On this West Virginia Morning, dignitaries recently gathered to honor clawhammer banjo player Aunt Jeanie Wilson with a Legends and Lore signpost unveiled in Chief Logan State Park. Briana Heaney was there and has this story.
On this West Virginia Morning, dignitaries recently gathered to honor clawhammer banjo player Aunt Jeanie Wilson with a Legends and Lore signpost unveiled in Chief Logan State Park. Briana Heaney was there and has this story.
Also, in this show, our Mountain Stage Song of the Week comes to us from fiddle man Jason Carter, who joined us with his all-star band of friends. We listen to their performance of “Queen of the Nashville Night,” from Carter’s 2022 album Lowdown Hoedown.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Our Appalachia Health News project is made possible with support from CAMC and Marshall Health.
West Virginia Morning is produced with help from Bill Lynch, Briana Heaney, Caroline MacGregor, Chris Schultz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Liz McCormick, and Randy Yohe.
Eric Douglas is our news director. Caroline MacGregor is our assistant news director and producer.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
This week, a southern Ohio college writing class recently learned about the idea of Appalachian identity and then told us what they thought. Kentucky has a new poet laureate so we listen back to a 2020 conversation with author Silas House, about growing up in the mountains. And in Harlan Kentucky, a mural sparked strong opinions over possums.
This week, a southern Ohio college writing class recently learned about the idea of Appalachian identity and then told us what they thought.
Kentucky has a new poet laureate, so we listen back to a 2020 conversation with author Silas House, about growing up in the mountains.
And in Harlan, Kentucky, a mural sparked strong opinions over possums.
You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.
In This Episode:
Ohio Students Discuss Appalachia And Discover Inside Appalachia
Back in 2021, Inside Appalachia produced an episode we called, “What is Appalachia?” It was all about parts of Appalachia that aren’t always thought of as being “Appalachia.”
We asked listeners, “Do you consider yourself an Appalachian?”
Well, we recently got some email responses from students in a writing class at Ohio University Chillicothe. For some of the students, it was their first encounter with the idea of Appalachia.
The Banjo Explained And Explored
Jammy music festival season is on its way and one of the main instruments in string band music is the banjo, which originated in Africa and was brought to this country by enslaved people.
The banjo crossed over into white culture, while its history was white-washed to obscure its African identity. In recent decades, Black musicians have reclaimed the banjo and are taking the instrument in new directions.
Folkways reporter and banjo player David Wooldridge brought us the story.
Silas House Ascending
In April, Governor Andy Beshear named writer Silas House Kentucky’s newest poet laureate. In early 2020, reporter Britanny Patterson spoke with House after he wrote an essay in The Atlantic about the lack of media attention to catastrophic winter flooding in central Appalachia.
Possum Painting Produces A Predicament
The Virginia opossum — also known as the North American opossum, or just plain “possum” depending on who you’re talking to — are showing up more in pop culture, especially here in the mountains. But not everyone loves possums.
In 2019, a community in Harlan County, Kentucky, found that out first-hand, when they decided to feature a possum on a mural downtown.
Folkways reporter Nicole Musgrave gave us the story.
Author Silas House is Kentucky’s newest poet laureate.
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by David Mayfield, John R. Miller, Jeff Ellis, Marissa Anderson and Town Mountain.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. Zander Aloi also helped produce this episode.
You can send us an email at InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
The banjo, an instrument closely associated with mountain music, originated in Africa and came to America with enslaved Africans. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was taken up by white musicians and became a staple of minstrelsy, a form of racist entertainment in which white performers—often in blackface—depicted stereotypes of Black Americans. Eventually the banjo crossed fully over into white public culture and was separated from its African roots and identity. Now, there’s an emerging movement of Black musicians who are reclaiming the banjo and taking the instrument—and its sound—in new directions.
The banjo, an instrument closely associated with mountain music, originated in Africa and came to America with enslaved Africans. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was taken up by white musicians and became a staple of minstrelsy, a form of racist entertainment in which white performers—often in blackface—depicted stereotypes of Black Americans. Eventually the banjo crossed fully over into white public culture and was separated from its African roots and identity. Now, there’s an emerging movement of Black musicians who are reclaiming the banjo and taking the instrument—and its sound—in new directions.
One of the most well-known of those musicians is Dom Flemons. He’s mostly known for his membership in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an all African American string band formed in the early 2000s, an era when Americana music was gaining a wider audience.
Many of the band’s songs are drawn from the 19th century, when the banjo was just being introduced into white popular culture and music through minstrelsy. A century later, Flemons and the Carolina Chocolate Drops dug into that difficult history.
