“West Virginia My Home” is a Hazel Dickens song, published by Happy Valley Music. Dickens was born in Montcalm, in Mercer County, West Virginia, in 1925, the eighth of eleven children in a coal-mining family; she followed an older sister to Baltimore and took factory work there, and it was in the Baltimore–Washington music scene that she met Mike Seeger and later Alice Gerrard.
Her first recording of the song was with Gerrard, for the 1976 Rounder LP Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. It was cut at the House of Music in West Orange, New Jersey, with Dickens singing lead, Gerrard singing harmony, Mike Seeger on guitar, Kenny Kosek on fiddle and Stacy Phillips on dobro. Rounder put the same track on a 1976 single, as the B-side of Dickens’s “They’ll Never Keep Us Down.” Hazel and Alice stopped working as a duo that year, and Dickens recorded the song again for her 1980 Rounder album Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People, this time at Bias studio in Springfield, Virginia, with John Baker on guitar and harmony, Ron Thomason on mandolin, Carl Nelson on fiddle, Roger Williams on dobro and Carolyn Kellock on bass.
The singer left West Virginia years ago, and city life has nearly won. Why the leaving seemed so attractive is now hard to recall, but where home was is not; the price of going has been paid, and the one wish left is to die among friends who will remember. In the chorus home is so clear in the mind that the honeysuckle can almost be smelled, and late at night the singer slips away to the hills, quick as a bird.
Mountain Grass recorded it on their 1978 Revonah album, also titled West Virginia My Home, and Ginny Hawker and Kay Justice included it on Come All You Tenderhearted (June Appal, 1993). Bobby Osborne recorded it in Nashville in 2005 for his Rounder album Try a Little Kindness, with Rhonda Vincent among the singers, and Kathy Mattea put it on Calling Me Home (Sugar Hill, 2012).
