Book of Love: The lonesome housewife country sound of Ella Hanshaw
By WTJU
With her granddaughter’s help, singer Ella Hanshaw’s “lonesome housewife country” lives on.
By Don Harrison (host of WTJU Rock’s Radio Wowsville, Sundays, 11 p.m. – 1 a.m.)
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. Kelly Kerney is pictured above with husband Ethan Bullard at their Church Hill home, holding the new compilation. Picture by Scott Elmquist.
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.”
Ella Hanshaw playing guitar in her kitchen in Brunswick, Ohio. 1961. All vintage family photos courtesy of Kelly Kerney.
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.
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Thank you to Don Harrison and Richmond’s Style Weekly magazine for the permission to re-post.
