Forgotten voices: WVU professor shares folk music from W.Va. coalfields with help of Mellon grant

WVU Professor of Sustainable Design Chris Haddox has received a $150,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support his project “Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields.” 

While Haddox teaches in the School of Art and Design, he is also a musician with a passion for folk music and the director of the Student Bluegrass and Old Time Band in the School of Music.  

Born and raised in Logan, West Virginia, Haddox has a deep connection to the coalfields’ rich but often overlooked musical traditions. He has been working on “Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields” for about six years alongside Gloria Goodwin Raheja, an anthropologist at the University of Minnesota and author of “Logan County Blues: Frank Hutchison in the Sonic Landscape of the Appalachian Coalfields.”  Their project has been largely funded by the National Coal Heritage Area (NCHA), which has been temporarily paused. The Mellon Foundation grant will help Haddox continue the project’s work in the meantime.

Haddox originally approached the NCHA with the idea that there was more to West Virginia’s coal miners than the fact they mined coal.

“I went to the Coal Heritage folks and said, ‘A lot of these miners were stellar musicians. What if we shined a light on that?’” said Haddox.

In the 1920s, several musicians from Logan County, including Dick Justice and Frank Hutchinson, made commercial recordings at studios in New York, Chicago and St. Louis, becoming rockstars of the folk and root music world. 

“Then there were all these other people in that community that never made it to the big cities—or never even tried to—but they were wonderful singers and musicians, too,” Haddox said.

Some of those singers and musicians were rediscovered when the West Virginia and Regional History Center, housed in the WVU Library, released select recordings from the Louis Watson Chappell Collection for commercial publication, including tracks from fiddlers John Johsnon and Edden Hammons. 

From 1937 to 1947, WVU Professor Louis Chappell traveled the hills and hollows of southern West Virginia with a portable disc recorder, capturing over 2,000 tracks of unaccompanied ballads, instrumental music, fiddle and banjo tunes, gospel songs and hymns, game songs, and Appalachian stories on aluminum discs. Chappell recorded roughly 90 individual artists across 28 West Virginia and two Ohio counties. 

“The Chappell recordings have been sitting largely unnoticed in the archives since the 1970s,” said Haddox. “I’m from Logan, and I didn’t discover them until probably 20 years after I left. I was like, ‘Why have I never heard of any of these people who were right here in my backyard? We need to let everybody down here know about this.’” 

In addition to the Chappell recordings, Haddox’s project also draws on the field recording archives of Cortez D. Reece (1949-1953), Kenneth L. Carvell (1957-1961), Thomas S. Brown (1970-1982), Patrick Ward Gainer (1940s to 19070s), and Gerry Milnes, who—at age 80—is still collecting, learning, playing, and teaching Appalachian folk music. 

“Chappell didn’t have much information when he made these recordings,” said Haddox. “He literally said into his recorder, ‘Tom Witt, August 8, 1940, Kirk, West Virginia.’ Then here’s all these wonderful songs Tom was singing and fiddling. But that’s all we knew about Tom Witt. So I started doing genealogical research to try to tell the story of who Tom Witt and these other folks were.” 

“Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields” shares the names and stories of folk musicians whose voices had been preserved on long-forgotten reel-to-reel tapes. On the project’s website, visitors can read the biographies of over 30 people and explore the family ties and personal relationships that connect the unknown folks of the Mountain State’s southern hollers to big-time commercial artists. 

“I want to be able to provide an alternative narrative for southern West Virginia. It’s not just good for coal mining. We have this rich music history, so let’s talk about that,” said Haddox. “Bob Dylan learned one of his early songs, ‘Henry Lee,’ from Dick Justice, a Logan County coal miner. People should know that and be proud of it.” 

Haddox and Raheja are determined to reveal and preserve some of the lost and forgotten connections in Appalachian folk music, like their discovery that even Justice’s version of “Henry Lee” likely originated years before with Kate Toney.

On Aug. 9, 1940, Chappell recorded Kate Toney singing 79 songs in the Kitchen, Logan County, coal camp. Her lyrics for “Henry Lee” (or, “Hennerlee” as she sang it) are an exact match for the version made famous by Dick Justice in 1929—the one that Bob Dylan and Nick Cave learned and performed. 

Even though Justice’s recording predates Toney’s, multiple factors suggest Justice likely learned his version of “Henry Lee” from Toney or someone in her family. Toney was older than Justice, and some deeper research showed the two shared a common ancestor several generations back. Justice’s family moved to the Kitchen coal camp the same year Toney and her husband did. 

Justice’s family moved away after a few years, but Toney was still in Kitchen two decades later when Chappell recorded her singing the song Justice made famous. 

Whatever it takes

Like most researchers, Haddox starts in the usual places when looking for information about a specific musician: genealogy sites, public records, and newspaper archives. But he has also had to get creative when the usual leads run dry, turning to social media and even cold-calling landline numbers from decades ago.  

The latter method is how Haddox finally got his hands on a picture of Kate Toney. 

Raheja, in the course of her own research, had found the notes of WVU Professor John Cuthbert, who had gone down to Logan in the early 1980s to find out more about the artists in the Chappell tapes. Haddox noticed that Cuthbert’s notes included names and phone numbers scattered throughout.

