Song of the Day: 'West Virginia My Home'

Last January I had been in Boston for two months, didn't really know anyone much except my co-workers, was trying to wrap my mind around my impending divorce, and was shocked to realize that the winter sun sets at about 4 pm in Boston. Plus the temperature did not get above 20 degrees, even in the daytime, for about a three-week stretch.

The last Saturday of January I packed up the cheap Yamaha guitar I had bought to play while my Martin was being repaired after its fateful brush with Southwest Airlines baggage handlers and went out to the Stagecoach Inn in Groton, Mass., for the monthly Boston Bluegrass Union jam. I knew absolutely no one there. By the end of the night, a young fiddle player asked me if I knew the song "West Virginia My Home" and I said I knew of it, loved it, and had never tried to sing it. I promised her I would learn it before the next jam, and I did. Whenever I sang the words "Well, I've paid the price for the leaving/and this life I have's not one I thought I'd find" I was singing my own life right then, even if my home was Texas and not West Virginia.

"West Virginia" was written and sung by Hazel Dickens, a woman with a powerful, direct delivery and by her own admission, a casual relationship with pitch. In a great Washington Post story from 1996, Dickens told writer Richard Harrington, "Oh, I never hit the right pitch. I go for that feel, I go for the jugular. I can't even think about [the pitch]. When I'm singing, I'm thinking about the real things."

Yesterday I drove through a bit of West Virginia between Maryland and Virginia, and I thought about that song again. Here's a video clip of Dickens, then 73 years old, singing "West Virginia" at the 2008 Folk Alliance conference along with Ginny Hawker and Tracy Schwarz. And yes, that is Kathy Mattea, also a West Virginia native, who spontaneously comes up to add more harmony.