Kelly Kerney knew, growing up, that her grandmother Ella was a talented singer who dabbled in songwriting. But she had no idea of the treasures that her “Mamaw” kept in her bedroom closet.

“I’m not a believer,” Kerney says. “I’m not religious at all, but I always believed in Mamaw, and I believe that her music does have the power to heal, as a lot of great music can.”

The Richmond-based author, who has published two acclaimed books of fiction, has joined with the indie label Spinster to compile the best of Ella’s songs — found on cassettes stored in her closet — into a record. The 18-song “Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book,” with liner notes co-written by Kerney, is slated for release on vinyl and streaming on June 13, the same day that a release party for the disc will be held at Small Friend Records and Books.

Born Ella Samples in 1934 in the small town of Procious, West Virginia, Ella Hanshaw discovered the guitar at age 12, and wrote her first songs soon thereafter. She loved to make music with her boyfriend, later husband Tracy, who played guitar and autoharp and had a beautiful singing voice. The couple migrated to Ohio and ended up living there for 31 years before Tracy was injured at work and they moved back to West Virginia.

Hanshaw wrote hundreds of songs during her life — predominantly gospel numbers — and often performed them in churches with Tracy and later, with two friends, Maxine and Chester Spencer, as a religious group called The Hallelujah Hill Quartet. “I’ll be sitting and just thinking, and just all of a sudden the songs will float through my mind,” Ella said in 2018. “And I can write one in 15 minutes. Whenever God gives it to me, I grab out my pencil.”

She would often preserve her original tunes on a department store tape recorder — earlier recordings made on reel-to-reel tape are long lost — but more often than not, they existed on scraps of paper, napkins and in people’s memories.

“She was offered a spot on ‘The Midwestern Hayride,'” her granddaughter says. “That was the first nationally televised country variety show, a precursor to ‘Hee Haw,’ out of Cincinnati. She was offered a spot sometime in the late ’50s but she was a young mother with a jealous husband and there was no way to make it work with a family. She was never going to throw herself into that lifestyle. But the music came so naturally to her.”

“The music is unvarnished and full of twang, the verses plaintive, the choruses swelling with churchly harmonies,” writes Jennifer Kelly in a Dusted Magazine review of “Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book.” “She’s captured here on tapes of varying quality, some vibrating with hiss, others admitting outside sounds like children playing, others more polished, but all focusing a bright plain light on Hanshaw and her music.”

Forging a musical bond

The story began when Kerney and her husband Ethan Bullard took a road trip. They were listening to a left-of-the-dial radio station playing vintage country gospel recordings. “‘That sounds like Mamaw,’ I told him.”

When she visited Ohio, where much of the family still lives, she asked her brother if he remembered their grandmother’s music. According to Kerney, he got up and returned with a cassette tape. “I stole this from Mamaw,” he said “She’s got a ton more just sitting in boxes.’ We listened and it was a tape with her and her quartet. Everything just came rushing back to me.”

Ella, still alive at the time but battling cancer, was only too happy to share her tapes, although still more of them would be discovered after her death in 2020.

“I was lucky that I started this process when she was still alive,” her granddaughter says. “I would call her and ask about a song and she would remember everything — when she recorded it, say, or she would clarify lyrics. It was a wonderful resource to be able to talk to her about so much of this.”

It also reestablished a bond between the two. “I had gone to college, and kind of became, you know, not Pentecostal. So it was a great way to get to know her as an adult. We were able to reconnect.”

Using Garage Band software, Kelly and Ethan ended up digitizing a two-CDR collection of selected moments to give to Ella and family members. “It had forty songs on it,” she says. “There was just so much there… quartet practices, duets, solo practices.” Alas, some tapes had deteriorated, or had contents taped over with a radio sermon, but there were many gems — the best of these have been painstakingly remastered by engineer Anna Frick for the Spinster compilation.

Hanshaw’s story isn’t unique. She is within a tradition of non-professional women’s songwriting in Appalachia, says Emily Hilliard, co-founder of Spinster and the founder of the West Virginia Folklife Program at the West Virginia Humanities Council.

As she explains in the compilation’s liner notes: “Writing—such as recording family stories, inscribing birth and death dates in a Bible, maintaining correspondence or annotating cookbook recipes—was historically one of the few admissible creative outlets for women in the mountain South.”

