Lift your voice in songs of old. Learn to sing the music of mountain elders in a non-judgmental setting. These rugged isolated mountains have nurtured a rich and vibrant culture that can still be found in its songs, ballads, and oral traditions.

 

This class will focus primarily on unaccompanied songs collected in Central West Virginia since 1978 by Michael Kline and Gerry Milnes from legendary ballad singers such as the Hammons Family, Phyllis Marks, Hazel Stover and others.  From the haunting strains of Sherman Hammons’s “Bangum and the Wild Boar” to Hazel Dickens’s “Blue-eyed Boston Boy,” the old ballads and stark, lined hymns of the tent-meeting days have mirrored historical events and can connect us, as the singers, with poetic images, emotions and values from an earlier time.  Increasingly oral tradition is seen as a dying cultural form, but we can still learn these songs, keep them in our hearts and pass them along to others.