Appalachians love to compete. Whether it’s recreational league softball, a turkey calling contest or workplace chili cookoffs, Mountain folks are in it to win it. But there’s more to competing than just winning or losing. In this show, we’ll meet competitors who are also keepers of beloved Appalachian traditions.
Appalachians love to compete. Whether it’s recreational league softball, a turkey calling contest or workplace chili cookoffs, Mountain folks are in it to win it.
But there’s more to competing than just winning or losing.
In this show, we’ll meet competitors who are also keepers of beloved Appalachian traditions.
Musgrave Reports From The Mountain Mushroom Festival
Tina Caroland shows off a morel mushroom at the Mountain Mushroom Festival in Irvine, Kentucky. Caroland has demonstrated how to fry morels at the festival for about 15 years. She purchased morels for this year’s cooking demonstration because Caroland and her family were slow to find morels at the start of this season. Credit: Nicole Musgrave/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Each spring, people take to the woods in search of morels, a seasonal favorite throughout Appalachia, and they inspire all kinds of competition.
Folkways Reporter Nicole Musgrave went to the Mountain Mushroom Festival in Irvine, Kentucky and found people looking for the most mushrooms — the biggest mushrooms — and the tastiest way to eat mushrooms.
An Accident Of Appalachian History Led To A New Style of Pizza
In Wheeling, West Virginia, people are passionate about their pizza. People there say that an accident of history led to a new style of pizza – Appalachia’s contribution to America’s great regional pizza traditions. Folkways Reporter Zack Harold visited DiCarlo’s Famous Pizza to find out more. Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Ever live in a place where there’s a competition between two restaurants, and people sort of decide which team they’re on?
Folkways Reporter Zack Harold says people in Wheeling, West Virginia are passionate about their pizza.That’s because an accident of history led to a new style and who’s better/who’s best contest that’s been going on for decades.
Brave Kids Continue Eisteddfod Tradition
Eisteddfod is probably not a word that rolls off the tongue of everyone in Appalachia. But in Wales, it refers to a traditional music competition that goes back nearly 1,000 years. Immigrants brought the tradition to southern Ohio, where it has endured for generations. Thanks in part to some brave kids.
Folkways Reporter Capri Cafaro has this story.
Playing To Eat And Eating To Play
Another competitive tradition that’s endured for generations is weekly board game night. Whether with family or friends, we play Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, and sometimes even Candyland.
Folkways Reporter Clara Haizlett reported on a board game that matches West Virginia’s favorite cryptids with some of its favorite places to eat.
A Southern Ohio Town Honors The Appalachian Connection To The NFL
Appalachia’s connection to professional football has always been a little loose. Lots of pro players have come out of Appalachia, but there’s really only one Appalachian NFL team — the Pittsburgh Steelers, or two if you count the Atlanta Falcons, as a listener recently argued we should.
It turns out, at least one other professional team has Appalachian DNA — the Detroit Lions. That franchise began as the Portsmouth Spartans in Portsmouth, Ohio, just across the river from Kentucky.
Sports fan and WVPB reporter Randy Yohe has this story.
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What about you? What kind of competitions are happening in your neck of the woods? Maybe you know about a sport or contest we’ve never heard about. Or someone there makes pizza like nobody else. Tell us about it. Email us at InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Charlie McCoy, The Steel Drivers, Larry Groce, David Mayfield, and Dean Martin.
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.
Elementary schools in Jackson, Ohio require every 5th grader to perform a song on stage. Some students choose to sing in Welsh.
This year marked the 96th Annual Eisteddfod in Jackson, Ohio. The Eisteddfod is a centuries-old Welsh music competition that was brought to southern Ohio by Welsh immigrants in the 1800s. Today, the tradition continues not only in Wales, but as a program put on by the Jackson, Ohio School District, inspiring students to learn about the region’s history and gain valuable life skills in the process.
For this year’s event, at least 100 parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters packed the auditorium to watch their family members perform. Students from the first to the fifth grade are required to participate in what has become more of an annual performance than a competition.
