The West Virginia Music Hall of Fame is a strikingly grassroots operation, staffed and governed by volunteers, with a Music Career Counseling Program for the next generation. Nominations come from the public, though that first 2007 class was selected by the board. The criteria are simple: cultural impact on state and national levels, and either West Virginia residency or birth. Six of the ten living inductees in the first class showed up in person to accept the honor. Subsequent classes have been smaller. The biennial ceremonies happen at the Culture Center Theater in Charleston and air on West Virginia Public Broadcasting, putting state musicians in living rooms where their granddaughters and grandsons can watch them sing.

What the inductee roster makes clear is that West Virginia has been a musical exporter for over a century, and not in just one direction. Jazz tenor sax player Chu Berry was born in Wheeling in 1908. George Crumb composed avant-garde modern classical music from his hometown of Charleston. Hazel Dickens turned coal-country grief into bluegrass that influenced everyone from Emmylou Harris to the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. Bill Withers wrote Ain't No Sunshine and Lean on Me. Phyllis Curtin sang opera at the Metropolitan. Maceo Pinkard co-wrote Sweet Georgia Brown with Ben Bernie and Ken Casey. Frank Hutchison recorded country blues in 1926. Even Frankie Yankovic, America's Polka King, is honored here. Few state halls of fame can claim such genre range.

Some of the most consequential West Virginia musicians are the ones who shaped sounds that other people became famous for. Johnnie Johnson played piano for Chuck Berry for two decades, and Keith Richards brought him out of retirement in 1986 because he believed Berry's rock and roll catalog could not be performed without him. Billy Cox played bass for Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. Walter Jack Rollins co-wrote Here Comes Peter Cottontail and Frosty the Snowman, holiday songs that play in shopping malls every winter without most listeners knowing where they came from. The hall surfaces these hidden hands - songwriters, sidemen, arrangers - alongside the marquee names.

Because the hall does not yet have a permanent building, it travels. The Hall of Fame works with the West Virginia Department of Education on a music history curriculum for elementary schools, and the traveling museum makes the rounds of schools, libraries, and community centers across the state. The 2020 pandemic induction was taped in Nashville, Los Angeles, and Bakersfield and posted online. A hall without walls that still puts West Virginia kids face to face with the recordings their great-grandparents made, the ones the rest of the country hummed without quite knowing the source. The state may have sent musicians out for a hundred years. The hall is what brings their stories home.