Musician Virginia Wilson died on March 2, 1992, at age 92. She was born in 1900 in what is now part of Chief Logan State Park.
Wilson was a master of the clawhammer-style banjo but was little known outside of her native Logan County for much of her life. That changed at age 58, when she was discovered by West Virginia University folklorist Patrick Gainer.
During the 1960s and 1970s, “Aunt Jennie,” as she was affectionately known, became a regular on the festival circuit. She also recorded traditional music for the Library of Congress and released an album produced by West Virginia native Billy Edd Wheeler.
Wilson was equally beloved for her wit and insights into life. One of her favorite sayings was ‘‘don’t take more on your head than you can kick off your heels’’—challenging people to enjoy life to its fullest. She also loved to recount stories from Logan County history. In 1984, Wilson received the Vandalia Award, West Virginia’s highest folk-life honor. And each Labor Day weekend, Wilson’s grandson, Roger Bryant, hosts a music festival in her honor at Chief Logan State Park.
Traditional musician PhoebaCottrell Parsons was born in Calhoun County on April 21, 1908. When she was 10, she picked up her brother Noah’s banjo. She later recalled of that moment, ‘‘He didn’t want me to play because he was afraid I’d beat him.’’ She soon became accomplished not only at the banjo but also at singing ballads, telling stories and riddles, flatfoot dancing, and playing the fiddle sticks.
However, after getting married in 1928, she quit playing music entirely and didn’t pick up the banjo again until the 1960s. In 1975, at age 67, she won the banjo contest at the West Virginia State Folk Festival. The next year, she and a number of other musicians were selected to represent West Virginia at the Festival of American Folklife in Washington. During this time, she became a fixture at traditional music festivals and influenced countless musicians and storytellers. She once said, “‘Nobody showed me nothing, [but] I learned a lot of people how to play.’’
In 1987, she was honored with the Vandalia Award, the state’s highest folklife honor. Phoeba Parsons died in 2001 at age 93.
After contracting polio as a young boy, Glen Irvine spent most of his life in a wheelchair, but his mandolin almost never left his side.
Although he’s virtually unknown outside of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, Irvine–or Dude, as he was known–was one of the area’s most gifted musicians. One of the founding members of the Black Mountain Bluegrass Boys, Dude was a virtuoso, self-taught musician. Although Dude passed away at the age of 52 in 1973, his bluegrass band continues to play all around West Virginia today.
One of Dude’s nephews, Richard Hefner, says he used to wait up for his uncle every Saturday Night. It was the only quiet night inside his family’s Civil War era home, in the house that was almost always full of music whenever his uncle was home.
“Uncle Dude, lived with us most of the time, taught us all how to play music, he played in beer joints all the time. Just about every Saturday night. Somebody would come and carry him out,” said Hefner.
“They’d carry him out, put him in the car, and then they’d carry him in the beer joint and set him in the chair. I’d usually stay up until Dude would come home at night, listen to his tales.”
These tales usually included whatever beer joint brawl or late night escapade had taken place that night at the square dance. In that house that may or may not have been haunted—there are a few tales of possible ghost sightings—Richard grew up idolizing his uncle.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Bill Hefner (left), Richard Hefner (middle), and one of their sisters Susan, remembering their Uncle Dude inside the old Civil War-era home in Mill Point, W.Va.
When he was 14, Richard began going with his uncle to the beer joints—they definitely didn’t card people back in the 50’s. There was one beer joint he often took his uncle to, called High Rocks, in Stompin’ Creek. Richard remembers when a bad fight broke out at the High Rocks bar, right next to his uncle Dude.
“I guess I was 16 and had my license, and I took him up there. He was playing with Virgil and Vincent Rider. Dude played the mandolin. And there was this real small place, it was a small as this room, narrower,” he said.
“A bunch of guys came from Richwood. And Richwood and Marlinton, at that time, didn’t like each other. That guy come off there and said something to him and boy he come off there and hit that guy. I grabbed Dude and slid him back behind that stove, and grabbed his case and slid it back behind the stove. Two of them went right through the front door, tore the whole door off the beer joint. Went out in the parking lot! There was five or six of them that just got whipped up pretty bad that night.”
“But, just like always, you know, just as soon as they get everything settled down, I slid Dude back out in the floor, got back in tune, started playing again.”
Dude taught himself to play harmonica when he was 5 years old. He later taught himself to play mandolin, banjo, ukulele, slide guitar, and on the guitar he could finger pick any Chet Atkins tune. Night after night, musicians would come to the Hefner home to play with Dude.
Credit courtesy of Susan Kershner
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Hefner siblings as children, playing with their Uncle Dude’s instruments. Bill Hefner (l), Jimmy (c), and Richard (r)
“There was always somebody at the house playing. Everybody on my mom’s side of the family played and sang. And uncle Dude always had somebody in here playing. And they did all kinds of country and blues. Old county, you know, when country music still was country music.”
Dude learned music by ear by listening to radio shows like the Grand Old Opry or the Wheeling Jamboree.
“So they got to mixing in country and Honky Tonk, Elvis, Chet Atkins tunes, and everything else,” Richard recalls.
He and his siblings remember that Dude didn’t let his physical limitations drag him down. He was born with a condition called Hydrocephalus, which causes fluid to swell near the brain. For some, this impairs mental intelligence.
But in Dude’s case, he was probably above normal intelligence—he taught himself to read and write, and even helped his own siblings with their homework. Because he suffered from polio as a little boy and couldn’t walk, Dude spent part of his childhood being pulled in a wagon, until one of the neighbors bought him a wheelchair. He never had a job, except for the cash he earned playing at local square dances and beer joints.