“I just saw that there was a need for new African American representation that could present some of the older material, but at the same time not pandering to any sort of backward thinking or anything like that,” Flemons said. “We were always very 21st-century and you know, urban, hip, thinking about, ‘Where does the music go from here?’ instead of trying to be relegated to something in the past.”
A younger generation is picking up the banjo, too.
Byron Thomas, who works for a public school system in Maryland, became interested in the banjo after reading a story in an old Boy Scouts magazine about a formerly enslaved man who made a banjo from a cigar box.
David Wooldridge
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Byron Thomas playing a gourd banjo.
“Just finding that article was the thing that brought me to the banjo just because at that point in my life, I [thought], ‘The banjo is just a white instrument,” Thomas said. “So I did not really have any kind of inclination to play the banjo at that point until I was like, ‘Huh, wait a second. What do you mean that there was a former slave playing a banjo?’ Now I have to figure out what in the world was going on and what has happened. Because now I’m very curious as to why in modern culture—mainstream, at least—we don’t see any Black people really playing banjo in front of us.”
Thomas has since researched banjo history and learned to play old tunes. But he also sees the instrument as a living thing and has a growing interest in learning to build banjos from a Black luthier.
Dena Jennings is a medical doctor, conflict therapist, and gourd banjo builder who grew up in Ohio. Her family has Appalachian roots.
“My mom grew up in a hollow in Kentucky in the Cumberland Gap area,” Jennings said. “And what I didn’t realize when I was growing up, we were heavily involved in the Pentecostal church and all of our friends and family and others were from that region of Cumberland Gap. It was pretty much like the hollow during the Great Migration—and a lot of Black families moved from the South to the North—it was almost like that hollow unscrewed itself like a light bulb and screwed itself in Akron, where jobs were.”
Jennings’ gourd banjos are pieces of art. She grows and selects the gourds on her farm in Orange County, Virginia and uses hides to create the heads. Her banjos have an earthy, bassy and funky sound. She said she was amazed when she first learned that the banjo started as a gourd instrument.
“I used to make an annual trip to Elderly Instruments in Lansing, Michigan—it wasn’t far from Akron. So I’d go up there and look around at the instruments that I either couldn’t play or couldn’t afford, and at least look at them and then get in the car and come back. But one year I went and I saw this amazing banjo. And it was a simple rim banjo with a simple goatskin head and simple nylon strings on it. And when I took it off the wall and plucked around with it… the sound was like honey from a honeycomb. It was just so warm and so rich and I said, ‘I need to know more.’”
Jennings feels she has a role to play in fostering a safe space for people who want to explore the history of the banjo, especially Black people exploring the Black history of the banjo. She hosts an event for banjoists called the Affrolachian On-time Music Gathering.
“You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been,” said Jennings.
Jon Cooley has been making dulcimers for 25 years. He has sold hundreds of his instruments and hosted workshops at music festivals, mostly in Western North Carolina.
But, there is one thing that makes his dulcimers stand out. They are made of cardboard.
“I just started making them one day,” Cooley said. “I was out of work, I lost my job as a counselor, so I was like ‘I have to start doing something here’.”
This was in the mid-1990s, but Cooley’s journey began in the early 1980s. That was when he bought his first cardboard dulcimer kit at a music festival in New York. He discovered cardboard dulcimers were easy and cheap to make – they seemed perfect for kids and families who might not be able to afford instruments. So he started his own cardboard dulcimer business and began making dulcimers and teaching workshops.
Cooley’s dulcimers range in size and can be nearly 3-feet long. Unlike the hourglass-shaped Appalachian dulcimers, Cooley’s dulcimers are rectangular. He leaves some of them unpainted, so other people can customize them, with wolves, hummingbirds or flowers.
Courtesy Jon Cooley
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Cooley’s cardboard dulcimers range in size. The largest “D” model is nearly 3-feet long.
Cooley’s cardboard of choice is thick, recycled refrigerator boxes. This makes his instruments affordable, and durable.
“They’re easy to make and easy to play,” Cooley said. “You can build them with kids.”
Of course, a cardboard dulcimer will not sound exactly like a wooden dulcimer.
“It’s not as crispy. I would say a wooden dulcimer is more crispy,” Cooley said. “Cardboard is a little more mellow.”
But do not mistake the cardboard dulcimer for a toy. It actually follows a long line of homemade or do-it-yourself Appalachian instruments. Appalachian Studies professor and folklorist Mark Freed says ingenuity has driven instrument design in Appalachia for centuries.
“When you think of this region, it’s often like, ‘Oh, people here are holding on to these old traditions and the bearers of these old traditions’ and that kind of thing, but really they were inventive and cutting edge,” Freed said.
