Fiddle Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

W.Va. Native To Appear On America’s Got Talent Season Premiere

Philip Bowen, a fiddle-playing social media star and Montgomery, West Virginia native, is set to appear on Tuesday’s episode of America’s Got Talent.

Philip Bowen, a fiddle-playing social media star and Montgomery, West Virginia native, is set to appear on the Tuesday, May 30 episode of America’s Got Talent.

Bowen is one of the featured contestants auditioning for the talent contest. The show will kick off its 18th season.

He’s most known for his viral TikTok series called “Does It Fiddle?” where he improvises melodies over popular songs from different genres.

@philipbowenmusic
Coolio! Keep ‘em coming! I love you guys. #coolio #gangstasparadise #gangstersparadaise #fypシ #violin #mostrequested
♬ Fiddle Paradise – Philip Bowen Music

But he’s also making a name for himself as an Appalachian songwriter. He performed original songs at a Mountain Stage show last January. His song “Old Kanawha” was the program’s March 30 Song of the Week. His debut album, which is named after the song, is also set to release Aug. 18.

Bowen was also a recent subject of West Virginia Public Broadcasting podcast Us & Them. He spoke to host Trey Kay about growing up in Appalachia, and how his songwriting reflects realities of the Mountain State’s coal industry.

“I worked at Cracker Barrel one summer out of college, in Kanawha City. And these coal miners would come in for breakfast, like literally black head to toe,” Bowen said during a sit down interview with Kay about his song “Vampire in Appalachia.” “There’s nobody that’s gonna tell you breathing that stuff in for your whole career is gonna do your body any good. And so I just was getting really frustrated by all of that sacrifice to provide for a family.”

Bowen is not the first native West Virginian to receive attention through America’s Got Talent. Landau Eugene Murphy Jr., a jazz singer from Logan County, won the show’s sixth season.

America’s Got Talent will air Tuesday, May 30 at 8 p.m. on NBC.

U.S. COVID-19 Health Emergency Ends And State Fiddler Talks Inspiration, This West Virginia Morning

On this West Virginia Morning, the U.S. has officially canceled the designation of COVID-19 as a public health emergency in the country. Emily Rice has more.

On this West Virginia Morning, the U.S. has officially canceled the designation of COVID-19 as a public health emergency in the country. Emily Rice has more.

Also, in this show, the memories of a Mountain State childhood offer some musicians creative images for a lifetime. Phillip Bowen grew up playing the fiddle, and now the 38-year-old West Virginia native includes songwriting in his portfolio. Bowen will release his first album soon.

In our newest episode of Us & Them, host Trey Kay talks with Bowen about his hometown of Montgomery along the Kanawha River and how it shaped his music. In this excerpt, we look at Bowen’s wide range of musical skills.

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 Concord University and Shepherd University.

Caroline MacGregor is our assistant news director and produced this episode.

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

Lawmaker Proposes Fiddle As W.Va. State Instrument

A state lawmaker wants to see the fiddle named the official instrument of West Virginia.

A resolution by Republican Del. Josh Holstein introduced in the West Virginia House of Delegates on Wednesday states that the fiddle has “importance and significance” in “West Virginia’s history, traditions and culture.”

The fiddle arrived in Appalachia in the 18th century with immigrants from the British Isles, according to the resolution.

“The fiddle soon became a staple of life in West Virginia, being played in churches, in logging and mining camps, at weddings and summer picnics, and in the homes and on porches of many West Virginians,” Holstein wrote. “It has remained so ever since.”

The proposal cites several prominent West Virginia musicians, including fiddler Blind Alfred Reed. Reed was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2007.

Born in 1880, Reed was among the artists who played in the first recordings of traditional country music at the Bristol Sessions in 1927. Reed, who was blind, performed locally until 1937 when the state passed a law prohibiting blind street musicians. He is buried in Elgood.

After its introduction in the House Wednesday, Holstein’s proposal was sent to the House Rules Committee. The fiddle is also the state instrument of Missouri and Arkansas.

Lawmaker Proposes Fiddle As W.Va. State Instrument

A state lawmaker wants to see the fiddle named the official instrument of West Virginia.

