Sixteen Years of Tazewell Beauty Queen

and Kin-keeping.

LISTEN NOW · 3:10

This year marks sixteen years since the release of my first full length recording with Jeni & Billy. The album was called Jewell Ridge Coal and the most popular song from it was “Tazewell Beauty Queen.” I wrote the song back in 2007 when I’d begun to understand that what mattered to me in songwriting was telling the true or truly felt stories of my family and my Appalachian heritage. Right now, I’m working on an article for Old Time News – the publishing arm of the Friends of American Old Time Music and Dance here in Britain – and that writing has me reflecting on my body of work as a songwriter over the last twenty years.

If you keep in touch with my daily doings on social media (Instagram and Facebook), you’ll notice that I post a lot of photos of sewing, knitting, charity shop finds, artwork and my teddy bear Stanley Bear. From time to time, I share a song on social media which I’ve also discussed here on Substack. Music, especially very personal non-commercial idiosyncratic music like mine, is strangely awkward to share on social media which is primarily a visual space. I have learned how to make little reels and slideshows there and, because my music inhabits the strange world of the staggering archive of music in “the cloud,” I can pull up one of my very own songs from the ether like “Tazewell Beauty Queen” or “Chicken Ridge" and make them the soundtrack for family photographs or my latest charity shop yarn discoveries.

But ultimately, my songs really mean the most either in concert or when someone chooses my album from their shelf, from the floor of their van, or from the cloud and plays it, sings with it, or does the ironing to it. I usually listen to music when I’m sewing, doing something hand-craft related, or cleaning up the mess I’ve made by doing something crafty. I love diving into my vinyl record collection of old country and folk music. I even sometimes listen to my old albums, but not often, because I think I’m a bit like actors who don’t watch their own movies. It’s too strange a reflection.

What I’ve learned through for Old Time News is that songwriting for me is a way to connect with a mysterious past – mysterious because it’s known only through photographs, incomplete memories, and an altered physical landscape. When my grandmother was growing up, Smith Ridge was covered in farmland and people raised their own food. Now, her mountain is covered in trees and gardening is mostly a hobby. Boxes of photos contain more pictures of unknown faces than known ones. My questions receive answers which come to a point and then stop because the details are blurred by time.

Fellas in our family photo box who we just can’t identify. They look very mischievous to me!

Why I am compelled by something inside me to seek this nearly unreachable past proves harder to answer. I can only think that my love of childhood reading, children’s theatre, and TV made me obsessed with stories and the dramatizing of them. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books and I watched them played out on TV. I read Pollyanna and I saw Hayley Mills be Pollyanna. I read Frog and Toad and then my sister and I saw Frog and Toad on the stage. I read Cinderella, The Brementown Musicians, and A Little Princess and then I was in those plays!

Yes, that’s me as a rooster – a part I got on the strength of my crow which I made up on the spot for the audition. My sister is the green imp and carried on in theatre. She is now the Manager of Education and Outreach Programs at Tennessee Shakespeare Co in Memphis! This was back at Watertown Children’s Theatre in Boston, Mass, which is still going strong.

When I read Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies about an Appalachian family in Southwest Virginia, I felt I was in that story. That was me. That was us. So, when Uncle Roy Lee told me about his one summer in the mines before he went off to University, there was no question that I would make that into a song. And each story lead to the next. Then there were whole albums of songs. This continues to today.

My Aunt Edith starred as the Tazewell Beauty Queen in the original booklet for the Jewell Ridge Coal CD. That’s Aunt Katherine’s image in the background. Here’s a song I wrote for Aunt Edith and one I wrote for Aunt Katherine.

Some idea I may have had initially about a “career” in music (whatever that really means) has become a handmaiden to my desire to collect and preserve the stories of my family. I’ve done this not in an archival or a methodical way, but in the way that a storyteller would by turning them into songs or poems or stories that introduce my songs.

I chose my family because mine is naturally the family whose history most interests me. We are not particularly special (meaning notable, famous, infamous, etc), but that’s not what’s important. We are a family like so many others and that creates a sense of recognition and closeness with my listeners and readers which makes me feel that my work is good and it matters.

