The Sound and the Holler

~ In Partnership with the Americana Music Association ~

Shrugging off cultural clichés, West Virginia has quietly — and not-so-quietly – become ground zero for a humble musical renaissance

Words by Mark Yarm

Header Photo by David McClister

November 14, 2024

Charles Wesley Godwin, a rising country-folk singer, has deep roots in West Virginia. So deep, in fact, that his family’s presence there predates West Virginia becoming the 35th state, in 1863. His mother’s side came over from Ireland during the potato famine of the mid-1800s. His father’s side goes back even further, so long that at least one of their ancestors died fighting in the Revolutionary War.

Godwin, whose mom was a school teacher and dad was a coal miner, was born and raised in Morgantown, W. Va.; today, he resides outside the city with his wife and two kids. The 32-year-old has lived in the state most of his life, save for a study abroad stint in Estonia and five years in Athens, Ohio. “I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the country,” he says of West Virginia. “In the fall, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

Being a musician who elects to stay in West Virginia—as opposed to, say, relocating to the epicenter of country music, Nashville—has some advantages. “On the plus side, it allowed me to develop my sound and write my songs within a bubble,” Godwin says, calling from Glendale, Ariz., where he’s opening for country superstar Luke Combs. “If I were to come up in Nashville, there’d be so many opportunities to write with people all the time. But then maybe the songs that I would have written over the years would be more like other people’s songs.”

But there are drawbacks, too. Godwin, who cites Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Bruce Springsteen as musical heroes, recalls an extended period of financial struggle early on. “I went years and years playing just any bar, restaurant, cafe, brewery that I could,” says the singer-songwriter, who first picked up a guitar 12 years ago as a student at West Virginia University. “And I would have a little sleeping mat that I rolled out in the back of the car—I had my dogs with me—and I was just trying to keep scratching along and trying to get better.” Not moving to Nashville “probably added some extra years to get to where I’ve gotten,” he says.

The wait seems to have paid off. In September 2023, Godwin released Family Ties, his third album and his first for the Nashville-based Big Loud label. Later that year, he had a song on the soundtrack for The Hunger Games: The Ballads of Songbirds & Snakes and sold out a two-night stand at Nashville’s famed Ryman Auditorium. In February, he made his “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” debut, playing the Family Ties standout “Cue Country Roads,” a searing rock ’n’ roll stomp that references John Denver’s famed West Virginia anthem “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” (For good measure, Godwin also covers the Denver classic on the album.)

Godwin was nominated for Emerging Act of the Year at September’s Americana Honors & Awards, part of Nashville’s annual AMERICANAFEST. Meanwhile, another West Virginia native, 35-year-old roots musician Sierra Ferrell, got nods in three of the awards’ six categories: Artist of the Year, Album of the Year (for Trail of Flowers), and Song of the Year (for “American Dreaming”). She took home all but the last award and just received four Grammy nominations for her work as well.

In all three categories, Ferrell competed with country singer-songwriter Tyler Childers, a 33-year-old, seven-time Grammy nominee. Childers is an eastern Kentucky native, but he lived in West Virginia for a time and performed there so much while coming up that he’s something of an adopted son of the state. In an interesting twist, some speculate that his song “Charleston Girl” (“All I know is that when I am good and sober/I am leaving West Virginia for a while”) was inspired by Ferrell.

The AMERICANAFEST nominations make plain that West Virginia music is having a moment. Sarah Rudy, a West Virginia native who now lives in Charleston, the capital, and fronts the alt-country project Hello June, has noticed a marked shift in the state’s musical reputation. “When I first started the band about 10 years ago, you just had this sense that West Virginians were going to get ignored,” the 37-year-old singer-songwriter says. “You’d show up in Nashville, and it was like, ‘Oh, West Virginia, really? What’s there?’

