Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, is not seeking re-election. When he leaves the chamber next January, that elevates Sen. Shelley Moore Capito’s seniority.
Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito will become West Virginia’s senior senator next year. What does that mean for the state’s clout in Washington?
Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, is not seeking re-election. When he leaves the chamber next January, that elevates Capito’s seniority.
Capito is a member of the Senate Republican leadership, and she is the senior Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee.
Both serve on the Appropriations Committee, which gives West Virginia an unusual amount of say over federal spending. Manchin, though, is a committee chairman of Energy and Natural Resources. His departure could diminish the state’s influence.
Unless Republicans wrest control of the Senate after November, which would make Capito chair of the environment committee. That committee authorizes road and bridge projects, as well as water and wastewater infrastructure. Capito took a lead role in what became the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, which has brought billions of dollars in funding to the Mountain State. Manchin had a hand in it as well.
West Virginia has a long history of senators leveraging their seniority, up to and including Manchin and Capito. Capito says she’ll continue to leverage hers.
“Well, I will be the senior senator after this next election,” she said. “And that means that my clout is more powerful, and my voice will be more powerful.”
It’s similar to West Virginia’s longtime Sen. Robert C. Byrd. Byrd served in various leadership positions, including majority leader, and he spent more than 50 years in the chamber, using his influence on the state’s behalf. After Byrd’s death in 2010, Manchin took his place.
Capito took the place of Sen. Jay Rockefeller in 2015. By the time he retired, Rockefeller had been in the Senate for 30 years and was chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
On February 4, 1861, a Peace Conference was held in Washington as a last-ditch effort to avert the looming Civil War. The deep divisions between the North and South carried into the conference, which failed to find a compromise. The Civil War started two months later.
George W. Summers of Charleston was among the 100 statesmen from across the country who attended the conference. Summers had proudly served his state and region for decades, including three terms in the Virginia General Assembly. From 1841 to 1845, he’d served as a representative from Western Virginia in Congress.
As a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850-51, Summers and other westerners helped secure reforms that favored Western Virginia. In the gubernatorial election of 1851, he was defeated by Harrison County’s Joseph Johnson, who became Virginia’s first popularly elected governor. Summers likely lost because he was viewed as anti-slavery even though he himself owned slaves.
As a member of the Virginia secession convention, he voted against the Ordinance of Secession. After the vote, Summers resigned his seat at the convention, returned home to Charleston, and retired from public life.
Educator Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, on April 5, 1856. After the Civil War, he relocated to Malden, a few miles east of Charleston, where he attended a one-room school for blacks.
He also was tutored by Viola Ruffner, whom he later credited for instilling in him the qualities of cleanliness and hard work.
After graduating from Hampton Institute in Virginia, Washington returned to West Virginia as a teacher. In 1879, he went back to Hampton as a professor. But when school was out, he’d come home to work in West Virginia’s coal mines.
In 1881, he opened a college for African-American teachers in Tuskegee, Alabama. Tuskegee Institute would become one of the country’s finest schools for blacks. And Washington would become the nation’s unofficial spokesman for African-Americans. He was controversial, though, in some circles for urging cooperation among whites and blacks.
Booker T. Washington returned regularly to West Virginia to visit family members and make speeches. He died in Tuskegee in 1915 at age 59. A monument of Washington is located on the state capitol grounds in Charleston.
Photographer Volkmar Wentzel was born in Germany on February 8, 1915. He and his family immigrated to New York State when he was 11. He eventually ended up in Preston County, West Virginia, where he attended high school.
As a teenager, he joined up with some Washingtonians who’d formed an artists’ colony in the forests of Preston County. While working at the artists’ colony, Wentzel built a darkroom in a pump house and began shooting local scenery for postcards.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt acquired some of his postcards when she traveled through the area to Arthurdale—the nation’s first resettlement community during the New Deal.
Wentzel was a writer and photographer for National Geographic from the 1930s until the 1980s. His articles and photographs ranged from pre-war Sweden to the wedding of African tribal royalty. He also took the first photographs of little-known Nepal. One of his first major assignments was to take photos for a 1940 article about West Virginia. In 1957, National Geographic published his second West Virginia article, featuring haunting, artistic images of Harpers Ferry.
Volkmar Wentzel died in Washington in 2006 at age 91.
“It’s kind of outrageous to think that the only place credible music business is done is Nashville. People listen to and play music everywhere, so why only do business in Nashville? It doesn’t make sense to me.”
