Kim Johnson
Our Beyoncé of the Banjo

By Stan Bumgardner

Anyone who’s called into, subscribed to, or submitted an article to GOLDENSEAL over the last decade has dealt, either directly or indirectly, with Editorial Assistant Kim Johnson, who retired at the end of November. Her well-earned retirement likely will come as a shock to much of the GOLDENSEAL nation: to our loyal readers, our authors, and, yes, most selfishly, me, the editor. While I wrote a few articles for the magazine over the years, virtually everything I know about being editor of GOLDENSEAL, I’ve learned from Kim. So, it seemed like a fitting time to learn a little more about this “Elk River girl” who’s become such a vital part of the GOLDENSEAL family and a transitional figure on the old-time-music scene.

Kim was born November 2, 1952, at her Grandma Cleo Sweeney’s house in Clendenin. “The house sat right where the on-ramp to I-79 North is now,” Kim says. She and her three siblings—Teresa, Karen, and Chuck—were raised primarily by their mother, Genevieve Sweeney Johnson, near Clendenin. Through the third grade, Kim went to a one-room school at Bufflick and then to Doctor’s Creek School (named for pioneer Dr. William Cobb), Clendenin Junior High, and Herbert Hoover High, graduating in 1970.

She, her brothers and sisters, and her friends did the “normal stuff that country kids do”: playing in creeks, fishing, camping. While nobody played an instrument, they had some old Hank Williams’ records and even a few rock ‘n’ rollers. Other than music from the mountains and from the Rat Pack Era, Kim and I don’t exactly share the same musical tastes. I know this quite well because Kim isn’t shy about her opinions. So you can imagine my shock when one day, I was listening to The Doors, and she started singing along. I was even more stunned to find out that she saw one of her favorites, Led Zeppelin, at the Charleston Civic Center in the late 1960s (for $5). She still laments that she hasn’t learned any Led on the banjo.

Thinking she wanted to be a teacher, Kim moved on to Glenville State College in 1971. She recalls, “I thought it’d be fun to be a school teacher until I student-taught and later substitute-taught.” She quickly realized, “This isn’t for me.”

But Glenville instilled in her a lifelong love of old-time music. Every June, she looked forward to (and still does) the state Folk Festival in Glenville. She’d walk around, listen to music, and take photos; however, it still hadn’t occurred to her to get her own instrument.

That finally changed after graduating from Glenville. Kim bought a $100 Hondo banjo and “fooled around with it a little bit.” Asking her why, of all possible instruments, she chose the banjo, Kim laughs, “Well, the fiddle’s too hard, a guitar hurts your fingers, and a bass is too big to lug around.”

As for her career, she took a part-time job as a stage hand at the newly opened Culture Center in Charleston. She liked the work but wanted something permanent, so she became a C&P Telephone (later AT&T) operator in 1978. At the switchboard one day, she fielded a collect call to a family in New York City. When she asked who the call was from, the caller said, “John Gotti.” He was serving time in Illinois and could make only collect calls. His family jokingly refused to accept the charges at first. Gotti wasn’t amused and started yelling unmentionables at his bemused family, so Kim decided it was time to jump off the call.

She stayed with the phone company until 2001 and then later took a part-time job with the Division of Health and Human Resources, but the pay was too little to live on. Then, in 2008, the editorial assistant job came open at GOLDENSEAL, and she landed back at the Culture Center three decades after her last go-around. Kim calls it “most fun job I’ve ever had” (likely no thanks to the current editor, who’s known for his random, nonsensical rants on virtually any topic).

Not only did Kim like her new job, the skills she’d developed as a phone operator, her knowledge of old-time music, and her love of history were a perfect combination for the work. John Lilly, who edited GOLDENSEAL from 1997 to 2015, notes that “her writing and photography skills came in awfully handy over the years. Kim was especially handy with historical photographs—she sometimes called them hysterical photographs—and she almost always knew where we could find a particular image.”

 John adds, “I am proud to have hired her! And equally proud of the magazines we put out together.”

Meanwhile, jumping back in the 1970s, Kim kept falling more and more in love with the banjo. Kanawha Parks and Recreation sponsored community education events in Clendenin. She went once a week for two months and learned the banjo basics from Paul Epstein, who’s still active on the old-time music scene. She also started attending old-time picks at banjo player Brooks Smith’s house in Dunbar. She learned a few simpler tunes, like “Cripple Creek,” and asked Brooks for advice. He told her to pick out a fiddler she really liked and ask him if she could play along.

Kim went to the annual Vandalia Gathering and listened to every fiddler there. She recalls, “The last one to play was the one I liked best.” So, she went up to Clay County’s Wilson Douglas and asked if she could play some tunes with him. She got his phone number and began making regular trips to Wilson’s house in Maysel.

Kim reflects fondly on those times, “We’d sit in his kitchen, and he’d play first and then ask me to follow him. Well, I could barely play ‘Cripple Creek,’ but Wilson kept encouraging me. He’d tell me to play what he was playing on the fiddle, but he’d say, ‘You won’t get all the notes but get what you can. And if you try to get them all, it won’t sound any good. Once you learn how to do that, you can play with anybody.’”

And that’s what Kim did. She and Wilson started playing the Clay County Heritage Nights (accompanied by Dana Perkins or Clarence Stover on guitar), ramp dinners, square dances in Sutton, and basically any place they could. As other old-time musicians know, not just anyone could play along with Wilson Douglas, who had his own unique style. Kim, though, found him easy to follow because “I didn’t know any different.”

