The West VirginiaUniversity Press hopes the state’s residents can help supply information on several singers to be featured on the upcoming CD”Work and Pray: historic Negro spirituals and labor songs from West Virginia.”

The performers on the CD were everyday people, recorded 50 years ago as part of a research project by musicologist Cortez Reece. Dr. Reece, then a professor at Bluefield State College, worked at documenting the rich African-American singing tradition in the southern part of the state, a tradition which had been largely overlooked by the musicologists who had flocked to the area earlier in the 20th century. The only copy of Reeces collection known to survive is in the West Virginia and Regional History Collection in the West Virginia University Libraries, where it is catalogued as the Cortez D. Reece Archive.

Danny Williams, who is coordinating the project for the WVU Press , expects the CD to appeal to both scholars and music fans.

“Some of the singers have wonderful voices, and all of them have wonderful stories to tell with their songs,”Williams said.”Many of the spirituals are familiar ones, but sung with a little different rhythm or feel. And the most striking work songs are from railroad track crews, who developed rhythmic chants to coordinate lifting and moving heavy steel rails in unison. There’s just not another recording like this anywhere.”

Joseph Bundy, a singer and music historian in Bluefield, is doing much of the research for this project. He has already located one of Reece’s most impressive singers, Clarence Harmon.

“Harmon was a young BluefieldState student when Reece found him,”Bundy said.”He worked on rail crews during the summers, and he had a wonderful voice on the old call-and-response work chant. Today he lives in Springfield, Ohio, and is retired from teaching high school science.”

Another of Reece’s singers whose later life is known is the late Memphis Tennessee Garrison, who earned a reputation as a teacher, community activist and fierce advocate for education. Garrison is the subject of the book”Memphis Tennessee Garrison : the remarkable story of a Black Appalachian woman,”edited by Ancella R. Bickley and Lynda Ann Ewen. She sings two spirituals, learned from her slave-born mother, for this CD.

In searching for information on other singers, Bundy and Williams have not been as fortunate, and they are appealing for help from descendants or friends. The recordings were made from 1949-53, so no doubt many of the singers are deceased. The singers include: Albert McCoy, whom Reece identified as a retired railroad worker in Bluefield; Nelson Harmon, a retired railroad worker from Northfork; Dr. P.R. Higginbotham, women’s physician at Bluefield State College; the Rev. and Mrs. John Wade of Bluefield; Frank Wade of Welch; Joe Perkins, a retired railroad worker and former coal miner from Bluefield; Esther Johnson, a school teacher in Omar, Logan County; Susan White, a young dance teacher in Bluefield; Waldo Dickason, a retired railroad worker from Giatto, Mercer County; the Rev. R.L. Pollard, head dishwasher at Bluefield State; Bell Edward Pate, a young man in Princeton; the family of Charles L Holland, a coal miner at Lake Superior, McDowell County; and Blanche Simmons of Lake Superior.

Anyone with information on any of these individuals is asked to phone the West VirginiaUniversity Press at 304-293-8400, or e-mail at press01@wvu.edu .