While it is compulsory for all elementary school children in Jackson schools to participate in the Eisteddfod, only the fifth graders get to choose a song in the Welsh language to sing.
Billy Witt is one of those fifth graders who decided to perform a Welsh song.
“I sang [the Welsh song] Calon Lan because my friend was going to sing this song. But he didn’t know how to pronounce any of the words,” Witt said. “So I was singing it to him for him to try to figure it out. Mr. Kugel overheard me and he asked me if I wanted to try to sing that.”
Sam Kugel is the fifth grade music teacher who helped talk Billy into singing Calon Lan, a song about appreciating the little things in life. Kugel teaches students the song’s melody while Welsh professor Dan Robotham helps kids pronounce the Welsh lyrics.
Even though it took some convincing to get Witt to sing the Welsh song, he still saw some value in doing it.
“I think it’s important because the Welsh basically founded this area,” he said. “And I think it’s great to support that and have a bunch of different things like the Eisteddfod to keep that tradition going.”
Witt was not crazy about the idea of getting up and singing in front of the crowd. But that is all part of the Eisteddfod tradition, one that is shared across generations.
Jackson native Catherine Smalley came to this year’s Eisteddfod to watch her grandsons sing. She reflected on her own time participating in the program 55 years ago.
“Everyone sang a solo. It wasn’t an option. It was just what you did,” Smalley said.
She said the event has changed a bit over the decades. “They’ve given some of the kids other options by singing duets or quartets or whatever, which is good. That at least gets them up there.”
While Jackson students are required to participate in the Eisteddfod during all five years of elementary school, the students aren’t judged. Starting in sixth grade, participation is no longer required. At that point, students can choose to continue to participate, and the program shifts from just being a performance to becoming a competition.
Competition becomes more intense when students enter high school. The performance is put on for a community-wide audience and each student or group is judged. Those who choose to stick with it year after year are ready for the pressure.
Camden Robertson, a Jackson High School sophomore, says being required to get on stage in elementary school gave him the building blocks for success in high school and beyond.
“I don’t think I would have ever proceeded in doing the Eisteddfod if I wasn’t required in elementary school, because it requires a lot of confidence to stand up in front of all these people that you know, or don’t know even, to just sing or play your instrument,” he said.
Even younger kids recognize the role the Eisteddfod has played in their personal growth. “It’s how I lost stage fright, was going up in front of a big crowd and then realizing it’s fun,” 4th-grader Naomi McGee said.
Eisteddfod may be difficult to pronounce, but its impact is simple to explain. In Jackson, Ohio, it brings a sense of purpose and pride to those who participate.
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This story originally aired in the Aug. 19, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, whichis 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.
Myya Helm is one of only 41 students in America to receive the prestigious Marshall Scholarship from the United Kingdom.
Growing up as a black woman in West Virginia, Helm says people often underestimated her. But with a little encouragement from her professor at WVU, she won a Marshall Scholarship award from the United Kingdom, making her one of 41 students in the U.S. to earn such an honor.
Helm’s research has a strong historic connection to the Mountain State. She plans to explore the connections between the Welsh black working class and the West Virginia black working class while living in Wales.
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Myya Helm grew up in W.Va.
“As a black woman being raised and living in one of the most predominantly white places in the United States, I’m often put in a box,” Helm said. “People, even in academia, usually assume and tell me what I can and can’t do.”
But one professor saw her potential. “Dr. Christina Fattore at WVU was the first person to tell me that I was good enough to apply for prestigious scholarships.”
Helms was a double major in political science and international studies with a minor in Arabic studies at WVU. She drew from her personal journey to discover her family roots to guide her scholarship application. Helms said she was always curious about who she was and wanted to learn more about her history.
“For Americans like myself that are descended from enslaved African people, I think the roots of our ancestry are often a mystery,” Helm said. “It’s a reminder that 150 years ago, black people weren’t considered people in America.”
