From Harmonic Highways, in Chapter 10, Dickenson County

 Jim “Scott” Mullins came from a long line of local musicians. He told me, “My father was a coal miner but was also a tremendously influential musician. He passed away about 10 years ago. There are many people with the surname Mullins around here. My daddy used to say that you could overturn every second or third rock in Dickenson County and find a Mullins underneath it.”
Scott is a young man (by my standards), about to turn 40 years old. He works in maintenance for the county at the courthouse. He is the only one of four brothers who had never worked in the coal mines.
He continued, “My family has been singing since my great-grandfather’s time. My primary work is on vocals. Our music has always revolved around our church work. I am a Free Will Baptist. The roots of our church lie with the German Baptists, or the Church of the Brethren. I’ve been told that my great-grandfather, D. P. ‘Doc’ Mullins, had stacks of old song books. From them, he taught virtually everyone in the family how to sing. We were taught the notes within an octave: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do, and how to harmonize. I have never read music. Everything is by ear. It is an organic thing, and it has always been part of who I am.
“My father and grandfather were two of the four members of the Mullins Family Quartet, which also included my grandfather, Hie A. Mullins, my grandmother, Frances Mullins, and my mother, Myrtle Mullins. They sang on the radio. They sang at churches. They sang at pie suppers and at countless funerals. They did three- and four-part harmony a cappella singing. The songs I grew up hearing were sung in a kind of soulful “drone” that was mostly derived from the old-world style of Scots-Irish singing. You can still hear the echoes of that old traditional sound in the old country churches.
“This is the type of music that has become the sound of Ralph Stanley. There can be many notes sang even within a single word.
“My daddy always pushed me away from the life of the miner. Miners love the work but they recognize the danger. We went to Montana years ago to do some concerts. We sang for an audience that was mainly farmers. Daddy was trying to explain the lure of coal mining. He sang Merle Travis’ song, Dark as a Dungeon. It has this lyric:
It’s a-many a man I have seen in my day,
Who lived just to labor his whole life away.
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine,
A man will have lust for the lure of the mines.
“There was a hush over the crowd. The people in the audience could feel the pain in his voice.”
I said, “It seems to me that what has made Dr. Ralph Stanley such a legend is that every pain that he, his brother, his family, or his community has endured comes through to the audience in the tones of his voice. His enduring presence is like a metaphor for the mountains. His voice has a haunting quality that evokes emotion in the listener.”
Scott said, “That is evident. When you hear his voice you hear a voice of the ages. You hear the voices of the Scots-Irish immigrants coming to this area over a century ago. You hear the cries of the Civil War soldiers in battle. You hear the pain of coal miners. These voices have shaped the way the people of the coal fields are today. We are shaped by hardship, tragedy and struggle. But we have always had the tenacity to survive and to keep going. It is through the mercy of the Lord and the hard work of our ancestors that we are in a position to keep going today.
“My daddy was a minister and a songwriter in addition to being a coal miner. He wrote some of his best songs while he was at work in the mine. He said that sometimes the miners would sing as they were being transferred in the man-trip or when they were taking a shower after their shift. Whenever they could, they would do what they could to shake off the blues of being in such a place. It is amazing to me even to this day that daddy could scratch out such brilliant songs on little pieces of paper. We have saved these scraps of paper and they are still smudged with his fingerprints of coal dust. These songs were inspired by the good Lord above.
“The songs and the testimony that my dad left behind have left an indelible impression on this community. We sang at more church services than I can count and at hundreds of funerals.
“I live in the type of community that I think most people in America don’t understand. We depend on one another and we try to lift up one another in any way that we can. I have encountered people in the stores or on the street who will say to me, ‘Scott, when I pass, I want you to sing at my funeral.’ I remember lots of times when daddy would give up things that he wanted to do around the house on his days off but instead he would go to sing at funerals. It is a heady responsibility but we embrace it. As Christian believers, we feel that it is our responsibility to do the work that God has commissioned us to do.
“We have sung in churches representing many denominations. We will sing just about anywhere we are welcomed.
“We have many great musicians in this area and there is a lot of singing. Our identity as musicians out here, for better or worse, has largely been defined by a single song sung by a single musician, and that is Dr. Ralph Stanley singing O Death, in the movie, O Brother Where Art Thou? That movie came out 10 years ago and Ralph had been singing for over a half-century before that. To the people who care about this type of music, he was a legend decades earlier. But it is still what fans expect to hear when they come to the Virginia Coalfields.
“Dr. Ralph’s music is rooted directly in the traditional music of the Primitive Baptist Church. There is a person who leads off the song. Everyone else then becomes the follower. It becomes a call-and-response pattern. You can hear the same type of thing in the old ballads from the Scots-Irish settlers. Our music is forged out of distress and in hardships. They say great art can come from great pain. The tragedies we have endured have made our music distinct.
“People think of Appalachia as being a relatively stagnant place, but nothing could be further from the truth. During the boom and bust cycles of the coal industry and in front of a backdrop of increasing mechanization and the ebb and flow of (labor) union influence, people from the coal fields have been forced into significant adjustments time and time again.
“The music differs here in that it is born of greater anguish. There are several coal camps in Dickenson County that today are ghost towns. Two of them are Clinchco and Trammel. There are many abandoned homes and businesses. Many good people still live there, but these areas are washed in poverty and sorrow.
“Lots of my great aunts and uncles moved away to the cities of the north to find work in the factories. They made the best of it and raised their families. Mommy and Daddy went up to Ohio at one point looking for work. After only a few days, they decided to come home and declared, ‘This is where we belong.’ Daddy went back to work in the coal mine.
“We are all excited about being on The Crooked Road and about the possibilities that that entails. The Crooked Road has helped us to build connections to other musicians that probably would not have happened otherwise. So it benefits musicians, too, and not just the tourists or the hospitality industry.
“Not long ago, we were in a show with some singing coal miners from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia who came to the Jettie Baker Center in Clintwood. They are “The Men of the Deeps,’ and have traveled to a lot of places to perform their choral show of traditional and mining songs. We instantly made a connection with them, both musically and culturally. The Crooked Road organization was a great catalyst in making that exchange a reality. Being involved with Crooked Road events like that has enriched our community greatly.
“We once played at FloydFest. It was incredible. We were these traditional conservative church-going folks mixing in an atmosphere that seemed a bit like Woodstock. What we saw there blew our minds. But everything worked out fine.
“We have weathered the storms and the hardships. Many people around here are willing to do just about anything to provide for their families. Those of us who are here today consider this a great place to live. People here are connected to the land. There is an incredible sense of place here. This is the reason why mountaintop removal mining is so devastating. My wife and I are raising our family on land that has been in her family for generations. When a man looks out from his front porch on a mountain for his entire life and then over a period of a few months it is carted away, it is completely devastating.
“I understand both sides of the mountaintop removal issue. The job of destroying that mountain to remove the coal is feeding someone’s family. But my feeling is that this activity is destructive beyond what God would have wanted for our society in its use of the land. The Lord wanted us to be keepers of this place. The Scriptures say that we are sojourners. We are passing through this place, borrowing it to pass on to future generations. Destroying a mountain hurts what God created for us. It’s awful to say but I can see a generation coming along that would just about dig under their own family graveyard to get the coal underneath it. Those graves may mean nothing to some people. But that is my identity. They are my people. That is why I am where I am, and who I am.
“The landscape here humbles a man. I have lived here all my life and every morning it humbles me. I like material things as much as the next guy. But these are not the things that drive our lives. We are driven by our sense of place, our sense of community, and our heritage. These are the things we value.
“I appreciate your interest in us and our culture. We’ve been represented in many ways. We’ve been written about, filmed, and recorded. Dad helped National Geographic do a story almost 20 years ago. He took them into the mine and through the communities. We were anxious to see the article when it came out. For the most part, they told the truth. But the first photo showed an old lady in a shack of a house with a gun rack over the picture of Jesus. Another page had a huge aerial photo of a strip mine. Still another page had a coal miner giving a goodbye kiss to his toddler grandson while his wife looks on. We just felt like they had the story written before they even came and were seduced by the urge to show stereotypes as they envisioned them.
“Anybody can find the negative stuff here. But we also have strength of family, generations of hard-working people, and pride in jobs well done. We have poets. We have musicians. We have artists. We have ministers. We have deep-rooted beliefs about right and wrong. We don’t need material things to have rich, successful lives. All the toys in the world or all the trappings of our modern society do not build happiness or satisfaction. What keeps people content is their link to the culture.
“I have lived my entire life in the shadow of a great man: my daddy. He only enjoyed three years in retirement before he passed away. If I can achieve a fraction of the accomplishments that he reached in his life, I will feel successful. It is my prayer to transfer that legacy to my children and then to my grandchildren.
“Sometimes when I am on stage, it’s a blessing to see the songs I sing bring a tear to a person’s eye. It will strike a chord or stir an emotion. I believe that the Lord speaks to his people through the moving of a good spiritual song. The songs give us great hope of a brighter day ahead. I always want the Lord to use me as His instrument, and I give Him glory for it all.
“Some years ago, we did some work with Ethel Caffie-Austin. She is a big, robust African American woman, known as West Virginia’s ‘First Lady of Gospel Music.’ Daddy had written a song called Amazing Grace Oh What a Blessing. It has sort of become an anthem of our family’s singing ministry. We go to places and sing this song and most of the audiences know it word-for-word. We were doing a cultural exchange where the traditional black music was being compared with our traditional mountain music. I sang lead on the first verse. Miss Austen played along on the piano and sang with that beautiful voice. Hearing my daddy’s words, written decades ago on a scrap of paper in a coal mine, through this incredible woman’s voice lifted my spirit along with everyone there. I felt that I was in communion with a higher power. There were no racial boundaries. There were no names and there were no faces. I was absolutely elated. I am certain everyone in the audience felt the same power I did. The spirit that swept over all of us was very real. I believe this was the most spiritually moving moment in my lifetime.
“Honestly, if I couldn’t sing I guess I would die. The music makes me who I am, and I thank God for that.”