CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The West Virginia Music Hall of Fame has announced its class of 2023 inductees. The field features two deceased acts and three living.
The inductees include the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, a pioneering bluegrass group which drew its members mostly from Mingo and Mercer Counties. They played together with various interchanging players from 1938 to 1966. They were very influential in shaping the genre and often on the leading edge of mountain style music.
A name familiar to those in Charleston is Winston Walls who was considered “King of the B-3”
“He was one of the greatest Hammond B-3 players in the world really,” said Hall of Fame Director Michael Lipton.
Walls largely played backup for numerous artists over the year, but in 1993 he produced one solo recording called “Boss of the B-3.” Winston started out studying drums with the great Charleston musician Frank Thompson – who would later play with Winston for many years. Winston got his first break when famed Hammond organist Bill Doggett’s drummer was a no-show for a performance in the late 1950’s at Charleston’s Municipal Auditorium. Later, learning from Doggett, he eventually made the switch to organ. For four decades, Walls had his own group and played regionally and was revered by musicians and fans alike.
Two of this year’s inductees are Fuzzy Haskins of Elkhorn, W.Va. in McDowell County and Calvin Simons. of Beckley.
“They’re what I like to call West Virginia’s funk brothers. They were co-founders of the ground breaking funk band Parliament Funk-a-delic,” said Lipton.
After their families moved to New Jersey in the mid-’50s, they joined The Parliaments, a doo wop barbershop quintet led by George Clinton. Clinton, Simon and Grady Thomas were barbers; Haskins and Ray Davis were patrons. The group relocated to Detroit in the mid-‘60s where it c
harted its first hit, “(I Wanna) Testify” in 1967. Haskins, Simon and Thomas stayed with “the Mothership” for two decades as it morphed into the deep soul, outrageous funk and acid-rock of Parliament-Funkadelic, and appeared on seminal LPs like “Chocolate City” and “Mothership Connection.” Haskins, Simon and Thomas left the band in 1978 and, in 1981, released “Connections & Disconnections” under the name Funkadelic. They rejoined “the Mothership” a little more than a decade later as part of the P-Funk Allstars. In 1998, Haskins, Simon and Thomas, along with Davis, founded Original P. Haskins went on to release solo projects while Simon, after battling cancer, turned his focus to gospel music. The two were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 along with the other 15 members of Parliament-Funkadelic. In 2019, they were given Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Classic pianist Barbara Nittsman is included in the 2022 Hall of Fame Class. Nittsman was born in Philadelphia, but calls herself a “…West Virginian by choice.” She’s lived in Lewisburg for the past 30 ears and has played all over the world.
Hailed as “one of the last pianists in the grand Romantic tradition of Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and Rubinstein,” her recordings include a number of
“definitive” works as well as releases on her own Three Oranges Recordings label. Nissman has performed with some of the world’s leading orchestras including the London, Royal, Rotterdam, Munich and New York philharmonics as well as the Chicago, Pittsburgh and St. Louis symphonies. In addition to performing and recording, contributing to books and music publications, presenting master classes at universities in the U.S. and Europe, her music lecture series, “Barbara & Friends,” appeared on the BBC network and has been adapted for children in collaboration with the Greenbrier Valley Theatre. She performed with Don Henley and Billy Joel at a fundraiser at Lincoln Center as well as performing at the Kennedy Center’s 25th Anniversary Gala Concert. Since 2002, she has been involved with the Robert James Frascino AIDS Foundation, raising more than $2 million dollars for AIDS service organizations worldwide. She holds the Governor’s Distinguished Service to the Arts Award from the State of West Virginia along with the Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award.
The “Bluegrass Doctor” Buddy Griffin of Richwood rounds out the class of 2022.
“He’s one of West Virginia’s best known and most respected country music musicians,” Lipton said.
A multi-instrumentalist, Griffin has toured and recorded with legendary acts including Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys, the Osborne Brothers, Mother Maybelle Carter, Johnny Russell, the Goins Brothers, and Mack Samples and the Samples Brothers. Growing up in a musical family, his parents taught him all the instruments as well as the importance of using humor to entertain an audience. Griffin graduated in 1971 from Glenville State College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in education, and became the staff banjo and fiddle player for WWVA’s Jamboree USA in Wheeling. Over the years, he has played on the Grand Ole Opry more than 200 times and has appeared on more than 150 recordings. In 2002, working with the Fine Arts Department at Glenville State College, Griffin introduced the first-ever four-year college degree program in bluegrass music and ran the program for several years. In 2011, he received the Vandalia Award from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, and in 2019, he was honored with an honorary doctorate from the school.