The fiddle arrived in Appalachia in the 18th century with immigrants from the British Isles, according to the resolution.

The proposal cites several prominent West Virginia musicians, including fiddler Blind Alfred Reed. Reed was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2007.

After its introduction in the House Wednesday, Holstein’s proposal was sent to the House Rules Committee. The fiddle is also the state instrument of Missouri and Arkansas.

Fiddler In Floyd County, Virginia Amplifies Black Musicians In Old-Time Music

Appalachian old-time music is a confluence of many cultural traditions, including those of Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, and the Scots-Irish. Yet the contributions of Black and Indigenous musicians have often been denied and overlooked. In Floyd County, Virginia one man is working to amplify the participation of Black musicians in old-time music.

On a rainy evening in a community center in Blacksburg, Virginia, Earl White was teaching one of his fiddle students how to move the bow in a circular motion. He explained to the student that in old-time music, moving the bow in small circles helps create a drone that plays out underneath the melody notes.

The Fiddle Became An Appendage

Earl White (right) gives a fiddle lesson to a student at a community center in Blacksburg, Virginia. In addition to the technical instruction of playing, White also passes on knowledge about the cultural and historical context of the music.

White is in his 60s and goes by the name Fiddlin’ Earl White. “And then at some point I shortened that to ‘FEW,’” White said. “And after I thought about that I was like, ‘You know there’s a lot of truth to that. There are few Black fiddlers in the world today playing Appalachian string band music.’”

White lives on a farm in Floyd County, about 30 miles from Blacksburg. He came to old-time music by way of dancing. In the early 70s when he was a college student in Greenville, North Carolina, White and a group of friends got into clogging. “We would be clogging on the porch, clogging in the street. Clogging—basically clogging became a way of life,” White said.

They dubbed themselves the Green Grass Cloggers and began performing around the country at folk festivals and dance competitions.

Earl White (center) looks at the camera while performing with the Green Grass Cloggers. The Green Grass Cloggers came to prominence in dance, bluegrass, and old-time communities in the 1970s, and traveled the country performing at festivals and competitions.

One day, at a performance in Maine, White found himself backstage. “I was sitting in the green room, and sitting in the corner was this old Black man and he was playing the fiddle,” White said.

It was Papa John Creach, warming up to go on for Jefferson Airplane. “In all of our travels of clogging, there were never any Black fiddlers that I saw. And so here he was playing the instrument as a fiddle, and I decided at that point, I wanna do that,” White said.

From then on, the fiddle became an extra appendage for White. Those old-time festivals and fiddlers’ conventions became a learning opportunity. “I’d find a jam and I’d put my recorder under the seat of the fiddlers and just keep it running. And then I’d go and dance on my board,” White said.

White would watch how those fiddlers used their bows, and he would listen back to the recordings. One of White’s favorite players on the festival circuit was Tommy Jarrell, a renowned fiddler from Mount Airy, North Carolina. “I used to wake up to Tommy Jarrell. I would go to sleep to Tommy Jarell. I was humming Tommy Jarrell. I was always whistling Tommy Jarrell,” White said.

A photograph from Earl White’s collection showing old-time fiddler Tommy Jarrell playing in a jam. White stands behind Jarrell’s shoulder on the left-hand side of the photograph.

It Was Always Played Together

When White was coming up as a fiddler in the 1970s, he was often one of only a few Black people at old-time gatherings. But his playing would spark memories for the older white musicians, like Jarrell. Seeing White bow his fiddle reminded them of an era when it was commonplace for Black and white old-time musicians to play together. “A lot of what I advocate is that old-time music is not a Black music, it’s not a white music. It was always played together,” White said.

But White explained that at a certain point, Black people started to feel less welcome at old-time gatherings. “A lot of the young people who might have continued those traditions, didn’t find comfort in going to those festivals. So as a result, the music was being lost in the Black community,” White said.

Other kinds of music—like blues and jazz—also started becoming more popular. “People didn’t want to square dance anymore. They wanted to shake their booties,” White said.

