From left, Kevin Kehrberg, Natalya Zoe Weinstein, Bennett Sullivan and John Cloyd Miller. Photo by Sandlin Gaither
By Emma Castleberry
John Cloyd Miller, a professor at Warren Wilson College in the traditional music program, has won the Hazel Dickens Songwriting Contest for his song Chestnut Mountain. The contest, put on by the DC Bluegrass Union, is an annual fundraiser for the Union and honors Bluegrass Hall of Famer Hazel Dickens.
John Cloyd Miller. Photo by Sarah Johnston
Miller, who often performs as part of the duo Zoe & Cloyd, admits he hasn’t entered a lot of song contests, but this one has always been on his radar because of his admiration for Hazel Dickens as a musician. “Hazel Dickens was a pioneering woman of bluegrass music, a wonderful songwriter,” he says. “At a time when a lot of that music was male-dominated, she wrote a lot of songs with a woman’s perspective about Appalachian culture and experience and a lot of songs about social justice. The stuff she wrote about was always of interest to me.”
Chestnut Mountain undoubtedly speaks to the Appalachian experience. Miller drew on his deep family roots in North Carolina for inspiration. “My grandfather was born on this mountain in Wilkes County in a cabin in 1921,” Miller says. Miller’s grandfather, Jim Shumate, was an accomplished bluegrass fiddler who had a heavy influence on Miller’s musical development.
Miller remembers going up to the Wilkes County property as a child, traveling along rutted dirt forest roads to the remote, wooded acreage where he and his family would spend time. In the early 2000s, when Shumate was still alive, a developer bought up most of the mountain and turned it into a gated community. “He kind of bullied my grandparents into trying to get them to sell their land, but my grandparents didn’t sell it,” Miller says. “It was the only thing of value they owned and they wanted to pass it on.”
A tale as old as time in this mountain region, where development is constantly encroaching on rural family properties. “I’d always wanted to write a song about that, but I was always afraid I wouldn’t rise to the occasion,” Miller says. “One day it popped out. It was simple and it turned out just as it needed to be. I was proud of it.”
Cathy Fink, one of the judges for the Hazel Dickens Songwriting Contest along with Phil Rosenthal and Celia Woodsmith, says Miller’s pride was warranted. “John nailed it,” she says. “Chestnut Mountain is a well-crafted song filled with imagery, memories, longing and storytelling. Packing that into a few short verses is hard to do.” She adds that Chestnut Mountain evokes the themes that were important to the contest’s namesake, like “how things used to be, what’s wrong about now and how we feel about it. The sadness of old homes and voices no longer there, and the devastation that happens when the past is bulldozed over for the financial gain of people who don’t care about what was there.”
For more information, visit DCBU.org and ZoeandCloyd.com.
