JEWELLS FROM COAL

JENI & BILLY
Jewell Ridge Coal
Jewell Ridge Records 003

The Clinch River straddles the Virginia/West Virginia line. It’s also a marker of postindustrial America with dead company towns hidden away in Appalachian hollows where the coal was dug out and the hamlets left to die. Jeni Hankins knows the area well; her grandfathers worked Jewell Ridge. Name a social problem and Jewell Ridge had it. Hankins and Billy Kemp capture the spirit of the place, with all its tragedy, dirt, defiance, sweat, and pride. They also capture the rhythms of daily life. When you listen to “Tazewell Beauty Queen,” a song of the youthful hopes that manage to bloom in barren places, you don’t know whether to celebrate the couple’s dreams or wail for the certainty they’ll be crushed. The album also honors the United Mine Workers, the union that was often the only thing between the miners and chattel slavery under a different name. As befits such material the vocals and instrumentals sparse and plaintive, and the album’s moods seldom drift from the somber-melancholy range. Hankins’s dry vocals have aptly been described as a cross between Hazel Dickens and Iris DeMent, and if the album has a fault it’s that sometimes her vocals are too “pretty” for the content. Styles include Country blues (“Oxycodone”), songs built around Kemp’s Appalachian-style flat picking (“Sweetness Keen as Pain”), old-time Country religion (“Land of the Pharaohs”), and mountain music (“Chicken Ridge”). Jeni & Billy have captured a bygone era, but they subtly remind us that even in a time of job scarcity no one should nostalgically yearn for the Clinch to revive.--LV