But on occasion, Earl did run across other Black old-time players at festivals. Like the time he met Joe Thompson, a master fiddler from Mebane, North Carolina. “When he saw me standing there playing, I thought the guy was gonna faint, you know. Or die, or something,” White said. “He thought he was the only and the last Black fiddler in the whole world.”

Meeting Joe Thompson sent White on a quest to find other Black fiddlers. But he had trouble tracking down historical details. “You saw a lot of pictures of Blacks holding banjos and Blacks holding a fiddle, but there’s generally no names associated with the people,” White said.

White explained that this erasure of Black contributions is another reason that old-time has been less popular in Black communities in recent decades. “If you don’t see yourself represented in the music, then there’s no reason to feel like you’ve ever had any kind of connection to it,” White said.

Earl White checks the bow of one of his fiddles. In addition to teaching, White regularly performs with his band, the Earl White Stringband.

But White is trying to change that. He regularly gives presentations about the participation and influence of Black players, and he organizes events around Floyd County that promote Black roots musicians. He, and his wife and bandmate Adrienne Davis, have also started a music camp on their farm called Big Indian Music Camp. “To me, part of that preservation is teaching the younger people,” White said.

At this point, most of White’s fiddle students are white. But he is teaching his pre-teen and teenage sons to play. And he hopes that by being an ambassador, he can continue to perpetuate Black traditions in old-time music. “If a young Black person sees another Black person playing, then they can say, ‘Oh wow, I can do that!’ And might be inspired. And so that’s a lot of my focus outside of the fact that I just personally enjoy it. I just love it,” White 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.

A Champion Guitar Player Continues the Family Legacy While Handing the Music Down

If you know one thing about the Newport Folk Festival, it’s probably this:

In 1965, folk wonder boy Bob Dylan took the stage with an all-electric band. He changed the course of rock music forever, but also enraged some traditionalists in the process. Pete Seeger was apparently so disturbed by the noise that night he threatened to cut the power with a hatchet.

But this story concerns a performance that happened the following year, at the 1966 festival. It was electric in a different way. No hatchets involved.

This performance occurred during the festival’s fiddle contest. Up to the mic stepped a man in a sports coat and slacks. He had a Colonel Sanders string tie around his neck, a fedora over his white hair and a fiddle under his chin. It was St. Albans, West Virginia’s own Clark Kessinger.

The 70-year-old Kessinger ripped into the traditional fiddle tune “Sally Ann Johnson,” dancing behind the microphone like a man a quarter of his age. The surviving footage is grainy, but you can see the wicked grin on his face.

He’s smiling because this kind of music just makes you happy. But he’s also smiling because he knows he just might be the best fiddle player alive. And because, just a few years before, he thought his days as a professional musician were over forever.

Kessinger was born in 1896. He started playing fiddle at a young age and, when he was still a kid, his dad would take him around to local honkytonks, where the boy earned more in tips in one night than his dad made all week.

Clark joined the Navy during World War I. After he got out, he started entering local fiddle contests — and taking home top prize every time. By the end of that decade, he was making best-selling records with his guitar-playing nephew Luke. The duo was billed as the Kessinger Brothers and their recording of “Wednesday Night Waltz” sold a million copies for Brunswick Records, making them one of the first country artists to achieve that level of success.

Then came the Great Depression, which put an end to the Kessinger Brothers’ recording career. Luke, a hard drinker, died of cirrhosis of the liver. Clark found work as a house painter. He got married — a few times — and raised a bunch of kids. He still played the fiddle for local dances but it seemed like his days as a professional musician were over.

Until the folk revival of the 1960s. A new generation of fans discovered those old Kessinger Brothers recordings. Interest was so high Clark went back out on the road. In 1964, at the age of 68, he took first place at the renowned Galax Fiddler Convention in Galax, Virginia. Two years later, he was at Newport. Two years after that, he played on the Grand Ole Opry. And in between all those high-profile gigs, he appeared at folk festivals all around the country.

His second chance at a music career ended almost as quickly as it began, though. In 1971, Clark was at the mic at yet another competition when he suffered a severe stroke. He collapsed right there onstage, and though he survived, he could no longer play fiddle.