Wilson introduced Kim to many old-time-music legends who are no longer with us: Sherman and Burl Hammons, Woody Simmons, Sylvia O’Brien, and Blackie Cool, to name a few. As good as the music was, Kim—who’d always had a love of history—enjoyed the old timers’ stories as much as anything. She still recalls the Hammons brothers’ tales about fishing on the Williams River, trapping minks, and digging ginseng.

Decades later, she remembers those stories as much as she does the songs themselves. Cody Jordan, a young old-time musician who currently plays with Kim, notes that she “can tell you not only about the tunes the old timers played and the way they played them but also about their lives and families; all of the little details which make it so much more than just something dead in history but something that is personal and meaningful and that lives on.”

Being a relative newcomer to the environment, Kim didn’t entirely realize what a special time it was for the old-time revival. Beginning in the 1980s, Kim became just about everyone’s favorite go-to person on banjo because she could seemingly blend in at the drop of a hat. Fiddler Bobby Taylor notes that “Kim’s style of banjo playing is never overstated and fits nicely into many settings. Although her leads are great, she seems most happy to contribute to the overall band sound. She never plays too much or too little. It is always just right.”

Kim used to attend regular picks hosted by David O’Dell in Spencer. David, a banjo master himself, echoes Bobby’s comments, calling Kim “one of the most underrated banjo players in the old-time-music world. She’s not about the spotlight; she’s not about self-promotion; she’s not about fancy hot licks.” 

I asked Kim when she first realized she was the go-to banjo person in West Virginia, and she replied self-deprecatingly, “I don’t know when that happened. In fact, I didn’t know I was.”

 It was a big blow to Kim when her mentor, Wilson Douglas, died in 1999. They were prepping for a performance at Melvin Wine’s annual birthday shindig in Sutton, and Wilson wanted to sing, “Granny, Will Your Dog Bite?” while Kim played it on banjo. His idea was even more unusual since he’d had the last of his voice box removed 10 years before; he’d talk and sing with the aid of an electrolarynx, which Wilson called “his electric teeth.” That night, just days before they got to perform their unique duet, Wilson died in his sleep, leaving Kim devastated.

She started looking around for someone else to play with and found Lester and Linda McCumbers of Nicut, Calhoun County. The McCumbers had just lost their banjo player, Carroll Hardway. So, Kim stepped and filled the void, sometimes with Andrew Dunlap on guitar, playing festivals around West Virginia. The McCumbers weren’t big on traveling. One time, though, Kim talked Lester into performing at a festival in Richmond. As they crossed into Virginia, Lester looked back, waved at the “Welcome to Wild and Wonderful West Virginia” sign, and said, “Good-bye, these United States.”

In time, Kim traveled to Washington state and even Australia, often accompanying Frank George of Roane County. At the Berkeley Old-Time Music Convention in California, Kim says that Frank—who was largely unknown in West Virginia outside the old-time community—was feted like a superstar: “All these hippies out in Berkeley had a copy of Frank’s album from 1967. They were all waiting in line to get his autograph, like he was Frank Sinatra instead of Frank George.”

Sadly, just about all of Kim’s musical mentors eventually passed on, including Lester and Linda McCumbers and Frank George in 2017 [see Spring 2018]. But Kim was about to find a new band and a new audience. In 2014, she was at the Appalachian Studies Conference in Huntington and heard a young fiddler and guitarist. Jesse Pearson (fiddle) and Cody Jordan (guitar) were in their mid-20s and playing old-time music “the way it should be played,” according to Kim. She listened for a bit and asked if she could play a few tunes with them. The three, as The Modock Rounders, were soon performing on the main and dance stages at the Vandalia Gathering and recording two old-time CDs. Fittingly, their first CD was a tribute to the late Wilson Douglas.

Cody sees Kim as a crucial part of our old-time-music family tree, “as much a part of the sound of classic West Virginia traditional music as the recordings of any of the legendary figures like the Hammons Family or French Carpenter. Her style contributed to the sounds of the greats that she played with.”

In retirement, she’s looking forward to traveling around, playing more music, and doing “a lot of fun things before I get too old to do them.” Just recently, she played on fiddler Tessa Dillon’s debut CD; Tessa is even younger than Jesse and Cody.

Kim Johnson is one of those rare individuals who’s been able to bridge the gap between musicians born in both the early and late 20th centuries. She observes, “I was about 26 or 27 when I started playing with Wilson. Now, I’m the age of Wilson playing with these young folks, who are the age I was back then.”

In that time, she’s learned more than a thing or two about old-time music. She knows the tunes by heart but also the stories behind them and the stories of those who inspired her. Bobby Taylor calls Kim a “top-notch historian in the world of old-time music. She continues to leave a lasting legacy for future generations. She will never hesitate to set the record straight, so watch out musicologists.”

David O’Dell adds, “She’s all about preserving and promoting traditional music and the history that goes with it, and she’s a walking, talking banjo-playing encyclopedia of West Virginia’s rich old-time music culture.”

Personally, I can’t wait to hear Kim play more often—something you’ll rarely, if ever, hear a fiddler say about a banjo player. Maybe she’ll even have time now to learn “Misty Mountain Hop.”

But it’s impossible for me to imagine the GOLDENSEAL office without her laugh and caustic wit. When I’m sitting here at work listening to Neil Young’s high-pitched vocals, who else is going to ask me, “Can’t they do something to make him sound better?”

I’ll miss you, Kim!

STAN BUMGARDNER is the editor of GOLDENSEAL