What are the sounds of Appalachian music? Mandolin. Fiddle. Banjo. Yes. How about electric guitar? Harmonica? Horns? They are when your understanding of Appalachian music extends to the early roots of rock and roll, and the sound culture West Virginian Aristotle Jones likes to call "Appalachian Soul."
"A lot of folks think about country and folk and bluegrass as the traditional music of Appalachia, but because my family's roots were from Alabama, that Great Migration, the music came along with it, that Southern soul, the blues and jazz," Jones said. "As [African Americans] were traveling from the rural areas [of the South] to the more urban areas [in the North and Midwest] they made pit stops in West Virginia. The river boats from the Mississippi and the Ohio River, they would make pit stops in West Virginia and trade that information, the musical information and style from those musicians traveling from the Delta and from the Deep South to their relatives living in the mountains."
Appalachian Soul: A cultural exchange.
Aristotle Jones (b. 1979) learned Appalachian Soul music porch-pickin' with his grandfather Robert Jones. The elder Jones didn't play Bill Monroe or Carter Family Appalachian music. He played Black Appalachian music informed by the South, by gospel, by Delta blues.
Robert Jones played the segregated coal camps and "Chit'lin Circuit" joints around his home in Osage, West Virginia in the mid-20th century. Aristotle Jones lives there now. He spent summers growing up in the unincorporated community 10 miles from the Pennsylvania border. He lived there for three years with his grandfather before he passed away in 2019.
It was during that time that Aristotle Jones started hearing the stories and learning the history that shaped the Appalachian soul tradition.
"Appalachian Soul music is folk music that blends Doo Wop, gospel, R&B, a little bit of soul, and then because of the proximity in the way the hollers are set up and the hills, everybody's on top of each other, you also heard some of that bluegrass, country, Celtic and Scots music, British Isles music, Spanish music," he said. "It's an amalgam of different styles, but it's rooted in primitive rock and roll, folk, people who would sing sitting on the porch on a Saturday afternoon."
Jones now hopes to teach this rich history to a wider audience with the support of the $50,000 prize he has been awarded in winning a 2026 United States Artists Fellowship. USA Fellows are selected based on their groundbreaking artistic visions and unique perspectives. Jones, a Black Appalachian storyteller and the self-proclaimed "Appalachian Soul Man," received his fellowship in the "traditional arts" category.
"If you look at the stories of Black Appalachians, some of these stories are better than Marvel movies; they're heroes," Jones said. "At the same time as the Harlem Renaissance was going on in New York, you had 100,000 Black people in Welch, West Virginia, coal mining. You had Carter G. Woodson writing The Mis-Education of the Negro. I want to create a portal for folks to experience that excellence that came out of the Appalachian region. I want you to see the full diversity of the Appalachian region, what our value is in American culture."
Another American Story of Erasure
Most people think that Appalachian music is exclusively white, a culture that descended from Scottish and Irish immigrants. This is because many don't know that there was a large population of Black coal miners in the region. Robert Jones was one of them.
Popular depictions of Appalachian coal miners typically fail to show any Black faces after the soot washes off. As is the American way, contributions to the nation undertaken by minorities are largely erased. Such was the case with Appalachia's Black coal miners, including those who supplied the furnaces in Pittsburgh that produced the iron which built a nation.
"My ancestors were plucking rocks out of the earth so that we could build New York City and the folks within our communities don't get any representation," Jones said.
Like those of the Black coal miners, the contributions Black Appalachians made to Appalachian music have also been omitted from the region's history. What Jones has learned about Appalachian Soul, he's learned firsthand.
"I got uploaded on this history from the horse's mouth. [My grandfather] was telling me about the gospel quartets and about the Swan Silver Tones and about how AM radio connected him to the Black cultural network going through the mountains," Jones said.
Forgotten Black musicians across Appalachia formed the bedrock of American music in the 20th century
The term "bluegrass" originates with Bill Monroe and his touring band, "The Blue Grass Boys," which formed in Kentucky, the Bluegrass State.
"Bill Monroe was influenced by playing with a wandering Black fiddle player who was playing a faster, different style," Jones explained. "Johnny Johnson, who played with Chuck Berry, the original 'Johnny B Good,' he was from 10 miles away from Osage, Fairmont, West Virginia."
Jones' interest in the Appalachian Soul tradition, along with his curiosity about the region, has turned him into something of an anthropologist, uncovering details that cast Appalachia, Appalachian music, and the story of America in a different light. Like the stories he told about Black life in Appalachia during the Great Depression from his grandfather.
"The churches would get together, and everybody was kind of raising each other. They were already poor. They were already living hand to mouth, so [the Great Depression] wasn't a big change," Jones explained. "A lot of [white] people were grabbing onto how they were living. I had this masterclass on this time frame from this person telling me these stories."
His counternarrative presents the Great Depression as another whitewashed epoch from American history. In all the pictures of poverty from the Depression era you've seen, do you recall seeing a Black face among them? Doubtful. Photographers pictured poor Black folks as well as poor whites, but it was the images of poor whites that pushed politicians in Washington into action.