Yet despite this tragic setback, Clark was about to usher in the next chapter of the Kessinger family’s musical legacy.

Not long before his stroke, Clark had a visitor at his St. Albans apartment. It was his nephew, Bob Kessinger and Bob’s 15-year-old son Robin.

Bob was an accomplished mandolinist, and had shown Robin his first chords on a guitar.

“That’s how I started playing. He needed a guitar player, so I started playing guitar with him,” Robin said.

Robin took to the instrument and started picking up songs anywhere he could, even from his Saturday morning cartoons.

“These really old cartoons you hear a lot of fiddle tunes on there. Like the buzzards flying, that’s ‘Arkansas Traveler.’”

He also learned songs from his dad’s recordings of this renowned old fiddler.

“Dad played Clark Kessinger albums and he had reel to reel tapes. I was indoctrinated that way. I was familiar with a lot of the tunes for as long as I could remember.’

So when Clark started sawing off a few traditional tunes — “Billy in the Low Ground” and “Done Gone” — Robin joined in on guitar.

“I backed him up. I played the chords,” Robin said. “He gave me a big compliment. He said ‘Bob, he sounds like Luke.’ I knew how Luke was.”

Luke, of course, was Clark’s late nephew.

After his stroke, Bob helped take care of Clark, so Robin got to spend even more time with him. And though he couldn’t play anymore, he still managed to pass down some of his musical knowledge to his great-nephew.

“He listened to all kinds of music. That’s one of the things I learned from him, was to listen to all kinds of music. And if you can use it in what you already know, you can make it better that way,” Robin said.

Robin took what he learned from Clark and began winning some contests of his own. He picked up titles in Kentucky, Ohio, Georgia and West Virginia. Just like Clark, Robin won first prize at Galax — though on guitar, not fiddle.

In 1985, he won the National Flatpicking Championship in Winfield, Kansas. He’s finished in the top five of that competition 10 times, more than any other competitor in history.

But for all the trophies, medals and ribbons he’s won through the years, there’s one that means more to Robin than any of the others.

Of all the plaques, ribbons and trophies he has received, Kessinger is most proud of his “Sammy.” The award is given by the Pinch Reunion to Good Samaritans who have made the world a better place.

The trophy looks a bit like an Oscar, but it’s called a “Sammy.” He was presented with it in 2001 at the annual Pinch Reunion in Pinch, West Virginia. Sammy is short for “Samaritan,” as in “Good Samaritan.” They give the award to people who have made the world a better place.

“It’s like a lifetime achievement for sharing my music and teaching,” Robin said.

Not only is Robin one of the most decorated musicians in American folk music, he has also dedicated the last four decades to teaching budding musicians like Bob Gilmore. Gilmore’s son Michael took lessons from Robin for a while. He lost interest when sports and other things came along. But years down the line, Gilmore ran into Robin at a music festival.

“I asked him if he was still giving lessons and he said ‘yeah,’” Gilmore said. “He said ‘I’ll take Michael back whenever.’ I said ‘Well, Michael’s not interested. I’m talking about me.’”

So he began meeting Robin every week at the Fret ‘n’ Fiddle guitar shop in St. Albans, where Robin keeps a small upstairs studio. That was 10 years ago. Their relationship is so mature now they interact less like teacher and student and more like two old buddies. Their lessons look more like living-room jam sessions.

“I’ve probably shown Bob more family tunes … I just keep digging up stuff I haven’t played in years,” Robin said.

Bob Gilmore, a longtime student of Robin Kessinger, keeps an eye on his teacher’s fingers as the pair play a traditional fiddle tune.

In fact, Robin schedules Bob as his last session for the day so they can take as long as they want.

“When he’s showing me stuff there always seems to be a story behind these tunes,” Gilmore said. “He might tell you where the song came from, what it’s about, what was going on at the time. So it‘s little more than the music you get with this, too.”

Clark’s music also lives on in the Kessinger family. Robin taught his son to play guitar and he’s picked up some contest wins of his own. His name is Luke.

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting. 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.