Today’s West
Virginia old-time musicians have a long-held tradition of fiddle
and banjo music. Early nineteenth-century accounts from the region
document both African and European people playing traditional
music on fiddles and banjos. People of Scots-Irish, English and
German heritage make up the majority of the population, but African
Americans were quite influential on the traditional music of
the region. Through the latter eighteenth and the nineteenth
century, string music for dancing, banjo tunes, fiddle tunes,
airs, ballads, folksongs and spirituals sustained and entertained
people engaged in taming the frontier.
At the turn of the 20th century, mail order catalogs began reaching
the more remote areas of the region. Guitars and mandolins (as
well as “factory”
fiddles and banjos) became accessible to country musicians.While
the mandolin was slow to catch on at first, guitars were widely
accepted by the 1920s, providing rhythm for dancing to string music,
and freeing up the fiddles to put more melody and less rhythm in
the bowing.When string music became available on 78 RPM records,
distinct regional styles became blurred. At the same time, the
early commercial recordings allowed some of the finest regional
traditional music to be documented for the first time in a more-or-less
permanent way.
By the 1930s, the stringband tradition became entrenched in the
southern uplands, including West Virginia, through widely distributed
recordings featuring talented artists.This was further bolstered
by the radio through live music broadcasts from studios around
the state, with Charleston (WCHS), Fairmont (WMMN), and Bluefield
(WHIS) being major players. These shows were sponsored by companies
hawking household products, medicines, and even baby chickens.
Later, through theater shows such as the Wheeling Jamboree, the
music maintained a devoted audience. In West Virginia, string music
played by such groups as the Kessinger Brothers, the Tweedy Brothers,
Cap Andy and Flip, the Blue Bonnet Girls, Jake Taylor’s Rail
Splitters, the Trading Post Gang, the West Virginia Mountain Boys,
the Coonhunters and many, many more, provided live radio with a
wealth of talent.
Through this period of the commercialization of stringband music,
a strong adherence to traditional old-time string music styles
was kept alive by rural individuals.These players, many of whom
lived into the late twentieth and the twenty-first century, like
Melvin Wine, the Hammons Family, the Carpenter family fiddlers,
and scores of others, were no doubt influenced in some way by the
widespread commercialization, but at the same time they remained
true to the music of their “people.”They chose to play
the older music, not because they were not exposed to more modern
music, but because they valued the old tunes and songs and the
way they were played by ancestors.
Today, following a renewed interest in old-time
music that began over forty years ago, there are many players
of the old music. Everything from old solo fiddle tunes to
stringband music that was played commercially and recorded
eighty years ago, is now being actively played and performed.Whether
for square dances, at fiddle contests, or at any of the traditional
music festivals and gatherings that promote the older sounds,
the string music of West Virginia is alive and well.
Gandydancer
Gandydancer features five respected musicians with
200 years of combined music experience. Each of the members is
a champion multi-instrumentalist, and they have known one another
and played together in different combinations for over 20 years.
Dave Bing of Harmony,West Virginia is a violin-maker who has
taught extensively. His crooked fiddle tunes evoke another time
and place. Gerry Milnes of Elkins works at the Augusta Heritage
Center and has collected, and played, old-time music for forty
years. Jim Martin of St.Albans,West Virginia is an accomplished
bass player and sings bass on the band’s quartet numbers.
Ron Mullennex of Bluefield,Virginia plays claw hammer banjo and
mandolin in the band and is an experienced teacher of the old-time
music. Mark Payne of Winfield,West Virginia is sought out for
his rock-solid guitar work and three-finger style banjo playing.
The band plays string music from the various eras outlined above.
From solo fiddle tunes to early bluegrass numbers, the band has
wide interests. Much of their repertoire consists of unusual
tunes and songs collected in the last thirty years from traditional
musicians and singers. But they also render pieces from the early
bluegrass era of the forties and fifties. Members of the band
play the fiddle and banjo in various styles, a key to the age
of the tunes. Some tunes and songs require the older clawhammer
or down-stroke banjo style from older black tradition. However
their repertoire includes the use of the three finger bluegrass
or “Scruggs” style as well, and these variations
present not only a great span of time, but also showcase the
versatility of the musicians in the band.
Gerald Milnes
Augusta Heritage Center
Davis and Elkins College
Elkins, West Virginia
The American Folklife Center
was created by Congress in 1976 and placed at the Library of
Congress to “preserve and present American Folklife” through
programs of research, documentation, archival preservation,
reference service, live performance, exhibition, public programs,
and training.The Center includes the American Folklife Center
Archive of folk culture, which was established in 1928 and
is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic material
from the United States and around the world. Please Visit our
web site http://www.loc.gov/folklife/. 
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