“Then, all of a sudden, I felt like, ‘I don’t need to feel this outsider thing,’” she continues. “People want to know about West Virginia in a positive way.” She credits this interest to high-profile artists like Ferrell and Childers, in addition to John R. Miller, who moved to West Virginia from Maryland when he was 10, and William Matheny, who has lived in the state all his life. For his part, Miller says that Childers’ success, in particular, shined “a light on this region.” He adds, “Once he started to pop and people started paying attention nationally, a lot of dots started connecting.”

This isn’t to say there’s what can be considered a West Virginia music scene. It’s more like a bunch of micro-scenes spread throughout the state, whose most populous city, Charleston, has only around 48,000 residents. “There’s a lot happening in Huntington; there’s a lot happening in Morgantown, which is where I live,” says Matheny, who is 40. “There’s a bit of stuff happening in Charleston. There’s some stuff happening in Thomas, which is kind of a weirdo mountain town that’s also a bit of a ski resort.”

The 38-year-old Miller—who now lives outside Nashville, where he relocated to get some distance from “chemical temptations”—says he gained a lot coming up playing music in a state with “no real hub” and wildly varied do-it-yourself shows. It wasn’t unusual for a string band to play on the same bill as metal, electronic, and hip hop acts, he points out. “What was most vital about that experience for me, and I think for a lot of folks, is not really having anyone hold your hand,” he says. “You have to seek things out and learn how to do things independently.”

Country singer-songwriter Olivia Ellen Lloyd, a 33-year-old native of Shepherdstown, W. Va., also hails this independent spirit. “When I think about the West Virginia sound, there’s a lot of indie rock and garage rock mixed in with the country twang,” she says. “Even Sierra gets kind of grungy and punky, which I love. I love that it seems to be the post-aughts sound that we are exporting. Folk music’s been gentrified to fuck, so we had to find a sound that related more to our lived experiences.”

Ian Thornton—founder of the Huntington-based Whizzbang Booking and Management, whose roster includes Childers, Matheny, and Miller—says West Virginia’s mini-scenes are always in flux. “College students are in town, there are sparks of inspiration,” says Thornton, who relocated to Nashville during the height of the pandemic. “Bands pop up, inspire other bands that come out. Then those folks grow up, the scene starts to fall apart a little bit. I’ve seen the ebb and flow a few times since I started really working in it. And then it becomes vibrant again.”

Among the state’s more storied places to perform are 123 Pleasant Street, a Morgantown club located in a renovated 1890s rowhouse, and the Purple Fiddle, a mostly acoustic music venue in Thomas. There’s also “Mountain Stage,” a four-decades-old music radio show produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed by National Public Radio. It’s usually recorded at Charleston’s Culture Center Theater in front of a live audience. “The biggest and probably most immeasurable impact of ‘Mountain Stage’ is the economic aspect,” says Adam Harris, the show’s executive producer since 2012. “At least a quarter of our audience comes from out of state.”

Though “Mountain Stage” doesn’t focus on West Virginia music, it has hosted some of the state’s newer talent over the years, including Ferrell, Godwin, Hello June, Matheny, and Miller. Harris says that what many of these performers have in common is authenticity. “That word gets thrown around a lot,” he concedes. “But you know it when you hear it, and I think a lot of people—through the music of musicians like Sierra and Tyler and John R. Miller and others—have found something that sounds authentic, and they’re craving more of that.”

Christian Lopez, a 29-year-old country singer-songwriter who splits his time between Los Angeles and his hometown of Martinsburg, W. Va., has played Mountain Stage several times. He also stresses the realness of West Virginia’s leading musical talent. “Sierra is just a true child of West Virginia,” Lopez says. “There’s no gimmicks.”

Ferrell grew up poor in a single-parent household in West Virginia. “At one point when I was a kid, I was walking around Charleston and saw some street performers singing all these old, minor-key songs,” she said in 2022. “And for some reason that hit me.” Ferrell left the state in her twenties, hitchhiking and hopping freight trains for a time. She subsequently lived in a van and busked on street corners around the country.

“Everything you see is what these people really are,” Lopez continues. “With Charles, he’s a good family man from Morgantown. People, when they’re listening to music like that, they want to know that the artists really are what they’re singing and saying. It just happens to be that these artists coming out of West Virginia, they deliver it well, and I think that’s why it’s catching on. They’re getting successful for a reason.”

Roots artist Andrew Adkins, a 48-year-old West Virginia native who now lives in the town of Fayetteville, says there’s an “almost primal” honesty that comes through in authentic Appalachian music. “People want to be told the truth on stage,” Adkins says. “They don’t want it to be, you know, all big trucks and tractors and girls and short pants,” he says. “People are seeking that authenticity, versus cookie-cutter, overproduced songs that are all the same tempo and just good beer-drinking songs.”

Adkins also objects to artists from outside West Virginia who have adopted the Appalachian sound because it’s hot at the moment. “West Virginia artists are hitting right now because there’s this beautiful level of authenticity that maybe other people who are from Brooklyn aren’t getting—and I love Brooklyn, I play there all the time,” he says.

Not to say that Brooklyn doesn’t have its advantages. As Lloyd, who splits her time between the New York City borough and Shepherdstown, notes, “I don’t feel like I had respect or attention until I went to a bigger place where being a woman wasn’t an immediate 10-point deduction on my skill and value.”

Lloyd stresses that she still has a strong attachment to her home state, which she describes as her “writing partner.” “My music has a lot of themes about working-class struggle and perspective, and also about drinking too much and staying out too late and dancing so that you don't have to worry about whatever the fuck is going on in your life.”

“I love the community that’s building in West Virginia, and I’m really proud of the visibility that the state and state musicians have been getting recently—mostly because of Sierra and Charles doing so unbelievably well,” she continues. “It’s been really exciting.”

Lloyd says that there’s a level of state pride among West Virginians that she doesn’t see elsewhere. “West Virginia, historically and geographically and culturally, is neither the South nor the North. We exist in this—to overuse an academic term—liminal space between those two places. And it sets us apart from those cultural identities, and also brings us closer together as West Virginians.”

She believes that people from West Virginia have “a unique identity.” “In other places, people might broadly say they’re from the South or might broadly say they’re from New England or from the Midwest. But West Virginians are solidly and only from West Virginia,” she says with a laugh.

Unfortunately, outsiders often have misconceptions about Lloyd’s home state. “When you go to New York City, for example, and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m from a small town in West Virginia,’ people are already projecting an idea of who you are onto you, whether you want it to be there or not,” she says. “And that idea is typically pretty negative. They kind of look down upon you. The stereotype would be that I’m uneducated and poor. Disadvantaged in some way. People bring up coal mining.”

Many West Virginia musicians are tired of the clichés. “West Virginia’s a really cool place, even though maybe it doesn’t have that view from the outside,” Godwin says. “You know, folks think of some of the classic tropes and stereotypes.” He cites The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, a 2009 documentary about an uncouth extended family in Boone County, W. Va. “It’s probably not the best representation of our state,” Godwin says. “There’s a lot more to it. There’s a great amount of talent in the state. Growing up in West Virginia gives people a blue collar, hard-nosed work ethic. Family values, loyalty. And I think there’s a lot of pros to that.”

Adkins, for one, is fighting back against the stereotypes. The first single from his next album is “We Don’t Need Your Elegy,” a heartfelt rebuttal to author-turned-vice president-elect J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which Adkins dismisses as “garbage” and “bootstrap porn.” “It was essentially saying people from Appalachia are poor because they’re lazy,” he says. (West Virginia has the third-highest poverty rate in the nation.) “I read that book, and it hurt my feelings and it hurt my soul.”

Adkins says that many people’s ideas about West Virginia are shaped by movies and TV and that he often tries to use his live shows to turn perceptions around. “I just read a room: Are these people genuinely interested in what I have to say, or are they just gonna lock into a Hollywood stereotype that I should be wearing bibbed overalls?” he says. “By the way, I don’t wear shoes. Which is a very hillbilly stereotype. But I don’t have shoes on because I just don’t like shoes. It’s not because I’m a big, dumb hillbilly.”