From West Virginia Public Broadcasting and A Change of Tune, this is 30 Days of #WVmusic, the interview series celebrating the folks who make the West Virginia music scene wild and wonderful.
And today’s interview is with an Americana duo taking an out-of-state approach to their Mid-Ohio Valley music. This… is Steve Hussey & Jake Eddy.
Steve Hussey: I bought a guitar halfway through my freshman year of college and taught myself how to play. I did it so I could write songs. I’ve been writing now ever since then. I founded The Steve Hussey Band in 2003, and we were together for nine years, played all throughout West Virginia and up and down the East Coast. We were a bar band, and we played a lot of dance music. From there, I did a couple of other small projects, took a break to learn how to be a producer and built my own studio.
I met Jake in 2014. I had written a couple of songs I wanted to record for my wedding as a party favor. I didn’t know anybody in the world that played the instruments Jake plays. I went to high school with his parents, and I was impressed [with his music]. He was soliciting for studio work. I took him up on his offer, and we recorded three songs for the wedding. That went so well, we talked about doing another few songs, and eventually it became the album.
Jake Eddy: I play banjo, guitar, mandolin, dobro, percussion, bass, ukulele and a hundred various other things Steve has laying around. The misfit toys of the instrument world. And I play all of that on the record [The Miller Girl] as well.
I started playing music when I was eight. I started playing upright bass first in a bluegrass band. I went from that to play guitar and banjo, and then I learned to play the other things over time. I linked up with Steve, and this has been my main gig ever since, other than studio work and production stuff I do outside of this. I’ve gained my name in this circle of roots and bluegrass and also the hip-hop industry as a producer. I’ve always liked rap, but I never write it or anything like that; it’s most of what I listen to. I’ve always been fascinated with sampling and things like that. I started off messing with samples and manipulating old music to make new music as a hobby and people were like, “You’re good at this.” That’s probably my main gig financially.
Credit Michelle Waters
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Steve Hussey and Jake Eddy
On forming the West Virginia-based music label Merf Records:
Steve: I founded it to release this album. It’s been fun, and I’ve been proactive in signing folks like Jeff Ray and Tracy Allan. The reason I started Merf is there’s so much talent in this state, it’s almost absurd how much talent is in this state. And the history of music in this state, and the whole genre of Americana, has some roots in Appalachia. And it’s still here! But there’s no business infrastructure, no music infrastructure and no one scouting out this talent to get it out to the world. My project was a dry run: let’s hire a publicist, let’s hire a radio promoter, let’s get it to all the Americana reporting stations in the USA and Europe. Merf is an experiment of “why can’t we do that here” [compared to Nashville].
The mission is to take the talent that’s in West Virginia and put a spotlight on it and get it out into the world. I want us to win Grammy’s right here. Why can’t we win a Grammy in West Virginia? Tim O’Brien can do it, but why can’t we do it on a regular basis? I mean, this is Appalachia!
The inspiration is basically Americana artists I know and love that have built their following from the ground-up sans radio support. Building their fanbases from scratch. And you have to have a team; you cannot do it yourself. You have to have someone whose job it is to follow up with all the radio stations you just sent your hard copy off to. You have to take the initiative to put all of your CD’s in boxes, label them and send them out to people who might play it.
Jake: It’s kind of outrageous to think that the only place credible music business is done is Nashville. People listen to and play music everywhere, so why only do business in Nashville? It doesn’t make sense to me.
Credit Michelle Waters
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Steve Hussey
Credit Michelle Waters
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Jake Eddy
On the Mid-Ohio Valley music scene:
Jake: It’s not so much lack of talent, but lack of good attitude. People want to say that the scene is going well but not put forth the effort. They want it to grow on its own, but that’s not how it works.
Steve: It’s an older town, so if they haven’t heard it before, they don’t want to hear it. So it makes it difficult for someone who writes and records original music. But things are changing. In the last year, there has been a small group of people who are trying to change that in the Mid-Ohio Valley. I credit Corey Shields for a lot of it.
Jake: And Todd Burge is a prime example of making your own luck. Todd has been involved in the music scene for ages, and he’s never not found a way to make it work, even when it’s at its worst and now when it’s better. He never stops; Todd hustles.
Music featured in this #WVmusic chat:
Steve Hussey and Jake Eddy- “The Miller Girl”
Steve Hussey and Jake Eddy- “Little Shove”
Steve Hussey and Jake Eddy- “Into the Ether”
Support for 30 Days of #WVmusic is provided by Kin Ship Goods, proud supporter of DIY music and the arts. Locally shipped worldwide at kinshipgoods.com.