Helms dug through death certificates, wills and countless records to explore her family roots. She found out that several of her ancestors were coal miners in southern West Virginia.
“The men in my family were the reason that the United Mine Workers of America organizers began organizing the southern coalfields in 1920,” Helm said. “The UMWA was one of the first unions to have an anti-racist clause in their constitution. They were considered the most important union in terms of organizing black workers in the early 20th century, much sooner than the Civil Rights Movement had even happened that their black and white workers work together to achieve justice for all of them.”
Her curiosity led her to exploring the connections between West Virginia in black history to Welsh black history.
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Myya Helm grew up in W.Va.
“Whenever I was in school, I never learned about black coal miners in West Virginia,” Helm said. “That is almost exactly the same as the stories of many Welsh people. Coal mining is integral to Welsh culture as well. Just like it is here, people don’t learn about the black coal miners in Wales, even though coal mining is so integral to the culture and history of both regions.”
She added: “A lot of black men from the Caribbean and from Northern Africa immigrated to the United Kingdom to work in the Welsh coal fields, just like a lot of men migrated in the United States to escape the Jim Crow South. They came to West Virginia for new opportunities there. That’s just the beginning of the many, many connections between Wales and West Virginia and why I want to keep researching.”
While studying at Cardiff University in Cardiff, Wales, she hopes to find out what the root of oppression is.
“From there I want to see how black coal miners in West Virginia and Wales fought those oppressions historically, because we don’t know,” Helm said. “That history has been erased from common knowledge. If we look at that, can we replicate what those black communities successfully did, and creating interracial working class solidarity, to do the same thing today to benefit the labor movement to benefit the Black Lives Matter movement and to help fight oppression today, however, it may appear.”
The core of her goals with her research is to learn from the past and history. Helm hopes her research will help to influence and develop policies that have worked before.
“Historical thinking is incredibly valuable to policies, especially for economic development,” Helm said. “One of my main goals with this research in my academic career is to ultimately help create policy that benefits working class people, whether in West Virginia or in Wales.
“When making policy recommendations in the future, I will use historical methods and approaches to provide the best possible contextual information, because everyone can learn almost anything (about) almost anything is going to turn out by looking at history, and we can see negative patterns we can learn from that and how to change that. “The main fact is that history matters. And black history matters. And this black history matters. And in learning just how exactly the working class came together, or whatever else, we can make it happen again, and we can create a West Virginia that welcomes workers that provides economic stability and that is the best place to build and grow a business. But first we need to analyze and learn from the positive and the negative patterns of the past. To create a better future.”
Appalachia has had hundreds of years of connection to Wales — people have been immigrating back-and-forth between the two regions since the late 1600s.
Our Inside Appalachia team has continued this through its Folkways program, by connecting teenage students in both Wales and West Virginia.
Courtesy Mackenzie Kessler
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Mackenzie Kessler, a high school student from Fayette County, West Virginia, has been exchanging audio messages with teenagers in Wales.
Originally, students from Merthyr Tydfil, Wales shared “audio diaries” with students in Lincoln County, West Virginia in 2019 and early 2020. They recorded themselves discussing serious subjects, like what life is like in current or former “coal country,” and more fun topics like favorite foods and what these teens do for fun. Subjects included Tudor’s Biscuit World, “plain pizza,” Doritos with salsa and the FIFA World Cup video game. Can you guess which choices were from Wales and which were from West Virginia?
Throughout 2020, the Inside Appalachia team helped the Merthyr Tydfil students, Ela Cudlip and Sam McCarthy, connect with two teenagers in Fayetteville, West Virginia, Brooke Thomas and Mackenzie Kessler. As one might imagine, the pandemic was on their minds.
Other topics discussed in the audio diaries include first love, getting a driver’s license and thoughts about the future, i.e. to go to college or not. These were topics that are universal for everyone in their teens – regardless of where they live.
This story is part of our Folklife Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.
As part of our Inside Appalachia folkways project, we have been exploring Appalachia’s unique connection to Wales. Both regions mountainous landscapes, a history of coal extraction, folktales and it turns out, music.
There is a growing community of musicians from both Wales and Appalachia who share an interest in the culture that binds them together.
Wales And Appalachian Old-Time
Ben McManus is a musician who lives in Aberystwyth, Wales. He grew up playing instruments, but as a teenager, he was instantly captivated when he heard music, from Appalachia.
“I came back from high school one day, and the gardener’s were playing bluegrass, like really loudly out of a boombox,” McManus said. “And I was just like, ‘wow, what is this music?’”
He was hooked. McManus searched for similar music, and that led him to Appalachian old-time, which is older than bluegrass. In fact, the string music played here in Appalachia has cultural roots from all over northern Africa, Europe and the British Isles — including Wales.
Credit West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Clifftop is an old-time music festival in southern West Virginia.
McManus fell in love with Appalachian string music so much, he eventually traveled to West Virginia to learn more from the musicians here. He took fiddle classes at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins and played at the Clifftop Appalachian Stringband Festival, a world-renowned old-time music celebration in southern West Virginia, which has been going on for 30 years.
Two Festivals 3,665 Miles Away
In Wales, there is another music festival, called Fire in the Mountain, named after an Appalachian fiddle tune. It includes a growing group of musicians in Wales who are also interested in the music of Appalachia.
McManus said it is the closest thing to Clifftop that he has found.
“A river runs right through the middle of it, so just a lot of chilling out, and just music everywhere, folk music everywhere,” he said. “It’s just a big four day party on a beautiful farm in the middle of Wales.”
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Listen to Ben McManus play banjo.
Appalachians In Wales
And this music exchange goes both ways.
Musicians Carl Jones and Erynn Marshall live in Galax, Virginia. They travel the world teaching and performing old-time music. But their favorite place to go is Wales.
“You might hear bluegrass and old-time and then you might hear somebody sing a Welsh song, you might hear somebody do an old-time or bluegrass song and sing it in Welsh,” Marshall said.
Marshall added that she and Jones were going to attend Fire in the Mountain this year, but it was cancelled because of the pandemic.
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Listen to Erynn Marshall and Carl Jones play a medley of West Virginia old-time tunes.
Jones is from Georgia, but on one of his first music trips to Wales, he was surprised to find he shared a lot of similarities with the Welsh people he met.
“We met a lot of singing farmers and they looked a lot like me. I was kind of shocked,” he said. “I said, ‘Wow, this guy looks sort of like I look.’ They are really good singers. I’m not saying I’m a good singer, but I did really feel an affinity to the geography and the location felt very comfortable to me and I love going to Wales.”
Jones recently took a DNA test, and discovered that many of his ancestors came from Great Britain. He said he would like to believe that many of them were from Wales.
Credit Glynis Board / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
A view of the seaside in Wales in December, 2019.
Marshall is originally from Canada, but she said she fell in love with Appalachia about 25 years ago. She devoted years to learning old time music from the people in the region. She said she wants to ensure that their music lives on.
“You know, we’re all links in the rope of tradition, you know strands in that rope,” Marshall said. “And it’s really important for me to share what those musicians shared with me; they were very generous.”
The Roots Of Old-Time
Musical traditions evolve as they pass to different cultures and continents, but there are many elements of this music that have not changed, for centuries, even after traveling thousands of miles.
One of Marshall’s favorite songs is a beautiful ballad she plays on the fiddle, called “Love Nancy.” It is an Appalachian song, but it actually originated from an older song from the British Isles.
“It came to West Virginia and other people learned it like myself, as well — it’s beautiful, many of the words long forgotten, but the tune still lives,” Marshall said.
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Listen to Erynn Marshall play 'Love Nancy' on fiddle.
This interconnection between Welsh immigrants and Appalachian string music has long fascinated folklorist Gerry Milnes.
“I don’t know of any culture who came here who didn’t bring some music with them,” he said.
Milnes is the former folk arts coordinator at the Augusta Heritage Center.
