Hughie Ellis
-Photograph provided by Hughie's grandson, Danny Ellis, February 2022.
When West Virginia University professor Patrick Gainer
recorded William Hughie Ellis of Logan County in 1959, he sang and played the
banjo, cracked jokes, regaled the small audience in the room with his ghost
stories and humorous tall tales and said that he could play two hundred and
sixty-eight different banjo tunes. And when asked if he ever played the fiddle
he said “I used to play a right smart fiddle.”
William Hughie Ellis was born sometime between 1883 and 1887
(accounts and documents vary) at Henlawson, Logan County, on the farm his
parents owned in what is now Chief Logan State Park. And he was raised there “right down at the
head of Snap Creek” that flows into the Guyandotte River. We know of him and his music chiefly because
he was an elder brother to Aunt Jennie Wilson, the well-known Logan County
banjo player; his style is quite similar to hers. The Gainer tape is the only
known recording of Mr. Ellis. In that
recording he played in both clawhammer and finger-picking styles; the tunes he
played included If I Were a Gambler, and the fiddle tune/breakdown Fly Around
My Pretty Little Miss, which he calls My Blue-Eyed Daisy. After playing Cripple Creek, he said that he
had “danced that a thousand times.”
Mr. Ellis also spoke briefly about the kinds of work people
did in his younger years. Coal mining took
hold in Logan County in 1904 but in 1910 he was a laborer in a lumber camp and when
interviewed by Gainer he remembered those years in which timbering was still a
dominant industry in West Virginia. And
so he spoke of digging for ginseng, cutting timber, running log rafts, and
working on the boats that pushed the rafts down river.
He seemed to relish telling of his experiences making
molasses from the cane he grew, beginning at the age of seventeen. He said that “people bragged on” the molasses
he made and he’d “let neighbors and friends all gang up in there and eat
molasses and have a big time,” when no doubt he’d play music and they’d all
dance.
In 1910 his family still had the farm and he apparently
lived there at the time he was working at a nearby lumber camp, but by 1917 he
had moved to Kitchen and was working as a miner for the Guyandotte Coal
Company. In 1920 he listed his occupation as laborer in the Chapmanville mines but
by 1930 he had left mining and noted that he was a farmer working on his own
land. In 1940 he was serving as a Justice of the Peace in Chapmanville.
Mr. Ellis died on 2 February 1972 and was buried at the Maston
Conley Family Cemetery at Chapmanville, very near where he lived.
Above his name on the headstone is a banjo. [See photo below.]
—Gloria Goodwin Raheja, February 2021, with musical
commentary and additional information/pictures from Chris Haddox, via conversations with Danny Ellis, February 2022.
Sources:
Gloria Goodwin Raheja’s research for her book Logan
County Blues: Frank Hutchison in the Sonic Landscape of the Appalachian
Coalfields.
Patrick Gainer Collection, A&M 3003, Tape 119 Side
2. West Virginia University Library,
West Virginia and Regional History Center.
Danny Ellis, Logan, WV, conversations with Chris Haddox, February 2022.
-Hughie's headstone at the Maston Conley Cemetery, Chapmanville, WV. Photo by Chris Haddox, 2021.
This story on Hughie appeared in the August 15, 1969 edition of the Cleveland Press.
-Photograph of news story from Hughie's grandson, Danny Ellis, February, 2022.
Finding Hughie's Grave
While many of the cemeteries in this project require some effort to find and visit, the Maston Conley cemetery--where Hughie is at rest--is nearly an in-town cemetery. It is situated up on a hill above Hughie's homeplace in Chapmanville, WV, above the four lane highway known as Corridor G, and just a stone's throw from the big Chapmanville school complex, numerous houses, and the Evans Funeral Home. As we learned, the road leading up to the cemetery is gated and locked as it leads to a private residence at the top of the wooded hill. Fortunately, access was easily attained after speaking with a nice gentleman at Evans Funeral home. He opened the gate and allowed us to drive up to visit the cemetery and in short order we found Hughie's grave. As referenced in the biography above, we do have a recording of Hughie talking with an audience where he references playing Cripple Creek quite often--a thousand times--so a little banjo rendition of that tune seemed an appropriate offering!
Listen to Hughie Ellis entertain an audience in this sound recording made by Patrick Gainer in 1959.
The physical setting for this conversation between Hughie and WVU Professor, Patrick Gainer, is unknown. I initially thought it might have been at the WV State Folk Festival in Glenville, WV, but the archives there have no records of Hughie Ellis having ever attended. Given that Hughie says in the recording that "this is about as far from home as I've ever been," and "you people up here probably don't believe everything I'm saying," I'm guessing that Gainer may have arranged for Hughie to come to Morgantown, where Gainer was based at the time.