Kelly Kerney and Ethan Bullard with a copy of “Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book” (Photo by Jay Paul)
A dozen years ago, while driving home to Richmond after a backpacking trip in West Virginia, Kelly Kerney and her husband, Ethan Bullard, heard something on the radio as they attempted to find a station.
“It hit me like a bus,” Kerney recalls.
Her maternal grandmother, Ella “Mamaw” Hanshaw, had been a solo performer, had sung in church and had toured regionally with the Hallelujah Hill Quartet along with her husband, Tracy, and their friends Chester and Maxine Spencer. Kerney remarked aloud that the song (by a different artist) reminded her of her grandmother’s music. Bullard’s jaw dropped, then he said, “Your grandmother sings like this?”
“I hadn’t thought about Mamaw’s music in 15 years and probably hadn’t heard it for even longer,” Kerney says. Regardless, that moment started a 12-year project of rescuing Hanshaw’s music from deteriorating cassette tapes recorded in the 1970s and ’80s and ultimately led to a recording, “Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book,” released this month through Kentucky- and North Carolina-based record label Spinster.
At first, Kerney wondered if her childhood memories had burnished the sound of her grandmother’s voice. Then, during a 2013 family gathering in Ohio, she asked her brother Scott, “Do you remember Mamaw’s music as being that good?”
He jumped up and returned with a single tape. “And he tells me, ‘I stole it,’ and that she’s got tons more, boxes of them,” Kerney says. Her first reaction: “You stole from Mamaw?” Then she put the tape in and pressed play.
Scott had unknowingly selected one of the best recordings of Hanshaw and the Hallelujah Hill Quartet, made by the Spencers’ son in 1985. Kerney collected the rest of the tapes from her grandmother (with her consent), and the couple decided to make a CD of the music for friends and family, including fellow grandchildren who hadn’t known of Hanshaw’s musical life.
The back cover of “Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book” (Image courtesy Spinster)
“[Mamaw] was thrilled that someone was interested in her music,” Kerney says. “She thought of it as her legacy, her purpose in life, and thought it lost. She had these tapes, and they were falling apart. And she didn’t know what to do with them.”
Kerney and Bullard don’t shy away from efforts requiring attention to detail and commitment to a subject. Kerney worked in the library and archives at The Valentine museum in Richmond and has written two novels. Bullard, a curator at the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site in Jackson Ward, has a background in 19th-century U.S. history as well as film and television production.
Their first challenge was transferring the music. About 100 recordings were whittled down to 54 tapes, yielding 34 hours of music. Bullard knew from his archival work that old cassette tape can snap with the pressure of rolling it through a machine. “The next time you play it could be the last,” he says. “The risk was that if we only have one tape of a certain song, that we’d lose it in the transition.”
Each evening for more than a year, the couple sat to listen and document as Bullard transferred the music to a computer. “We’d play it once, and not rewind, and kept detailed notes and made an index,” he says.
Hanshaw played by ear and didn’t know music notation, so she sometimes recorded several versions of a piece as she worked through it. Opening notes went missing due to a tape’s soundless leader, and other songs suddenly stopped. “They were trying to get the most music on each tape,” Bullard says. The index became an information matrix that allowed them to select the tracks that best represented certain songs.
Ella Hanshaw with husband Tracy during a 1961 duet (Photo courtesy Kelly Kerney)
In her earlier days, Hanshaw wrote country ballads with lyrics like, “I may not be in your little black book, but I’m always in your kitchen when it’s time to cook.” In later years, however, she performed only faith-inspired music. The new album physically represents the division, with one side labeled “Big Black Book,” referencing the Bible, and the other side called “Little Black Book,” with its surreptitious connotations and songs reminiscent of Hanshaw contemporaries such as Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn and Wanda Jackson.
Hanshaw considered entering popular genre music — she received an invitation to join the “Midwestern Hayride,” an influential radio and television country music and variety broadcast and precursor to “Hee Haw” — but declined. She left an earlier band because she didn’t want to perform in bars or risk temptations against her Baptist grain. Following a religious conversion at age 57, she became a devout Pentecostal and participated in marathons of fervent prayer, speaking in tongues and the metaphorical slaying of demons. The juxtaposition of life as a gentle and loving grandmother who also fought off devils seems to have provided Hanshaw with inspiration.
According to Kerney, Hanshaw once said that all she’d ever wanted was to play guitar and drive a car, and she managed both. In her lifetime she composed 200-300 songs — sometimes writing lyrics in just 15 minutes — and the Hallelujah Hill Quartet toured churches throughout West Virginia. Hanshaw felt her music came to her from the divine and that she was a mere vessel, her music serving as a form of spiritual praise.
Once Kerney and Bullard had preserved the music, they worked with audio and video services business Revolve in Scott’s Addition to produce 100 copies of a two-CD package. In 2018, they drove to Ohio to share the finished recordings with the family. Hanshaw expressed joy and excitement that her music could live on, Kerney says.
Kerney and Hanshaw in an undated family photo (Photo courtesy Kelly Kerney)
The project completed, Kerney and Bullard considered next steps. “We thought it was good, but wondered if anybody else would,” Bullard says. They sent CDs to labels that produce folk and outsider music, receiving polite rejections in response. But one connection — Virginia artist and musician Daniel Bachman — suggested they contact Spinster co-founder Emily Hilliard, then director of the West Virginia Folklife Program.
Bullard queried in July 2018. The music piqued Hilliard’s curiosity and inspired her to interview Hanshaw for inclusion in her book, “Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia.” Listening to Hanshaw’s sacred songs made Hilliard want to “meet Ella and work with her in a folkloric sense,” Hilliard says via email, “but it was her secular lonesome housewife country songs that Ethan sent later that really stunned me. They have a forlorn intimacy and quiet longing, smart lyrics and beautiful, catchy melodies — all seemingly recorded in a back bedroom during a free moment. In some of the raw recordings, you can hear sounds of her children playing in the background.”
Hilliard was so taken with the recordings that “Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book” became Spinster’s first archival release. The material was redigitized at Richmond’s Red Amp Studio, where the research notes and time stamps proved helpful, and sound engineer Anna Frick of Longmont, Colorado-based Ally Sound modified the hisses and pops. “For the first time, it sounded cohesive,” Bullard says, but not polished. The recordings have a quality reminiscent of an old family album filled with scallop-edged photographs, yellowed newspaper clippings, and creased announcements and invitations.
After studying the music forward and back for hundreds of hours, Bullard muses, a detachment from repetition set in. “But the guy cutting the vinyl told me some of these songs made him teary-eyed, and they’ll get to me, too.”
Hanshaw, although afflicted by cancer, continued singing and making music until her death at 85 in 2020. Tracy, her husband of 68 years, died the next year.
“This felt like a completion of a bond,” Kerney says. “She’d been so important to me and given so much to me as a child. Mamaw didn’t make this music for vanity’s sake. When the tapes were so scratchy and grainy, the point for me was that it was sincere and so direct, straight into your heart.”
“Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book” is available on vinyl and disc from Small Friend Records and Books and streaming on Bandcamp.
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