Take the Appalachian dulcimer — they were introduced to popular culture in the 1960s by folk musicians in New York City and mass-produced soon after.
But Freed says long before that, when the dulcimer was first introduced to Western North Carolina, community members built them based on a paper pattern.
“The story of that is that there was a guy who came through this area, right around the late 1800s or turn of the century, and he had a dulcimer,” Freed said. “One of the local community members traced a pattern of that dulcimer, and that pattern got passed around and people in this area were making lap dulcimers.”
From there, community members were able to innovate and make instruments their own. And as we see with Cooley, instrument makers and Appalachians are still innovating.
Appalachian instruments were often distinct because instrument-makers had to deal with limited resources. Freed says the fretless mountain banjo is another example of this innovation.
Courtesy John Peterson
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Peterson’s fretless mountain banjos are all made to order and he has customers all around the globe. To date, he’s made nearly 730 banjos.
“The mountain-style banjo, you know, has the smaller head, because this was the size of a stovepipe, or maybe of a coffee can,” Freed said. “People were using what was available to them.”
In Boone, North Carolina, John Peterson is a renowned mountain banjo maker who still builds instruments by this ethos.
“The mountain banjos are a little more primitive or homemade looking than a factory banjo,” Peterson said.
Peterson has been making fretless mountain banjos for over a decade now. He learned to make banjos by watching other master banjo-makers and studying banjos he owned.
Peterson did not set out to make mountain banjos, he just wanted to play them in local bands while he lived in Fargo, North Dakota. Peterson says his fretless banjos and old-time music style made him a novelty in Fargo. Not many people had seen the unique instruments, which are typically found in Appalachia and the South. He remembers one night, an audience member approached him after he played in a coffee shop.
“This guy came up to me after the show and he asked me if I would build him ‘one of those,’ and I never built anything like that before, but I told him I would,” Peterson said.
So Peterson set out, studying banjos he owned from other local builders. The end result was a plywood banjo. It did the job, and since then he has made more than 700 banjos. But Peterson’s fretless banjos are not exactly like the ones one might find even 50 years ago. For example, he uses large #10 cans from restaurants as a combination tone ring and tension hoop. This is in lieu of a stove pipe.
Since stove pipes are not common anymore, Peterson says it makes sense to get the large cans from restaurants for free to use in their place. He is also happy to stick with calf and goat skins on the banjo head instead of squirrel or even groundhog skins, which were used for mountain banjos in the past. No matter the material he uses, Peterson’s dedication to preserving the craft and the unique form of the mountain banjo remains.
Peterson also makes other homemade instruments, like the “can-jo,” a scaled-down version of a banjo that uses a coffee can or tin can for the head. Some canjos only have a single string, but some canjos can have a fretboard, like a full-size banjo or guitar.
The canjo is mostly used as a craft project for kids, but folklorist Mark Freed said it follows in the spirit of Appalachian musical traditions, just like the cardboard dulcimer.
“People were resourceful,” Freed said. “If you wanted to be entertained, you entertained yourself.”
Lots of folks have picked up new hobbies and passions during the pandemic, like knitting or growing a garden. In Harlan County, Kentucky, a 20-year-old punk musician turned to the banjo. And that led to a search for a 97-year-old banjo maker.
Everything I Was Doing I Couldn’t Do Anymore
Southeast Kentucky is home to a vibrant punk rock music scene. Bradford Harris is the guitarist and lead vocalist of the punk band L.I.P.S. of Harlan. They used to play out a couple times a month, but had to stop playing live shows because of COVID-19.
Courtesy of Bradford Harris
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Bradford Harris plays guitar with their punk band L.I.P.S at a show in Harlan, Kentucky. Harris started booking shows at 12 years old.
“All I’d been doing was booking shows and touring and playing with bands,” Harris said. “And then everything I was doing, I couldn’t do anymore.”
Without an outlet to play loud punk music, Harris recently started playing old-time music. In this part of Kentucky, it’s common for punk musicians to also play old-time. And during the pandemic, Harris started messing with the banjo.
“It wasn’t until this year that I actually really started appreciating it,” Harris said.
One day, Harris was looking up tunes on YouTube and came across a video of someone talking about making banjos. Harris’s dad, Steve, runs the woodshop at the local community college. So Harris got the idea that the two of them should build a banjo.
“I’m not an instrument-maker,” Steve Harris said. “I’m a cabinet and furniture guy.”
To figure out how to build a banjo, they ordered a kit from the internet, and pulled out the family’s set of Foxfire books to reference the chapter on banjo-making. Then the two of them got to work.
