How’s this for a love song?
Aristotle Jones, the Morgantown musician, songwriter and performer who regularly sings the praises of the Osage coal camp, smiled when he heard about how its residents delivered that day.
When Osage’s U.S. Post Office building was permanently shuttered a few years back, many of those residents turned out.
And, on this particular sunny afternoon in the middle of the week, they were armed.
With screwdrivers.
The toolbox implement was so they could remove the small, windowed latches embossed with the red and gold numbers to their mailboxes.
Said latches, they had to open every day, in order to get to the mail that was their portal to life in Appalachia and the world.
Utility bills.
Letters from sons in the military just out of basic training.
A birthday card from the sister who married and moved away, but never forgot where she was from.
That regular copy of JET, when the publication was still a newspaper and not a magazine.
Catalogues, Christmas cards and the one fat envelope telling you that you may have already won the big sweepstakes prize.
Two-liter bottles of Coke and Pepsi were twisted open that afternoon.
Somebody’s mom made a platter of pepperoni rolls, and everybody descended upon the building.
That’s where they had all lingered to talk, for all those years anyway, as they picked up their mail.
Said latches, they were preserving as keepsakes.
A day that could have been a little sad, wasn’t.
As it turned out, the Osage Post Office had already been stamped with some pop culture whimsy, anyway.
Marvel merchandising. And a sense of humor.
A wag on a work crew that put a new roof on the place a couple of years prior, had tied a plush Spider-man figure to the front over the entrance.
People liked it and laughed at the spectacle of Spidey perched there, so it stayed.
That’s the thing about Osage, Jones said: People (plus one costumed superhero, in this case), stay.
Which is why he wrote the song that is his latest single.
It’s a sonic tribute to the people of Osage who stayed — and one proud son, in particular, who came back.
Chords of truth
“The Streets of Osage,” is the tune that is also part of the performer’s latest album, “Mountain Doo-Wop & The Streets of Osage,” which was released earlier this year.
Visit Jones’ YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/user/aristotlejonesmusic to hear the song and to watch the music video.
Videographer William Walker shot it on a misty, mountain morning in the coal camp, nestled in a cut-out valley just outside Morgantown in the Scott’s Run area along W.Va. 7.
The video is interspersed with scenes from the Scott’s Run community fair, which was held in Osage in September.
You’ll see someone you likely know — even if you don’t hail from the coal camp.
First, Aristotle, walking into the frame, with his acoustic guitar:
“… Down at the end of the road in Osage
There is a little shoe repair shop
And if you can find time to stop in
Al Anderson will find time to talk …”
As in, Al Anderson, the shoe cobbler and region’s celebrated rock ‘n’ roll and R&B singer.
The performer who sang on stages from Hollywood, Fla., to Hollywood, Calif., and is still tearing it up with local gigs at the age of 86.
The man who spent 20 years or so in Washington, D.C. — and who was actually there, on the mall and down from the Lincoln Memorial, listening when Martin Luther King Jr. told America about his Dream.
A son of Osage who came back home in the 1970s, so he could care for his ailing father.
Bud Anderson, a coal miner, also ran a shoe repair shop — which Al took over.
It’s still in operation.
“I can still hit those high notes,” said Mr. Anderson’s son, who is known here just as much for his community activism, as he is his singing.
Jones’ family is of Osage, too. He still has family there.
“Hey, if you’re gonna sing about Osage,” Jones said, “you have to sing about Al. No way around it. He is Osage.”
At the peak of the coal years, Osage, and Scott’s Run, served as Mon County’s Melting Pot.
Everyone came here.
They were looking to dig out their purchase of the American dream, from the coal seams that ran, lattice-like, underground.
Blacks, up from Alabama.
Italians, over from Calabria.
Russians on this hill, Greeks on that hill, and more — “19 nationalities in all,” as Anderson likes to say.
It wasn’t easy, the old singer observes.
There were inherent dangers of coal mining, especially in 1920s when Osage was really coming along.
And there was the grim, on-the-job, Jazz Age analogy fronted by the labor historians and safety experts related to the state’s chief industry — during those years when mining disasters occurred every few months.
Back then, those watchers said, if you had a choice of spending an afternoon on a World War I battlefield, or an afternoon in a typical West Virginia coal mine, said choice would have actually been easy.
That’s because it would have been statistically safer, taking your chances up top.
Even with the bullets, bombs and mustard gas.
It was that dangerous.
Socially, it wasn’t much easier, Anderson said.
Racism could sting.
So could the fiscal tyranny of the company store.
But in Osage, there was a strong pulse of something else.
Spirit.
And shared purpose.
Aristotle time-travels
“We all got along,” Anderson will marvel, in his hepcat, jukebox rasp.
“And those of us who are still here continue to get along.”
The video of the song, meanwhile, gets along with archival, sepia-toned photos of Osage from those days, blended in with the present-day camp.
There are scenes from the Scott’s Run Street Fair, which is a fall staple in Osage.
The video shoot coincided with the homecoming event on purpose.
Picnic food on paper plates and everybody’s grandkids and great-grandkids, playing together and having fun.
Al, with a microphone on a makeshift bandstand.
Jones and Walker wanted it all to spool out on its own accord, just like life does.
Anderson, maybe the camp’s most well-known resident and one of its oldest, too, shines in every scene, as Jones sings and picks his guitar:
“… ‘Cause you can learn the most
By listening to those
Who have made the most out of time …”
“Osage is what happens,” Jones said, “when you let people, be people.”
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