“Lonesome housewife country”

Hanshaw is also firmly within another, more recent tradition of the anonymous female singer-songwriter who gains recognition, even fame, from recordings found after her death. That list includes Sibylle Baier, Connie Converse, and Molly Drake (the mother of singer Nick Drake) — buried talents who were unable, or unwilling, to pursue a music career during their lifetimes.

“When Kelly first sent me the songs, the first person I thought of was [Sibylle] Baier, even though her music is nothing like Ella’s,” says Hilliard, who started the “radical feminist” Spinster label with co-founder Michelle Dove in 2018. “I think their stories tell us something about the music industry and the way it has historically only been available for certain types of people. There are a lot of women, especially in [the 1950s and ’60s] who maybe recorded one record and dropped out or they just did something at home… like bedroom projects.”

The Ella comp is the first archival release for Spinster. The label normally releases work by contemporary artists such as Amelia Courthouse, West of Roan and Slut Pill.

In her former guise as West Virginia’s state folklorist, Hilliard interviewed Ella for an oral history project in 2018. “She had just recovered from cancer, so she was a little frail. Her voice wasn’t in great shape at that time, but she did kind of sing a few melodies and was really excited about getting back to the guitar. I think she was struggling to kind of hold it, but she had been playing piano.”

Hilliard had been delighted by Ella’s gospel material but was “blown away” by the secular songs, which she calls “lonesome housewife country.” Of the 52 tapes found, there were only two that contained that kind of material.

“It was pretty shocking to find it,” says Kerney. “No one in the family listened to secular music. And I was born in 1979, so she was only writing and singing gospel when I heard her singing. It blew my mind when I came across this music.” Ella didn’t disavow this material, she adds. But she wanted it to be “separate” from the religious songs that mattered most to her. Still, it turns out that she was a big fan of secular artists like Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and Merle Haggard. (Kerney says she even mumbled something about Merle on her deathbed.)

Sadly, there were also some songs her children remembered that couldn’t be found. “There was one song about a ‘one-way ticket’ that everyone remembers,” Kerney says. “My aunt can sing it. But we couldn’t find it in the tapes. I guess, by the time she got the tape recorder, it was long finished.”

Taking down the demons

While her music is mostly uplifting and sweet, Ella, later in life, started to speak in tongues and have visions; much of her oral history with Hilliard is a recounting of these vivid imaginings of hellfire, scorpions and serpents. “It wasn’t often that the dark imagery of visions made it through to her lyrics,” Kerney says. “‘Behold and Believe’ [contained on the compilation] is an exception, and there were others that didn’t make the final cut.”

“It was a way that she could be empowered,” says Hilliard of these episodes. “She would have these visions of her taking down demons and the devil. I think it was interesting for Kelly in her writing about Ella, the idea that the sweetest person that she knew, her grandmother, had this other life battling evil.”

“I came to believe that the songwriting was a way to turn that darkness into light,” Kerney echoes. “It was triumph over the darkness.”

Hilliard thinks that fans of old time country and gospel music will enjoy the songs compiled on “Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book.” But musicians looking for material should also lend an ear. “I think a dream for all of us would be to hear other artists cover some of Ella’s songs.”

For Kerney, the Spinster release is the fulfillment of a mutual bond that she always felt she shared with her grandmother.

“She told me before she died that it was one of the greatest joys of her life wherever I came to visit. And it was so mutual. All I wanted to do was be on that hill in West Virginia with her,” she says. “She gave me a sense of home when I needed it, she gave me what I needed when I needed it the most. When I was a child, I couldn’t really reciprocate. But I thought, ‘What can I do for Mamaw?'”

As she was sifting through Ella’s archive, Kerney suddenly knew.

“She needed people to hear her songs and now I can do that for her. The most important part of the music for her was sharing it with others, it was an outreach tool for spreading the gospel. I feel like, with this record, I’m fulfilling the other side of the pact. I’m returning the love.”

“Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book” will be released on Friday, June 13. For more info, go to https://www.spinstersounds.com/ella-hanshaws-black-book-album. There will be an album release event on June 13 at Small Friend Records & Books, 1 N. Lombardy St. at 7 p.m.