Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
Kelsey Beverage lit up the stage with her banjo tunes and stories from her childhood in the fifth and final segment of the Pocahontas County Opera House “Story Session” series.
She opened the session with “Walking in the Parlor.”
“That’s an old Lee Hammons tune,” she said.
Beverage learned the tune from her instructor Pam Lund, who has taught many young old-time musicians in the county.
“Pam used to always pick on us for playing it too fast,” Beverage said. “We only play it like a quarter of the speed that the Bings do – so we used to refer to it as Bings speed. We were never allowed to play it that fast because every time we even attempted it, she was like, ‘Lee Hammons is rolling over in his grave right now. You kids are killing him all over again. You better slow it down.’”
Beverage played the tune again at the slower pace to quell the possible anger of Hammons’ ghost.
She followed that with “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss” and “Shady Grove.”
As she changed the tuning for the next song, Beverage told the story of how she became a banjo player.
“My papaw would be very disappointed in me if he saw how much I was using this tuner,” she said. “When I first started playing banjo, it was all because of him. He used to play with the Viney Mountain Bluegrass Boys and he was a fiddle player, but he also played a little bit of banjo.
“One day, when my twin brother and I were running through the house, I remember my mom in the middle of the kitchen, turning and looking at us for no apparent reason and asking if we wanted to take banjo lessons,” she continued. “We were like, ‘Yeah, sure.’
“And the next thing I knew, we were taking banjo lessons every Tuesday with Pam Lund.
“It was a blast, except after basketball practice, and you were tired and sweaty and you had to go anyway.”
Beverage’s grandfather, Richard Beverage, who turned 90 this year, had a big influence on her love of music, and she shared more stories about their interactions around music.
“Papaw always played for us at Christmas, but just for the kids,” she said. “He would never play in front of the parents, so he would sneak us back into the back bedroom and get the kids around. He’d get the fiddle out and he’d pluck a little on it and get the banjo out, and we’d pluck a little on that. He’d put them all away as soon as the first adult face would pop in the room. That would be the end of the banjo and fiddle lessons with papaw.
“I also remember one time I broke a banjo string,” she continued. “I was at home and I had no idea how to fix it. He came over and fixed it. It broke way down where none of the factory wiring of the banjo would work anymore. We wired it together and he did his hoodoo, voodoo papaw work on it. I showed up for lessons and Pam took my banjo away from me, and she was like, ‘Who did that?’ She knew I didn’t do it, and I told her Papaw, and she said, ‘He did a good job.’”
Next, Beverage played “Falls of Richmond,” a song she learned for the Vandalia Gathering – a statewide contest for banjo, fiddle and more.
“Pam taught me that song to play at the Vandalia Gathering banjo contest when I was in high school,” she said. “I was terrified because right after I worked really hard to learn it – it was the best song I knew – she told me that Alan Dutchess was going to play that song in the same banjo contest. “Luckily, she let him know that it was my best song, and he politely declined to play that during the contest.
“He beat me anyway,” she said, laughing, “but he was nice enough to switch it up a little bit for me.”
To end the session, Beverage played “Old Joe Clark,” one of the tunes that wore out its welcome at her grandmother Dessie McLaughlin’s house.
“I’ll switch to [the key of] A and play some stuff that my Grandma Dessie got tired of hearing,” she said. “When I was little and was first learning, we used to take our lessons at WVMR, the radio station, and then we moved them to our grandmother’s house in Dunmore, which was just a little bit closer to everybody.”
Beverage is an outdoor guide and travels the country as a white water rafting guide in the summer and returns to Snowshoe Resort as a snowboarding and ski instructor in the winter.
The Pocahontas County Opera House “Story Session” series is available to view online at the Opera House Facebook page and at pocahontasoperahouse.org
On Mondays in May, the series will be featured on the Pocahontas County Opera House Radio Hour on Allegheny Mountain Radio from 1 to 2 p.m.
The audio from each session will be broadcast, along with past performances from the Opera House.