I found these connections by performing and sending my music out into the wider world. My family songs encouraged people to think about their own heritage, the places they came from, their deep past, and the wisdom or the stories held by their elders. Through my songs, folks looked at their own stories as something worth keeping and not losing sight of. Over the twenty years since I wrote “Tazewell Beauty Queen,” I’ve loved when people have spoken to me or written to me about their own family histories and stories. 

Here’s a cutting from the newspaper from when Uncle Roy Lee married his own Tazewell Beauty Queen. Uncle Roy Lee passed away some years ago, but never stopped being tickled that his story became my “hit” song.

My work, though it comes with the making of recorded songs or the performing of concerts, is also the work of what my dad called kin-keeping. He once said I was the kin-keeper of the family and that he was proud of that. I could have chosen to kin-keep through embroidery, scrapbooks, or patterns in knitting or quilts, and I have done a bit of all of that, too. But because my medium is writing and songwriting, songs are where my (version of our) family stories reside, where my story resides, and where we can all be together amongst the tunes.

I studied art and the making of art in college and the thing that I found out was that it was terribly lonely for me. There wasn’t the current sort of online community, though it comes with its own pitfalls, of Instagram or Facebook for sharing your visual space twenty years ago. I was making art in my space and then trying to find ways to share it with other people through small local galleries or craft fairs where people might might see it. I felt isolated because there was this long time where I was just by myself making artwork and I didn’t enjoy that solitude. Now, after many years of travel and interactions, I think differently about quietness, but back then I struggled with it.

Here’s a painting I made as a student of painting at Davidson College of a Christian mystic in her little village. It hangs in my bedroom at Mom’s house with my Homecoming Queen star behind it.

Music is a way to share my art in a very communal way – in a way that involves positive communication through sound. I make a song and it’s truly out there when it’s been heard, whether that’s through me singing live or on a recording. Either way, the exchange begins and takes flight. That’s a very lucky and vibrant way of sharing art.

I never stopped to consider whether my kin-keeping kind of music would have any lucrative commercial appeal. In fact, I was once advised by a Grammy-winning producer to change the lyric of my song “Jewell Ridge Coal” to “Blue Ridge Coal” so that it would have “commercial appeal.” My reply was that I didn’t grow up in the Blue Ridge, but in Jewell Ridge in the Allegheny’s. What popularity and resonance my music does have has sent me to many places to meet many people with whom I have a connection and from whom I’ve received kindness. And I’ve made something that only I could make. That’s important to me.

It’s been a varied, topsy-turvy, highs and lows, adventures and surprises kind of life, this musical kin-keeping. Thank you for being part of my wanderings.

The Jewell Ridge Coal record was my first Little House On the Prairie book, my first solid ancestry artwork, my first singing scrapbook. This song is the best one I ever wrote. Enjoy “Tazewell Beauty Queen” sung plainly by me alone just as I would have when I first wrote it back in 2007.

With kindness to you, always,

Jeni

P.S. To watch a video that my Dad made of “Tazewell Beauty Queen” which includes many family photos, visit this link.

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Tazewell Beauty Queen

for Uncle Roy Lee Smith

If you don’t mind the low seam,
and if you don’t mind the dark,
if you don’t mind the black face
that is every miner’s mark,

you can make a fortune
and you can buy a dream —
go cruisin’ in a Chevy
with the Tazewell Beauty Queen.

If you don’t mind the short fuse,
and if you don’t mind the smell,
if you don’t mind a summer
in a place as black as hell,

you can make a fortune
and you can buy a dream —
go cruisin’ in a Chevy
with the Tazewell Beauty Queen.

If you will make a gamble,
if you will bet your skin,
you can get your wish in
tires and chrome and fins.

You can make a fortune
and you can buy a dream —
go cruisin’ in a Chevy
with the Tazewell Beauty Queen.

You might be dusty now,
but you’ll be coming up so clean —
just a’drivin’ in that Chevy
with your Tazewell Beauty Queen.

© 2007 Jeni Hankins, BMI

This recording of “Tazewell Beauty Queen” comes from my solo performance for Bromborough Folk Club, The Wirral, Liverpool,  2018. Recorded live by Dave Burrows. You can hear some lovely singing from the audience in the background.

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We went to a small fishing village in France for my birthday last month! Here’s Stanley Bear with his French friend Benjamin D’Ambleteuse.

They also did some rock climbing.

And they helped me with my watercolor painting.