![]() ![]() “When I was growing up, there were certainly indications that doing things that were Appalachian marked you as backwards, and I had teachers who made fun of me for having a little bit of an accent or using a phrase that my great-granddad used,” Stimeling said, MM ’03, Music History. ![]() He grew up surrounded by Appalachian music near Buckhannon, W.Va., and chose to become a classical musician, a low brass major in college, because he got the idea that the local music that surrounded his childhood was the “wrong” kind. Travis Stimeling, the assistant professor who created the WVU Bluegrass Band two years ago, knows exactly what Hinton is talking about. This is something that’s meaningful to us.” “I think it was nice to say this originated from my state. “They don’t try to say, ‘Oh, I’m from West Virginia.’ “Our state, people kind of downgrade it, and a lot of people try to hide and say, ‘Oh, I’m just from the Pittsburgh area,’” Hinton said. ![]() She thinks the high schoolers’ grandparents could have heard these songs that came from their state. “The people around here needed to get that again,” Hinton said. In the last hour, she and hundreds of classmates heard songs by West Virginia writers like “The Yablonski Murder,” “West Virginia, My Home,” and “Won’t You Come and Sing For Me” played on banjo, mandolin, fiddle, jaw harp, ukulele, guitar and bass. If you lived in Wellsburg, a town of almost 3,000, you could claim to live in the Pittsburgh area, and some do, says Ashley Hinton, who was a senior at the high school this spring when the West Virginia University Bluegrass Band performed as part of their spring school tour. It’s true in the auditorium at Brooke High School in Wellsburg, W.Va., that Clarksville, Pa., isn’t too far from here. The fight described in Hazel Dickens’ song “The Yablonski Murder” was in 1970 after a United Mine Workers of America union leader, Jock Yablonski, and his family were shot to death by hired guns as Yablonski sought the UMWA presidency. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |