"West Virginia, My Home"

#615 / Flood Time Capsule: 2002 (Video Extra)

Twenty-four years ago tonight, Floodsters devoted a few minutes of a show down by the riverside with the Huntington Symphony Orchestra to leading the crowd in a sing-along on the guys’ favorite song by West Virginia’s treasured songwriter, Hazel Dickens, as seen in the video below:

And as you’ll hear above in the first few seconds, that June night also was the debut of Charlie Bowen’s ad libbed introduction to the song. In fact, it was the first time his band mates even heard his idea of using the tune’s chorus to train “yankees to talk like us” (night/quiet/flight). However, it tickled them enough that from then on they insisted him repeat the notion every time they did the song.

About the Song

“West Virginia, My Home” debuted in 1973 on Hazel Dickens’ groundbreaking Hazel & Alice album, recorded with Alice Gerrard.

Dickens’ song is a deeply personal reflection of her own life and the realities of Appalachian out-migration. Raised in a poverty-stricken family in Mercer County, WV, Hazel moved to Baltimore at 19 to look for work.

“I guess I expected a lot of things to be different, you know,” she told writer/musician John Lilly in an interview in June 2003.

“But there were just plain old apartments, old row houses. It was not any grand thing. I don’t know what I thought. I was just thinking, you know, go and make a lot of money, and buy all these nice clothes, and everything. When you got finished working, there was not that much left.”

Enter Mike Seeger and Alice Gerrard

That was in 1954. Around that time, through her brother Robert, Hazel met Mike Seeger, younger half-brother of Pete Seeger and later a founding member of The New Lost City Ramblers.

She and Mike became active in the Baltimore-Washington area folk scene, playing in living rooms and later in bars with Bob Baker’s bluegrass band. They mixed traditional tunes that Hazel had learned over the course of her childhood with contemporary bluegrass.

During this time Dickens also established a collaborative relationship with Alice Gerrard, who married Mike Seeger in 1970.

“West Virginia, My Home” began to take shape during that period. “I didn’t write it all at one time,” Hazel told Lilly. “It just kind of sat there. The chorus came actually pretty quick, yeah. But the rest of it didn’t for a while…. I guess I didn’t want to deal with those feelings.”

“A lot of feeling went into that song,” she said. “No matter where I go or where I live, I have always identified with West Virginia as my home, no matter what. And some people used to kind of look askance at me at for saying that.

“They said, ‘But you don’t live there, and you haven’t lived there.’ I said, “Well, what does that matter?” … I said, “I don’t apologize for it.”

More About That June Night on the River

As reported here earlier, The Flood’s jam with the Huntington Symphony Orchestra was the highlight of a pretty memorable couple of days in the Floodiverse. To read all about it, click below.

Meanwhile, in the Studio…

Finally, “West Virginia My Home” was among the songs that The Flood recorded on its first studio album.

Click the button below to hear that track, as engineered by the late, great Buddy Griffin: