Chris Haddox

Research

I research folk music traditions in southern West Virginia. It’s basically working to find stories about people who make music. These are not, in most cases, well known people. Some of them had some local or even regional notoriety. I am particularly interested in the Louis Watson Chappell Collection—a sound archive housed in the WV and Regional History Center at WVU.  The archives are not really easily accessible. The people who collected them back in the ‘40s and ‘50s didn’t really collect much information on the people. They got someone to play a collection of fiddle tunes or banjo tunes and they just didn’t get any information about the person. I’m interested in the songs and who those people were. My goal is to build the stories of the individuals behind the recordings. So many of them died in the ‘40s and ‘50s that I’m trying to track down family members and pictures and build biographies around these people for whom we have sound recordings. 

You’ve got to like detective work. Sometimes it’s just jumping for joy if we find a picture of somebody.

Recently, I tracked down the 96-year-old granddaughter of one of these singers. She was able to provide me with a picture of her grandmother. This woman was an incredible singer. She’s in the collection of archives at the West Virginia and Regional History Center. 

I tracked down a son and granddaughter of an African American coal miner from Logan, West Virginia, who wrote one song that happened to get recorded in the Library of Congress. He was from a little town called Yolyn. I tracked down his family and I was able to share the recording with them. I sang that song over his grave with his granddaughter. 

Part of the work is working with the West Virginia Regional and History Center in getting these archives in a more accessible format for people, so they can go online and download these songs instead of having to go to the library.

What jobs did you have before coming to WVU?