Credit photo courtesty of Susan Kershner
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Glen Irvine, or “Dude”, as most people called him
“I remember one time Dude, they played for $5 a piece. And he come home and he said, ‘Gilbert gave us a raise. He’s paying us $6 now.’ He was tickled to death, you know, because he got a dollar raise.”
Eventually, Richard and his brother Bill learned to play from their Uncle. Hamp Carpenter had been playing with Dude for years, and his son Harley Carpenter got to meet Bill Monroe in Maryland. Soon they all began playing more and more of Bill Monroe’s tunes. This was in the late 1950’s and into the 1960’s, around the time when they formed the Black Mountain Bluegrass Boys.
“There wasn’t much Bluegrass. There wasn’t any Bluegrass around here, until we started playing.”
Soon, the Black Mountain Bluegrass Boys began writing their own songs, and in 1971 they recorded their first album, “Pure Old Bluegrass”. It was the only one of the band’s albums that Uncle Dude played on.
The Black Mountain Bluegrass Boys are still playing today-although most of the faces have changed. Richard Hefner is the only founding members who is still in the band. They play throughout West Virginia, including every Friday night at the Sweet Shoppe in Lewisburg. More information about the Black Mountain Bluegrass Boys and other bands that regularly play near US 219 can be found on the Mountain Music Trail website.
BlackMountainBluegrassBoys219.mp3
Another story about the Black Mountain Bluegrass Boys, by Dan Schultz and the Traveling 219 Project.
For many West Virginians, the banjo represents a sense of home. That’s certainly the case for Shepherdstown-based musician, Chelsea McBee. The 29-year-old banjo player is a regular on the West Virginia music scene now, but that wasn’t always her plan.
McBee grew up in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. She graduated from Shepherd University with a degree in Photography, and she was sure she wanted to be a photographer. But during her last year at Shepherd, she discovered a love for the banjo. She even learned a unique playing style called clawhammer.
Q&A
How did your upbringing inspire your musicianship?
“I didn’t actually start playing the banjo until my senior year of college, here at Shepherd, but as soon as I started learning those old time tunes, it really, it’s all so connected, that even having grown up in West Virginia, and not necessarily played the instrument growing up, it just ties everything together, all the geography, and the history, and then the music.”
Did you ever meet people who were surprised to see a female banjo player?
“The most common reaction that I get is people are excited that I’m a woman playing this instrument, and…they can get…where once they see that, they get past, like, oh it’s not just a singer, and isn’t it so cute that she plays banjo, like, oh, I can really sit down and play a tune, and that’s…it’s good. I have a lot of young girls that come up and say they want to play, they want to perform, and I’m just like, yeah, do that, get started, play whatever you want!”
What is the clawhammer style?
“I’d say that the most recognizable style of banjo playing is the three finger picking style that is used in Bluegrass music traditionally, and the clawhammer style is more of a rhythm keeping kind of strum, and the way that you hold your hand, it kind of looks like a claw on a hammer, which is where the name comes from. So your fingers are curled up in a claw, and they hit the four main strings, and then your thumb is used to hit the top string as a drone.”
Why did you pursue the banjo?
“When I first learned a West Virginia old time tune, from a friend, he grew up in Romney, West Virginia, and played old time banjo, and he showed me my first couple tunes, and it is really cool, and I hadn’t heard stuff like that before necessarily, and it just really, really spoke to me. The music that I was listening to at the time, there was a little bit of banjo in there, but I wanted to see what else I could do with it, so really once I got started, then the process of getting to know the instrument is really what kept me intrigued and really what made me pursue playing and what else I could do with it, and that led into songwriting, and here we are today.”
Credit Liz McCormick / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Colin McQuire of the Fredrick News Post described your voice as if “Nora Jones and Dolly Parton could have a daughter and that daughter just happened to grow up in West Virginia,” does this quote effectively represent your style, and are these women musical influences for you?
“I was thrilled when I read that quote, because it’s…their two voices are, and their presence in the music scene are ones that I look up too, certainly, and are inspirational. I mean, they’re both women that have done a lot of stuff for themselves, and…so I was honored that he would use that comparison, and I think it does fit. I’ve had a couple different people…I’ve used that quote on the website and on a couple posters when I’m travelling out of the area to give people some sort of idea, and I’ve had a couple people come in because of that quote, and say, that was really intriguing. We wanted to know what that, and he’s absolutely right! So that was great. I thank him very much for that.”
How do you see yourself evolving in the future, and has your path changed since you started your musical career?
“I think the fact that I see it at all as a musical career now, has changed, and the more and more that I play, and the more that I’m exposed too, industry-wise, the more I want to do. So that feels really good to feel inspired to continue in one direction instead of wanting to experience all the things that I was experiencing before, you know, trying to take photographs, and play music, and you know, everything else that I get excited about. So the fact that I can see that as a pretty clear path of music career, is certainly something that’s changed. And as far as evolution, I hope that it continues to grow and to evolve, and you know, I can tell a big difference in my playing and singing and writing now, you know, has changed so much since I started, for the better. I hope it keeps growing and keeps getting better.”
Chelsea McBee performs around the region – solo, and with her group, the Random Assortment, and she often plays with West Virginia’s Christian Lopez Band. On the first Thursday of every month, Chelsea hosts a First Thursday Artist Series at the Opera House in Shepherdstown.
