RE: [Harp-L] Was Any 1920s; Now Coalfield Blues

[robert mcgraw <harpbob@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dave Payne wrote:
Frank breathed coal dust at the Ft. Branch Coal mine in Logan, W.Va. all day. Thinking about Frank is what got me thinking about this, Frank had some pretty deep blues roots and it doesn't seem like he had ever heard 2nd position. The Southern West Virginia coal fields had a tremendous amount of blacks by 1910 and there seems to have been a very free exchange of musical ideas between blacks and whites in this area by World War I and the 1920s.
WVa Bob added: ---I, along with Dave, am very familiar with the Southern West Virginia coalfields, as I've lived most of my life here...many folks aren't aware of the rich cultural diversity of the Appalachian coalfields, from 1910 until, really, the period immediately after WWII...and African Americans were a big part of that. While West Virginia was certainly no racial Utopia, black coal miners were paid the same wage as white coal miners, so black people from the Delta and other parts of the South did come here; they brought their music with them, as did the Italian, Hungarian, Welsh, and Scottish immigrants who came here to mine coal. As Dave said, there evidently was a considerable exchange of musical ideas amongst these peoples.
   I've been fortunate to be a friend  and occasional musical partner of  guitarist/singer named Nat Reese, from Princeton, West Virginia. Some of you may have heard him at festivals around the country when he was playing as a partner of the fiddler/mandolinist Howard Armstrong. Nat, who is now 83, recalls rent parties, juke joints and traveling bluesmen just as you may have read about in the Mississippi Delta, but all in Southern West Virginia in the late 1930s-40s...Nat also says he and other African-Americans in the coalfields loved to listen to the Grand Ole Opry; in fact, Nat plays several country tunes, though not often.   
  Of course this cultural interchange will not come as any surprise to any of you; the point isn't that something was happening in the West Virginia coalfields that wasn't happening elsewhere; the point is that  what was happening elsewhere was happening here, too, which is a fact that I'm under the impression isn't well-known, and which guys like Dave and I are proud of. There's much more to West Virginia than you might expect...
WVa Bob
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