Over the years in his interviews with people in Appalachia, he has discovered hints of Welsh influence in our culture.
“There’s a whole list of towns with really Welsh sounding names,” he said. “Certainly for one thing, there’s an awful lot of Welsh surnames that are involved currently and in the past with old-time traditional music in West Virginia.”
Many Welsh people immigrated to Appalachia in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Although there is not a lot of written history about this group of immigrants, Milnes said he has a hunch that there are more cultural connections with Wales than we realize.
Ben McManus, the Welsh musician who fell in love with Appalachian old-time, agrees.
He has been digging into the history of music that the people of Wales would have been playing in the late 1600s — just before so many of them immigrated to Appalachia. He said there is very little recorded history of the music and culture from that time, adding that is perhaps because the British invasion and oppression of the country wiped out much of that history.
A lot of the Welsh folk music of today had to be rewritten in the following centuries. McManus said he recognizes the importance of keeping traditional music alive, which includes Appalachian old-time.
“Obviously being like a Welsh guy on the other side of the world, like, it’s kind of not wanting to take someone else’s tradition, but it’s like, learning their style,” he said”
The modern day cross cultural exchange of Appalachian old-time music is on hold this year, at least in person. Virginia-based musicians Erynn Marshall and Carl Jones have their sights set on Fire in the Mountain next year. So does McManus. In fact, he is planning to be in West Virginia too — playing old-time music across the Mountain State when it is hopefully safe in 2021.
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
Before the pandemic hit, our Inside Appalachia team was planning a reporting trip to Wales as part of our ongoing folkways project, as the country has a strong historical connection to Appalachia that we wanted to explore. The trip’s been postponed, but in a special report as part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Project, Caitlin Tan interviewed two Welsh storytellers who through their craft bring us artistic parallels between our region’s sister country.
Wales, Appalachia, COVID-19
They called it “The World Turned Upside Down.” In the 18th and 19th century the British monarchy took over Wales and the Industrial Revolution began. Thousands of poorer farmers were displaced, left with no land or work, so they sailed West, eventually finding themselves in Appalachia. This continued to happen for hundreds of years.
“People were displaced from here and then coming over to Appalachia and displacing people who live there,” said Peter Stevenson, a professional storyteller, artist and folklorist who lives in Wales. “So, it’s not necessarily a particularly nice story, but there’s a lot of folktales behind that.”
Credit Peter Stevenson
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One of Peter Stevenson’s drawings depicting a part of his story, ‘The War of the Little Englishman.’
Peter spent the last few years writing about this complex period in history and about the resulting connection between Wales and Appalachia. The tales have culminated into a book called “The Moon-Eyed People.”
In a way, these old stories help us understand ourselves and the times we are living in, Peter said. Even the title, “The World Turned Upside Down” seems familiar right now.
“And I don’t think it’s too much a stretch of the imagination to kind of realize we’re probably in one of those right now, in a very different way,” he said. “But it’s in a human emotional level. We’re upside down. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.”
Rooted In The Land
West Virginia Public Broadcasting interviewed Peter for a story last year when he hosted an art exhibit in Morgantown featuring Welsh and West Virginian artists, exploring the unique folklore connections between the two regions. Peter has family in the Mountain State, which initially sparked his interest in the connections between these two places.
He said that through the centuries of immigration Welsh and Appalachian folklore have naturally influenced one another.
“Geographically, they’re very similar landscapes, you know, mountains, woods, you have the big rivers, we have the sea, but there’s this strong connection between the people and the land,” he said. “And the thing that comes out of that connection, it’s stories and music, folk culture, buildings, all the things that are rooted in the landscape that people respond to and see.”
Credit Glynis Board / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The Welsh countryside on a WVPB scouting trip in December, 2019. Peter Stevenson said he sees a lot of similarities in the Appalachian and Welsh landscapes.
The Craft Of Storytelling
When Peter tells a story, one feels like a kid again – sitting crisscross, entranced by the vivid tale.
