide collaboration, involving multiple generations of West Virginia filmmakers – like Danny Boyd, who started making films and acting in the 1980s. When Pierce and Gravely called Boyd for advice on their film, he eagerly offered his support. Boyd ended up acting in the movie, alongside an actress who had acted in his own movies back in the 80s.

“That’s one of the things I’m more proud of than almost anything else,” Gravely said. “Because we carried on the flame of something that started a long time ago.”

The directors also invited film students from Marshall University to intern on the Ambrosia set. Pierce says they wanted to show the interns it’s possible to make a film in West Virginia.

“You don’t have to go somewhere else to make a film,” he said. “It may be a little bit harder to do it here. But at the end of the day, you can do it, you can pull it off.”

With help from Mountain Craft Productions out of Fairmont, Butter Chicken Pictures spent about 2 weeks filming Ambrosia last summer. They recruited and hired actors, many of whom were not actually actors by trade.

“The way Shane and I like to do it is if there’s a certain personality that we find interesting in town, we’ll just say, how about you just be in the movie?” Gravely said.

“They kind of create their own personalities and their own characters that we honestly probably couldn’t have written,” Montague added. “And it adds that level of Beckley weirdness that I think we want to come through.”

One such character was David Sibray. He played Stanley Kublitz, a filmmaker and explorer staying at the Ambrosia Inn.

“Amusingly they wrote me into this,” Sibray said. “The character is, to some extent, myself.”

In real life, Sibray is the publisher of West Virginia Explorer Magazine. He’d acted a few times in high school and college, but he’d never done anything at the scale of Ambrosia.

“The first day of shooting was the hardest day,” he said. “I was almost in tears by the end of the day. You know, I’m 55. It was 10 o’clock at night and I had been there, I’m sure since 7am. And they were still going, we were all still going.”

Sibray, like most of the cast and crew, was taking time off work to shoot the film. And even though filming the movie was no vacation, Sibray says Ambrosia gave him the chance to try something he’d always felt inclined to but never pursued professionally.

“Discovering this part of myself again was – it was a breakthrough,” he said. “Now I’m an actor. I’ve always been an actor.”

Pierce says Ambrosia is just one part of a creative renaissance happening in Beckley right now.

“It’s like every couple of weeks you’re seeing new projects,” he said. “Something new is happening in Beckley.”

And although Ambrosia is still in the editing phase, Gravely, Pierce and Montague are already looking forward to the next film.

“You really go into it,” Montague said. “You become this family unit. And then it’s over. And it’s like, ‘what’s the next thing we can do?’ Because I want that feeling back.”

The film is set to debut at the Raleigh Playhouse and Theatre in Beckley later this spring.

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, which is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to Inside Appalachia to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.