Though there are many misconceptions about West Virginia, there is an undeniably dark force at play in the state: the opioid crisis. According to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, West Virginia leads the nation in drug overdose mortality, with 80.9 fatal overdoses per 100,000 people. Huntington made headlines in August 2016, when 26 people overdosed (none fatally) within a four-hour period.

Ferrell has been particularly open about her substance abuse issues. “I left [West Virginia] because I feel like I’ve always had this wild side to me,” she has said. “I knew that if I stayed there, I probably wouldn't still be alive. And so, I left and searched for maybe myself, maybe to find out what else there is, maybe even a reason to live.” Ferrell is now based out of Nashville.

Hello June’s Rudy also knows the very real stakes at play: She lost her father to addiction, a subject she addresses on “Interstate,” a propulsive, brooding rock track off her latest album. “Most people that I know have been affected by having a loved one that has been taken down by addiction,” she says. “It just ravages families.” The crisis also prompted her to record a plaintive version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” for that same record. “I know that the song brings people together, and I love that,” she says. “But what I wanted to convey was a little bit of the sadness and the hardship. It’s not all rainbows and butterflies.”

Whizzbang’s Thornton describes the effects of the opioid crisis on the state as “astronomical.” He’s on the board of Hope in the Hills, a nonprofit that puts on the annual Healing Appalachia festival in Lewisburg, W. Va., which Childers has headlined since it began in 2018. The concerts—which have featured West Virginians such as Godwin, Matheny, and Miller, in addition to acts like Jason Isbell, Trey Anastasio, Margo Price, and Gov’t Mule—have distributed more than $800,000 to recovery charities.  This latest edition, held in September, featured Childers, Ferrell, My Morning Jacket, Shooter Jennings, and more.

“All these people donate their time so that we can see the change that we need to happen to reverse the cycle of this plague,” Thornton says. “Not just our state, but the entire nation. It’s a do-it-yourself kind of thing. You can’t depend on other people to help you all the time. So there’s this tenacity where we’ll figure it the fuck out on our own. And we lean on each other to do that. I think one of the most beautiful things about West Virginia is that sense of community.”

Godwin says that there’s still a lot of “world-class talent” in West Virginia that remains untapped. “I saw it at my church growing up, every week,” he says. “I see it at the church my wife and I attend now. There are people, there are voices, all throughout the community, who are absolutely incredible, that are pro. And they’re just folks that just never even considered it an option to do music for a living.”

He dreams of a vibrant musical future for the state. “I hope that more and more kids coming up realize that they can make it happen,” Godwin says. “That it is totally possible for them to reach any heights in the music industry, if they choose to do so and go for it and stick with it.”

One of those kids coming up is Logan Halstead, now 21, who was born in Kentucky but raised in West Virginia. In late 2020, the then baby-faced teen recorded himself performing “Dark Black Coal,” a traditional-sounding ballad about the region’s ailing mining industry. When the radiowv YouTube channel posted the clip, it went viral; it’s now been viewed over 8 million times.

Halstead, who released his debut album (also titled Dark Black Coal) in 2023, credits a trio of high-profile Kentucky musicians—Childers, Chris Stapleton, and Sturgill Simpson—for showing him that it’s “cool” to be a musician from the region. “A lot of kids growing up in Appalachia, growing up in West Virginia, they try to throw away their accents,” says Halstead, who has embraced his own twang. “They try to wipe all that history away. And I feel like it’s being brought back.”

Halstead now tours across the country, where audiences “want to hear about Kentucky and West Virginia and Appalachia as a whole,” he says. “They want to hear about how we live. It’s almost like it’s trendy now.” But he doesn’t fear the trend ending any time soon. “It’s only going to keep going and reaching more people,” he says. “We’re just getting started.”