Brave Shanty Boys: The Songs of Timber Workers and Community in Pocahontas County, West Virginia

Abstract

Deep in the heart of West Virginia’s Pocahontas County, the timber industry moved across the nineteenth-century forest, taking valuable commercial lumber, but leaving behind rich cultural legacies. Transient and illiterate laborers, who worked from dawn to dusk, were not privileged to record their thoughts and emotions. Their identities, situated somewhere outside of community structures by virtue of their occupations and ethnicities, were not always recorded in traditional written sources, and yet the complex relationships between those communities and the timber workers are important to understanding the history of Appalachia. Histories of the extractive industries that swept through the region are rich with details of the devastation wrought in the area, but the personal stories of the workers’ lives must be uncovered using cultural remnants. Through the analysis of the songs of the timber camps and the way those songs became incorporated into a community social heritage and identity, the voices of the brave shanty boys can ring out once more.