As Peter has retold these old folktales for audiences, he has adapted them – sometimes just taking the idea of an old story and writing it using his own folklore research.
In live performances, Peter’s artwork typically accompanies each story. He often tells Welsh tales using an Appalachian storytelling device called the crankie. Basically, it is a scroll that moves horizontally, depicting hand drawn or painted images.
Credit Peter Stevenson
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The crankie scroll that Peter designed for the story “The War of the Little Englishman,’ set in front of the actual old ruins from the tale.
In the book “The Moon-Eyed People,” Peter intentionally used white, black and red in his drawings. He said he hoped the colors conveyed the tense times. He drew the faces of the characters, often including animals, to look inherently friendly; however, the scenes and the small details often depict things from one’s nightmares – a group of angry villagers burning a castle down, a girl with wolf ears, and little goblins and fairies emerging from a fairytale book, to name a few.
“I can tell a great long story and I know hundreds of stories, but how do I remember them? Well, I don’t remember word for word,” Peter said. “What I do remember are pictures. I see images. So, I know the narrative of a story. I know what’s going to happen one moment to the next, because I can see the pictures.”
Featuring The Cello
Lately, Peter’s storytelling performances about Wales and Appalachia have included music.
Specifically, music performed by Ailsa Hughes. She is a Welsh musician, storyteller and artist.
She wrote the song “Messenger of the Darkness,” to accompany one of Peter’s stories – adapting it from old Appalachian and Welsh folktales about death, featuring an owl, an ominous symbol in many cultures.
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Listen to Ailsa's song 'Messenger of Darkness.'
Ailsa’s voice is hauntingly beautiful. Whether in Welsh or English, her voice harmonizes with her cello – creating a reverberation that fills one’s whole room, even if it is coming through a computer, several thousand miles away.
Although Ailsa has not traveled to Appalachia, she said she is inspired by landscapes and the old folktales of both countries. In fact, during the pandemic Ailsa has been using music, sounds and the landscape to bring people together, through something called “sound mapping.”
Credit Peter Stevenson
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One of Peter’s drawings from the story, ‘Rhyfel y Sais Bach’ or in English, ‘The War of the Little Englishman.’
“I get people to listen at the moment from their gardens or just put their windows open and creatively depict the sounds they’re hearing in the landscape,” she said. “So, like drawing and writing words and finding ways of describing the sounds that they’re hearing.”
Melody Rooted In Tradition
Ailsa started playing the cello at age seven. It was only later as an adult that she started writing songs, using them as a storytelling device and, as part of her band duo Tinc y Tannau, sometimes finding lyrical inspiration from old Welsh texts.
“This sense of finding, belonging that I feel really present with that at the moment, this need to connect with my ancestors and to connect with the place where I am, the place where I feel at home in a deeper and deeper way and I think through the arts we can do this,” she said.
Ailsa has also taken to the dulcimer, an ancient stringed instrument from Western Europe that was later modified into the mountain dulcimer in Appalachia. It is featured prominently in a lot of the region’s old-time music.
Ailsa recorded herself playing the dulcimer in her own unique, Welsh style, across the Atlantic Ocean, nearly 4,000 miles away.
dulcimer.mp3
Listen to Ailsa's dulcimer improvisation.
“I can’t profess to be able to play this, but I couldn’t not play it a little bit for you,” she said.
Ailsa and Peter had plans to perform their stories and songs this summer in Wales, but the pandemic canceled their shows. However, they recorded themselves and shared their collaboration with us at WVPB.
Credit Peter Stevenson
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Peter’s drawing of one of the several castles burnt down in the ‘War of the Little Englishman.’
The story and song they performed is about the “World Turned Upside Down” period in Wales. The story is called ‘Rhyfel y Sais Bach‘ in Welsh or, ‘The War of the Little Englishman,” and it is written and told by Peter Stevenson, and the Welsh hymn is sung by Ailsa Hughes.
storyandsongWEB.mp3
Listen to the story "Rhyfel y Sais Bach."
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