Courtesy of Bradford Harris
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Steve Harris (left) and Bradford Harris (right) showing off the first banjo the two of them built together. Steve’s father and grandfather were both carpenters, so Steve has been passing on the family trade to Bradford as they’ve been building banjos together.
“He knows so much about woodworking that I can’t even fathom to know about,” Harris said about Steve. “And I know stuff about instruments that he wouldn’t even consider.”
The two of them built their first banjo this past summer, and they haven’t stopped since. Harris even quit a job at a local car wash to focus on building banjos. They’ve joined online banjo-building forums and Facebook groups, and they’ve connected with banjo players and makers from around the area.
The Search For Al Cornett Harris stumbled upon one of their best sources of instruction while using a sander at the shop one day.
“Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a banjo neck hanging out of the shelf,” Harris said. “And I was like, ‘I will worry about this later. I just saw something cool.’”
Courtesy of Bradford Harris
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Tools that were handmade by Al Cornett, who was the resident luthier at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College in Cumberland, Kentucky before retiring in 2013. Bradford Harris uncovered the tools one day while working at the college woodshop.
Harris went to investigate and uncovered a stockpile of handmade tools, banjo templates, and detailed, handwritten notes about building instruments. They had been left behind by a man who used to work in the shop. His name was Al Cornett. Cornett retired years ago after working at the college as an instrument-builder and teacher.
“He would write down things that I would have never thought about. You could tell he was writing down years of experience. And his drawings are superb,” Harris said. “Although he hadn’t been in that shop for 15 years, he’s been one of the most monumental people in me learning how to build.”
Harris knew that a luthier had previously worked in the shop at the college, but didn’t know much else.
“I had just heard about him,” Harris said. “And somebody was like, ‘I doubt he’s still alive.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I mean it’s worth checking.’”
Harris started asking around the college to see what people knew about Cornett and where he might be. All anybody knew was that if Cornett was still around, he was probably in his 90s. Undeterred, Harris posted on social media, looking for more information.
“And somebody was like, ‘Yeah I know, Al. I go check on him every now and then.’ And I was like, ‘This is it. The search begins,’’ Harris said.
With confirmation that Cornett was in fact still living, Harris was determined to meet him. Finally, after several weeks of searching and trying to get in touch with Cornett, Harris was able to visit with him. They sat down in Cornett’s living room, and a friend, Will Major, recorded the meeting on video.
“How old were you when you started building instruments?” Harris asked on the video.
“I started in 1977,” Cornett said.
“So you said you first started building dulcimers?” Harris asked.
“I started building dulcimers, yeah,” Cornett said. “I have the first one I built.”
Courtesy of Bradford Harris
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Al Cornett sits in his Cumberland, Kentucky home, playing a banjo built by Bradford Harris. Cornett primarily made dulcimers, but also built other stringed instruments, such as banjos and mandolins.
During the visit, Cornett talked about his experiences as a luthier, and he shared some tricks of the trade with Harris. Cornett even talked about some of the more challenging projects he worked on, like the one time he built a fiddle.
“I worked seven years on a fiddle,” Cornett said.
“Have you made more fiddles than that one?” Harris asked.
“No, I quit after this one,” Cornett said. “It takes too long.”
In pre-pandemic times when punk shows in southeast Kentucky were still going loud and strong, Harris would not have thought they would be tracking down someone like Cornett.
“If you would have told me a year ago that I’d be playing old-time music and doing this old-time history stuff and going and meeting old banjo players and stuff, I would have been like, ‘No, probably not,’” Harris said. “But I also wouldn’t have thought there would have been a pandemic.”
Harris is eager to book and play punk shows again, but for now at least, they’ll keep making banjos. And Harris is grateful to have had the chance to thank Cornett in person.
“I just felt that it was important for this rad 97-year-old man to know that somebody is carrying on this tradition in the same workshop that he was,” Harris said.
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.
Musician John Homer Walker died in Princeton on January 4, 1980, at age 81. The Mercer County native was raised in Summers County and lived much of his adult life in neighboring Glen Lyn, Virginia. He usually worked as a laborer and farmhand.
“Uncle Homer,” as he was affectionately known, learned to play clawhammer-style banjo from his mother and uncle. He picked up traditional songs, like the old spiritual, “Steal Away,” from his grandfather, who was born a slave.
“Uncle Homer” Walker was a popular performer during the folk revival of the 1960s and ’70s. He appeared regularly at the John Henry Folk Festival, the Vandalia Gathering, and the Appalachian South Folklife Center. He was featured at the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife and was the subject of the 1977 film Banjo Man.
