Work and Pray

Field recordings from southern West Virginia, 1949-1953. Railroad work chants, ancient spirituals, hammer songs, slave-era songs, and more. A collection as rich, varied, and powerful as the African-American experience in Appalachia. The southern rim of West Virginia, a rugged land of steep hills and narrow valleys, was one of the last areas of the eastern United States to be opened and populated. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad passed just north of this region shortly after the end of the Civil War, and by 1890 the Norfolk and Western Railroad ran north from Virginia to meet the C and O. This opened the vast southern West Virginia coal fields to an industrializing nation, and brought former slaves and their families into the mountains. Bluefield, West Virginia, at the southern point of the state, became the major city of this coal boom. The town ballooned from 600 residents in 1890 to over 5,000 in 1900, largely through the immigration of African-American miners. In 1895, the state established the Bluefield Colored Institute to train Black teachers for the segregated coal-camp schools scattered throughout the region. Half a century later, it was a professor at the renamed Bluefield State College who unearthed the music heard in this recording.