by Jamie Lovejoy
Central West Virginia old-time music is a deeply regional tradition shaped by generations of oral transmission, community life, cultural exchange, and the particular histories of the people who lived in the mountains. Appalachian music scholar Drew Beisswenger notes that “Central West Virginia represents an area that has nurtured fiddle traditions almost exclusively through oral tradition since well before the Civil War.” Over time, the music absorbed traditions carried by early settlers, influences brought by people who came into the region during the post-Civil War timber and coal booms, and repertoire circulated through nineteenth-century popular entertainment. Yet much of it continued to pass directly from musician to musician and within families such as the Hammons, developing distinctive local approaches to melody, tuning, phrasing, bowing, crookedness, and rhythm.
For Dwight Diller, however, the defining this music had a living, breathing soul carried forward through rhythm. He repeatedly emphasized rhythm and the cultural understanding behind the music. Dwight often told me that many musicians “play fiddle tunes and don’t have any syncopation,” while describing the “proper syncopated rhythm” as something students often struggled to retain. He believed that this musical language came from being immersed in a particular culture, telling me since my family had helped settle Randolph County, “you are from WVa… you immersed in who we are here… we have the same dialect.” In another conversation, when discussing the difference between old-time music and bluegrass, he reduced the distinction to something much larger than technique: “again it is a way of life.”
It turns out that even though the secrets of these tunes have been buried beneath a century of technological and social change, once you hear one that has been carefully preserved, either through an early field recording or by a musician with a meticulous passion for preserving it, they becomes a historical transmitter, carrying forward the community life that once surrounded it: dancing, gatherings, weddings, festivals, work breaks, family memories, and other shared experiences.
No other family in West Virginia exemplifies the tradition more than the Hammons family. The Hammons Family material argues that central Appalachian culture, especially the culture represented by Edden, Burl, Sherman, Maggie, and the rest of the Hammons family, came from people who lived in remote hollows and mountains, making their living through hunting, trapping, logging, gathering, and small-scale farming rather than commercial agriculture. See Vandalia Award winning old-time fiddle and banjo players.
The Core Ingredients
1.German and Scot-Irish Influence
Many tunes trace back to old fiddle traditions from Germany, England, Scotland, and Ireland. But by the time they reached the mountains, they had already become something new. The Hammons Family Study suggests Appalachian music may not simply be “old British music preserved in the mountains” but rather an American style that developed on the frontier and evolved separately for generations.
2. Frontier American Culture
The mountains were settled by families moving west through Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Music traveled with them. Tunes were passed from family to family, often without written music.
3. African Influence
The banjo itself comes from African instruments brought to North America by enslaved Africans. The drone string, rhythmic drive, and many aspects of Appalachian banjo playing have African roots, even when played by white mountain musicians. The Hammons Family Study specifically notes that African influence likely entered Appalachian culture much earlier and more deeply than many historians once assumed.
4. Isolation
Many mountain communities were separated by ridges, rivers, and poor roads. A tune could survive in one hollow for a hundred years and develop its own personality. Families became musical repositories.
The Hammons family is a perfect example. Edden Hammons, Lee Hammons, Burl Hammons, Sherman Hammons, and Maggie Hammons carried tunes that often existed nowhere else in exactly the same form.
What Makes West Virginia Music Sound Different?
Compared with other old-time traditions:
- More crooked tunes (uneven phrase lengths)
- More modal melodies
- Less concern for “correct” versions
- Strong storytelling tradition
- A wilder, older fiddle sound
- Tunes connected to places, people, hunting, and local history
Listen to:
- Kitchen Girl (banjo)
- Yew Piney Mountain (banjo) Yew Piney Mountain (fiddle)
- Sandy Boys (banjo), Edden Hammons playing Sandy Boys (fiddle)
- Big Scioty (banjo)
- Abe’s Retreat (fiddle), Abe’s Retreat (banjo)
- Shelvin Rock (banjo), Shelvin Rock at Opera House Story Sessions (banjo)
- Sugar in the Coffee (fiddle)
The Hammons View of Music
For the Hammons family, music wasn’t just for entertainment.
It was:
- Family history
- Community memory
- Dance music
- Storytelling
- A way of passing time in remote places
- A connection to ancestors
The music existed with hunting stories, ghost tales, Civil War memories, logging camps, and tales from daily life. In the Hammons world, tunes and stories were part of the same tradition.
Dwight Diller’s Summary
Dwight often taught that this music came from the rhythm of the Yew Piney Mountains themselves. It came from everyday life – walking ridges, chopping wood, hunting, working, listening to streams and the wind through the trees. It was the music of place.
“I think that’s why when I listen to Edden Hammons’ fiddling or Dwight Diller’s banjo, I think it sounds ancient and deeply tied to the mountains. Afterall, the goal wasn’t virtuosity and this music wasn’t tainted by trends. The music carried forward the voice of the forest and culture from which it came from. Often, it was their only remaining connection to the homeland they had left behind.”