"You got more Granny Clampetts than you did Booker T. Washington, or Carter G. Woodson, or Roberta Flack, or Johnny Johnson," Jones explained, dropping a "Beverly Hillbillies" reference. "The general population was more interested in hearing about the white depression in Appalachia versus the Black excellence that was coming out of Appalachia."
After his grandfather passed away, Jones sought out other Osage residents to corroborate the stories. He began sharing the stories on stage during concerts, and then, a funny thing happened.
"I got a chance to tour these old coal towns that no longer have functioning mines and would run into the old guy, whether he was white, Black, Native American, German, however he identified. Because I would tell stories on stage, they would share their stories with me, and introduce me to the local historian," Jones said. "Then I would get actual artifacts, I would be able to touch them and hold them."
Same as with the Great Depression, and American history more broadly, the story of Appalachian music has been whitewashed, its "official" narrative narrowed to include only bluegrass, country, and folk—white music genres played by white musicians. These "Americana" genres, in their perceived whiteness, endlessly valorized and studied, written about, featured in documentaries, and promoted by state tourism offices. Rightly so. But not to the exclusion of Black Appalachian music.
That exclusion nearly prevented Jones from becoming the "Appalachian Soul Man."
Before the "Appalachian Soul Man"
As hard as it is to believe, despite all his time spent in West Virginia and his family ties to the state, the young Aristotle Jones wasn't feeling it. As an African American kid coming of age in the 1980s and 90s, he couldn't connect to Appalachia.
"I grew up in this mindset where I didn't really have a place within Appalachia, didn't have heroes, didn't have teachers," Jones remembered. "There were community members, but we hadn't quite been able to have a platform to express exactly what our version of Appalachia is."
Filling that gap were outside perspectives on what it meant to be African American.
"We had more things on TV that told us to be like the hip hop guys in New York or L.A., that was kind of your purity test, whether or not you were 'Black enough,'" he said.
In rural West Virginia, Jones couldn't identify with Chuck D or Ice Cube. He had yet to be educated about Black Appalachia, and what he was told about the African American experience in America, an ostensibly urban experience, he couldn't relate to.
He felt like a man without a country.
A lightbulb went off while attending Berea College, Kentucky's first integrated college. He told a professor there that he didn't feel Appalachian.
"How do you feel like you're not Appalachian when the whole state of West Virginia is the only state encompassed by the Appalachian mountain range," Jones remembered his professor, Andrew Baskin, the then-chairperson of the school's Department of African and African American Studies, asking him.
Accepting his disconnect from home as a challenge, Jones dug into the subject, work that would eventually result in his winning the National Association of Black Storytellers' Black Appalachian Storyteller Fellowship.
"I realized the reason I hadn't been connected to Appalachia the whole time is because the narrative had not been presented of Appalachia as a place I saw myself in," Jones said.
Following the advice of Toni Morrison, who famously said, "If there's a book you want to read that you can't find, then write it yourself," Jones began writing the book of Black excellence and Black music in 20th-century Black Appalachia himself. His first three albums address that history.
As the old saying goes, when the student is ready, the master will appear. Enter Robert Jones.
"I didn't know anybody at that point that I would have considered more Appalachian than my grandfather," Jones said. "We got pigs and cows and chickens and horses. We were canning food. We were hemming garments. He rode around on his tractor. He wore a straw hat. We had a big garden where we ate farm fresh food."
Robert Jones told Aristotle endless stories as the pair picked guitars on the porch. Only after the work was done, though. Robert Jones always put work first, even as a young man who held a day job in the coal mine and an evening job farming.
"It's a fundamental aspect of Appalachian culture, at a certain point, you got to get up and do the work," Jones said. "You can sit here and shoot the breeze all the time—there's shirkers and there's workers, shirkers talk about it and workers go out and make things happen."
With the blessing of his grandfather, Aristotle Jones started making things happen.
Becoming the "Appalachian Soul Man"
Robert Jones saw Aristotle Jones as the "Appalachian Soul Man" even before Aristotle saw it in himself. Grandfather saw his grandson walking a path he wanted for himself at one time, that of a touring musician. Robert stayed in Osage and raised a family instead.
After Robert had a stroke late in life, he suffered from health complications, rendering him an amputee, and causing him to drift in and out of consciousness. Despite this condition, Aristotle Jones remembers a remarkable conversation he had with his ailing grandfather.
"One day he looked at me very lucid and he goes, 'Aristotle, you know what you're doing. You know what you're doing. Don't wait for anybody else. Go be yourself because you know what you're doing and don't explain it to anybody,'" Jones remembered. "He pushed me out of the nest."
Aristotle Jones became the "Appalachian Soul Man."
"I realized I was playing Appalachian Soul music and it was important for me to carry on the mantle as an Appalachian Soul Man so that people would understand that there were soul men in Appalachia," Jones said.
Men like Robert Jones.
"I'm a proud Appalachian who gets to speak my family's contributions to Appalachia, which then gives me a place," he added.
Jones' next album, due out mid-2026, looks to the future of Appalachia, not to its past. The lead single is a bluesy number titled "Appalachian Soul." One lyric goes: "If you like what I'm selling, but you're still not sold, I can throw in a little bit of country living and a lot of Appalachian Soul."
"This is what Appalachia is about," Jones explained. "It's beautiful."