“I asked Gloria if she’d called any of the numbers, and she hadn’t because they were from 1981,” said Haddox. “I figured if it was a landline, then it was probably still in the family. Three hours later, I tracked down Kate Toney’s granddaughter and ended up talking to Kate’s great-granddaughter, who’s also named Kate.” 

The young Kate was able to help Haddox get one of the few surviving pictures of the late Kate Toney, which is now available on the project’s website. 

In a similar incident, Haddox was determined to find more information and a photo of Black folk musician and songwriter Russell Brown. Haddox had heard a 1940 recording by folklorist Geroge Korson of Brown singing “Union Blues” that had been digitized by the Library of Congress. Brown had written and performed “Union Blues” at a Labor Day celebration in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1935, where organized labor leader John L. Lewis was the speaker. 

Haddox and Raheja had found some basic information about Brown: He was born in 1904 at Winona in the Nuttall district of Fayette County, West Virginia, where his father was a coal miner. Brown completed three years of high school before he moved to Logan County in the 1920s and married Marietta Franklin. 

Haddox was able to track down Brown’s and Brown’s wife’s obituaries, noting the church where the services were held, who acted as pallbearers, and who had attended. Haddox tried reaching out the church in Huntington, but when he received no response, he looked up the people listed as pallbearers for the funerals. 

In a small world moment, Haddox found that one of the pallbearers was connected to his friend Bill Harrison, a Black West Virginia storyteller, on Facebook. 

“I’m like, ‘Bill, who is this person?’ and he goes, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Well, at least since you’re Facebook friends, they’ll get a message if you send it. Would you let them know to be on a lookout for a message from me?’” Haddox recalled. 

Haddox was working on his own album in a Beckley recording studio when he got a call from an unknown woman wanting to know who he was and why he was looking for information on Russell Brown. Haddox explained his project and the woman put him in touch with Brown’s granddaughter, Christina. 

Haddox asked her if she’d ever heard Brown’s “Union Blues.” She had, but never in full—her grandfather had occasionally hummed or sung snippets, and there were a handful of the lyrics written down on a piece of notebook paper. As far as she and her family knew, the song had never been recorded and was largely lost to time. 

So Haddox sent her the link to the Library of Congress sound file. As she listened, still with Haddox on the phone, she exclaimed, “That’s my grandfather’s voice—that’s my grandfather!” 

In the end, Haddox learned more about Brown’s life outside the coal camps, from the family he raised in Huntington to the hymns and poems he wrote later in life, and was able to get a photo of Brown to include on the project’s website. In exchange, Brown’s family learned that his voice and work had been immortalized and that his legacy reached further than they had imagined.

“Now I just have to find a picture of Pete Hill, the Black fiddle player. I know there’s one out there somewhere, so I just need to get down to Stone Branch and start knocking on doors,” said Haddox. “If I found a picture of Pete, I could retire.” 

Showing the world

Haddox worked with Rebecca Branson Jones to create a short film, “Voices Faintly Heard” (2026), highlighting some of the music and historical research he and his colleagues have unearthed. The film brings to life the material on the project’s website and gives viewers glimpses into the work that can’t be reflected in text, like Haddox paying his respects to Kate Toney or playing a tribute over Dick Justice’s long-lost grave.  

Read about Chris Haddox’s quest to find Dick Justice’s grave in a forgotten cemetery.

“Voices Faintly Heard” has been presented at several film festivals to great acclaim. Though it’s not yet available for public viewing, Haddox has been taking it on the road for combination screenings, concerts, and lectures, and thanks to the grant from the Mellon Foundation, he can now offer it to a wider audience. 

“If a college or an organization wants to see the film and have me give a little concert, I can fund that now,” said Haddox. “They don’t have to figure out how to pay me to get down there. If we need a venue or need to rent equipment or pay for a sound person, I can cover it thanks to this grant.”

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. Through its grants, the Mellon Foundation seeks to build just communities enriched by meaning and guided by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.

He hopes that this and future grant funds will allow him to work with Jones on creating more short films about West Virginia folk musicians.

“We’d love to make little vignettes about the musicians. Like if you go to a museum and punch a button, you hear some music and see a little video,” Haddox said. 

He would like to be able to partner with the town of Logan, which is trying to establish a history center and has shown interest in using Haddox’s research as the foundation for some of the exhibits. 

His big dream, though, would be to have a large, professionally documented concert with big-name West Virginia artists playing the songs from the field recordings. 

Until he can get Tim O’Brien and Charles Wesley Godwin to agree to that, though, Haddox will keep traveling with the film and giving folk music performances himself. 

“The big thing is providing a counter-narrative to the West Virginia coalfield stereotypes,” said Haddox. “I showed the film as part of a Smithsonian pedagogy class and somebody came up afterwards and said, ‘You’re giving dignity to these people when so many others are trying to strip it away.’ I want people to know their history and be in awe of it.” 

Learn more about the “Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields” at https://omekas.lib.wvu.edu/home/s/folkmusic/page/About.