Five Years After Her Death, W.Va. Singer-Songwriter Gets Her Due

A new album celebrates the music of a West Virginia singer and songwriter.

Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book posthumously collects songs written and performed by Ella Hanshaw, a woman who grew up in West Virginia before later moving to Ohio. She passed away in 2020, but now her home-recorded songs are being released by Spinster, a feminist record label based in North Carolina and Kentucky.

“I feel like Ella’s work helps us understand what it was like to be her, a working-class woman who was born in Clay County, West Virginia, in the 1930s,” Emily Hilliard, a former West Virginia folklorist and co-founder of Spinster, said. Hilliard wrote about Hanshaw’s music in her book, Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia.

“She was an Appalachian migrant, so she and her husband moved up to Ohio for work,” Hilliard said. “She was a deeply religious person. She was a mother, a grandmother, a wife, a musician and an artist, and it helps us kind of understand that experience.” 

Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book is divided into two sides: “Big Black Book,” which collects some of her gospel and religious music, and “Little Black Book,” which consists of secular country songs. 

Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams spoke with Kelly Kerney, Hanshaw’s granddaughter, who played a big part in the album’s release.

The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Adams: We’re talking about Ella Hanshaw. I reckon you’ve known her from the time you were born. What are some of your earliest memories of Ella Hanshaw?

Kerney: I say that my earliest memories of Ella are more of a feeling than a memory. I was in Sunday school, and my teachers were talking about heaven and trying to explain what heaven was to us, and they said, “Just imagine your favorite place on Earth, filled with your favorite people, and that’s what heaven is.” And so, for years after that, whenever I thought of heaven, which was a very common thought for a young Pentecostal, I thought of myself with Mamaw on her hill in West Virginia. We made a trip down once a year from Ohio, and that was a time I had one week with her every year. I loved these trips. I vibrated with excitement on the way down, even though there wasn’t much to do there but roam around and collect ticks. I didn’t have my bike, [and] she didn’t have many toys, but still, I was so excited to just get down there and do nothing. And Ella was the entire reason for these intense feelings. She brimmed with love, and as fiercely talented as she was, she always had room for me. I remember she would be singing songs, doing quartet practices, and she just incorporated me into the process. I’d be sitting on her green carpet, and they’d be there recording songs just on a cassette player. Decades later, as I was restoring these tapes, I would hear some kid making a racket in the background, and I was just like, “Is that me ruining the song?!”

Adams: Ella Hanshaw wrote and performed music throughout her life, but she never became a recording artist. The Black Book collection includes a number of her demos and home recordings over the years. How did you all come across these recordings?

Kerney: It was all very serendipitous. In 2013, my husband and I were driving through West Virginia on our way back from a backpacking trip in Monongahela, and we were flipping through the radio looking for something, and I hit a station — and I just felt like I’d been hit by a bus. And all these memories came rushing back. I had not thought of or heard Mamaw’s music in 15 years, and suddenly, there it was. I said, this sounds like Mamaw, and Ethan hit the brake on the highway. This turned out to be the Myers Sisters from Georgia, from Art Rosenbaum’s Art of Field Recording. I just started to think about the music, and there was no way to really know. I doubted myself. I was like, “Maybe she wasn’t that good. Maybe my memory was wrong.” I didn’t know anything about music at the time, and it’s been so long, and so there’s really no way to know or figure it out. 

Just a couple months later, my other grandmother had died, and I ended up going back home for the first time in years. I was at my brother’s house, and we were just talking, and I just asked him, “Do you remember Mamaw’s music? Do you remember it being that amazing?” And he got up and he went into his garage, and he came back with one tape. He said, “I stole it! She’s got a ton more just sitting in boxes.” I was so shocked. All I could say was, “You stole from Mamaw!” There was nothing to do but to put the tape in. And we did. And it was amazing. I just knew from there, “I need to get the rest of these tapes.” And so, we took that tape home. I called Ella and asked her about her music, and if she’d mind sending me all of her tapes. She was thrilled to do this. It was really so serendipitous, because if we had not been speeding through West Virginia at that particular moment, hit that particular station playing that particular song, I never would have thought of it. It never would have reentered my mind. I never would have asked that question when I went home. So, it all just felt so serendipitous.

