×
TRAVIS STIMELING: I decided that the classical music might be the bread and butter that provides, you know, the basis of my teaching and that sort of thing; that I needed to spend my life studying Appalachian music, country music, the music that I grew up with to really get a better understanding of who I am or where I come from if nothing else.
DIANA MAZZELLA: I’m Diana Mazzella, and you’re listening to the first episode of Sparked, a podcast from
West Virginia University Magazine about the people who are changing Appalachia’s future. They’re solving problems, creating jobs and inspiring progress. The voice you heard in the opening clip belongs to Travis Stimeling, a musicology professor who created the WVU Bluegrass Band. We followed the band in the spring of 2016 as it toured K-12 schools in West Virginia. The first stop was Oak Glen Middle School.
SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR: OK, make sure you are quiet and you guys are listening respectfully. They came a long way to do this and we’re glad to see them, so without further ado I’d like to welcome the West Virginia University Bluegrass Band.
[MUSIC: “Blues Stay Away From Me”]
STIMELING: Bluegrass music comes out of the old string band traditions. It’s a musical practice, it’s a commercial music actually it comes out of the 1950s named after the band Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass boys. Bill Monroe was a star of the Grand Ol Opry and had a band featuring Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs — a string band sound, what Alan Lomax called “folk music with overdrive” is kind of what bluegrass music is. And the songs tend to reflect some sort of aspect of everyday life. They’re about heartbreak. They’re about agricultural life. They’re about industry.
They’re about jobs that have gone away. They really deal with kind of working people’s issues. In a sense, bluegrass music’s often thought to have sort of a common touch and to speak to common problems.
MAZZELLA: Travis knows what he’s talking about. He’s connected to this place through his roots in Buckhannon in central West Virginia.
He’s this energetic preacher of music with a PhD in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He edited “The Country Music Reader” out of Oxford University Press, and he’s just out with a book called “50 Cents and a Box Top” about Charlie McCoy, a Country Music Hall of Famer who played with Bob Dylan and lots of other bands.
So he knows a lot about this music. It’s not just intellectual for him. He has it in his heart from when he was a child, listening to his neighbors play this music, listening to it in church and just growing to love it.
STIMELING: So my earliest memories of Appalachian music probably go back to when I was a little kid growing up in Upshur County. And there was one gentleman in particular. His name was Randolph Wright. And Mr. Wright kept in his shirt pocket a little book full of texts, hymn texts. As I think back on it that sound of his voice, he wasn’t a trained singer, he was a farmer and a coal miner, and he just sang with passion.
When I went to college, Appalachian music was not something I thought about. I wanted to be a classically trained musician. I got it in my head somewhere that there was a right way to make music and a wrong way to make music and to me the wrong way was the way I grew up with. So I went to school to learn how to play like a classical musician. I was a low brass major, went off and did competitions and everything. It was reasonably successful at that. It wasn’t until I started my master’s degree that I realized that that music that I’d been playing and studying just didn’t feel like home to me.
MAZZELLA: You don’t have to talk to Travis long to see that he really understands this music that he cares about it and he wants other people to care about it, too. That’s why he and the band are doing this trip.
STIMELING: This is called a dobro or a slide guitar and where this instrument comes from is Hawaii. It’s what’s also known as a Hawaiian steel guitar originally. What happened was there were Spanish sailors who brought guitars with them to the Hawaiian Islands, and the Hawaiians there said that’s a pretty neat instrument but what if you were to raise all the strings up and slide a metal bar or something on it to make it so we could play our traditional songs. And so this instrument became very, very popular in the 1920s and 1930s. This was the sound of contemporary…
MAZZELLA: In 2015 the band started touring the state from Berkeley Springs to Clay County. From Philipi to Thomas. On this 2016 tour after the middle school, the band hits the road and heads south on Route 2 toward Brooke High School in Wellsburg. Along the way, you get the sense of why exploring the value of Appalachian culture and music is so important right now.
We pass an old steel plant that’s much smaller than it was decades ago. In the early 1900s, one area steel plant, Weirton Steel was the state’s largest employer. There are towns now across the state that have more people leaving than are coming in. So the questions you see hanging over these high schoolers are where will they live? Where will they work? And what would keep them here?
STIMELING: I have decided that this bluegrass band, it’s primary goal is to remind people of the great things that we have here in the state of West Virginia. And that’s why we go to the schools and that’s why we go out to places that are a little bit off the beaten path. Because it’s in those places, it’s places like Clay County Middle School where you have kids who are growing up in this tradition but who are also looking out to the rest of the world and wondering is it better out there? And I want to remind them that it’s not necessarily better, it’s just different. And that the things that they’re growing up around and that they value and that really excite them have value as well — that the rest of the world sees that.
MAZZELLA: After the band performed at the high school auditorium to mostly music students, the students had questions for them: What is college like? What’s it like to pursue music there? How do you pay for college? But the band was also asking them questions: Where are you from? And what does that mean to you? And are you going to take that with you if you leave? And will you come back?
[MUSIC: “Won’t You Come and Sing For Me”]
MAZZELLA: There’s this song that the band often plays called “West Virginia, My Home.” It’s by Hazel Dickens and it’s about how the singer misses the home that she’s been away from for so long.
[MUSIC: “West Virginia, My Home”]
STIMELING: “West Virginia, My Home” the Hazel Dickens song is a song that almost always brings a tear to my eye. I spent 10 years away from the Mountain State and they were 10 of the most trying years of my life because I always wanted to be back home.
MAZZELLA: There’s this one line in the song that Travis references. “I can’t remember why I left so free, what I wanted to do, what I wanted to see, but I can sure remember where I come from.” He thought about that line when he wasn’t home. And he thinks about it now when he’s working with students who are trying to make those decisions. The song hits on why he’s doing it: To build a band, to take that band on the road and to perform for hundreds of school children who can become attached to this music and more attached to their culture, a culture that can influence them for the rest of their lives.
[Indistinct music and applause]
At the end of the tour, there was one audience who are years away from asking where they’ll live and where they’ll work. For the kids at Washington Lands Elementary School, when the music plays, you get right down to having a good time.
STIMELING: That was much better. That would be easier to dance to than what y’all were doing the first time. [Laughter]
[MUSIC: “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”]
STIMELING: Ultimately I’d love it if kids would come out of a place like Clay County Middle School, go get an education and then come back with the deep knowledge of the things that are important in that place and with an understanding of how the rest of the world works, and then hopefully transform those places and make them places that are more liveable. As we face things like population decline in the here in the state, I think those sorts of re-imaginings are really important. Music provides a way for people to reimagine the places they live in, not as backwoods places or as places that time forgot or as you know former industrial colonies that have been left to the wayside but as places that have great potential, potential for cultural development, potential for really peaceful and sustainable living. I think music can play a really important role in all of that.
[MUSIC: “Take Me Home, Country Roads”]
MAZZELLA: Thank you for listening. This podcast was created to show how West Virginia University alumni and faculty are invested in their communities. They see a problem and they are determined to solve it. We want to know what you think of the podcast so far. So send us your comments and ideas for future shows by writing to wvumag@mail.wvu.edu. You can also find a whole story full of photos and videos about the WVU Bluegrass Band and Appalachian music culture online at our website which is wvumag.wvu.edu. Sparked is a production of West Virginia University, located in Morgantown, W.Va.
