Right: Crowd at the Celebration of West Virginia Folk Music Traditions event.
The West Virginia & Regional History Center ( WVRHC) is home to a vast and rich collection of West Virginia and Appalachian folklore and folklife that document the culture and traditions of long-settled West Virginians in stories, ballads, and superstitions, as well as contemporary conceptualizations of folklife in new immigrant communities, modern labor struggles, and folk narratives, such as those of the increasingly popular cryptid creatures, like Mothman.
Edden Hammons (seated) playing fiddle and his son James (standing) playing banjo, undated.
A strength of this collection is folk music. Most notable is the sound recording collections of the Louis Watson Chappell Archive, which contains more than 2,000 songs, ballads, and fiddle tunes, recorded between 1937-1947. In 2024, the History Center published a Chappell digital collection with support from a West Virginia Humanities Council grant, available at folkmusic.lib.wvu.edu.
To celebrate the collection, the History Center hosted an event in November at the Gluck Theater. Dr. Gloria Goodwin Raheja, a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, presented on the diverse and fascinating repertoire of the performers. Dr. Chris Haddox, a WVU associate professor of design studies, and Mary Linscheid, a WVU graduate and musician, gave a musical performance and added stories and details that brought the folk songs to life.
The Chappell digital collection has already garnered international attention from Steve Roud, an international fellow of the American Folklore Society and creator of the Roud Index, a database devoted to providing access to the whole collected corpus of traditional song across the Anglophone world. Roud indexed the Chappell collection, which will make it easier for users to identify songs across places and times that may have alternative titles or lyrics. The History Center will add the Roud numbers to the Chappell performances.