Adams: I understand that the spiritual music you all found, and that was on the CD-R that Emily Hilliard first heard. She says the secular music was found later. How did that happen? I’m curious to hear that story.

Kerney: Oh, so that was tape number 40. By this time, we had gotten into a groove, going through all these tapes, largely unlabeled, deteriorating. And I mean, her gospel music, there is such variety in it. We were having so much fun, but there was a lot of drudgery as well. Just going through songs, cut off and taped over with sermons. So we put in tape number 40, and we hear, “And if you think you’re going to mess around, leaving me alone to be a clown, let me tell you something, and it might sound cruel, I ain’t gonna be nobody’s fool.” Tape number 40 basically blew my mind. When I called Mamaw to ask her about these secular songs, she blew them off. She was very ambivalent about them. She considered her gospel her true legacy. But then she started talking about Merle Haggard and Wanda Jackson. Wanda Jackson?! Who is spicy and controversial. Even my aunt, who does remember Ella walking around the house singing her secular songs as she did housework and such, she didn’t even believe Wanda Jackson. And then when it was confirmed, she said, “Well, maybe that was something she just put on when us kids went to school.”

Adams: The collection is Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book. The first half is “Big Black Book,” which includes several of her religious songs. Then the second half is “Little Black Book,” which are secular country songs she recorded earlier in life. In the liner notes, you talk about a pivotal moment in her life in 1991. Can you share what happened?

Kerney: Ella’s music was always inseparable from her faith. She had always been very religious, always wrote gospel. In some cases, she merged the process of songwriting with the act of healing as she battled various ailments. But then, in 1991, her spiritual life entered a new phase. She spoke in tongues and had her first vision, which is a phenomenon described in the Bible as setting the faithful on fire. Now, as a good Baptist at the time, this was heresy in the Baptist tradition, and so it was a big conflict with her church. They did not believe in what is called “the gifts” — that God moves through people in that way. But she believed in it, and she believed that God spoke through her and had given her these visions. 

I’ll read from my liner notes here: “The stoked fire of Ella’s faith did not consume her; it illuminated her and gave her purpose. The visions, which she recorded in more than 100 notebooks, continued for the rest of her life. They revealed dark, astonishing scenes in these visions. She lived life as ‘a prayer warrior and intercessor.’ She took down enemies in epic battles against lions, snakes, dragons and other demonic forces sent to do harm. She used swords, fire and often her bare hands to crush evil, stabbing, burning and strangling the foes of God. She once recalled a vision in which she simply pointed a finger at an evil spirit and ‘fire from heaven came through my hands and burned it to the ground.’ Sometimes, an enemy was clear, and she knew what she fought for. Other times only later would God reveal to her the purpose: defeating illness, temptation, deception or death coming for a loved one. In this way, she spent more and more of her later years in spiritual warfare, which she waged through both prayer and song. She prayed for six hours every day.”

Adams: What was this process of collecting songs like for you as her granddaughter?

Kerney: It was amazing and it was drudgery. We must have spent close to 100 hours combing through 52 usable tapes to get 34 hours of music. But then we spent even more time culling and comparing versions and editing it down to a cohesive album. A lot of times, a song would just be cut off in the middle, and we would never find another version again. She had a terrible habit — Ella did — of not putting any lead time, not accounting for the leader in the tape. And so the first few seconds of songs are just not there, and then she would turn it off the second it was time. But I will say that more personally, the whole project became a way back to Ella, back to Mamaw. All it was such a gift, and I feel so grateful that I was able to do that with her and to begin this process with her. She did not live to see the end of it, but she knew that I would see it through.

Kelly Kerney is the granddaughter of Ella Hanshaw. The album is Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book, available now from Spinster.

**Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story misidentified Ella Hanshaw’s grandmother as her mother. Additionally, the Spinster record label is based in both North Carolina and Kentucky, not just North Carolina.