Overall Comments

“West Virginia Mountain Music” is a video by Bates and Jody Littlehales featuring some of the most beautiful footage and still shots of the flora, fauna, landscapes and wildlife of Pendleton and Pocahontas Counties, set to the music of Dwight Diller. Several years in the making, it represents the best photographic and editing work of Bates and Jody, who produced Diller’s instructional DVDs.

Jody was an art director for the book division at National Geographic, and lent her skill as an editor to this series of video collaborations. Bates’ long professional experience as a photographer for National Geographic has been distilled in a number of photographic studies published over the last ten years since their retirements; those books are worth looking at themselves for the artistry and erudition they represent.

I cannot offer a dispassionate review, since I am linked to both the Littlehales and to Diller in a series of entangling alliances that amount to some of the most treasured friendships to emerge from my brief and undistinguished association with West Virginia banjo music over the last ten or more years.
So, my enthusiasm for this video, which I have viewed many, many times since Elaine Diller sent me one from her great store, MorningStar Folk Music, in Hillsborough, West Virginia, makes me an extremely biased supporter of the art of Bates, Jody, and Dwight.

They have together produced a video that overwhelms the senses – front loading the brain with landscapes and life forms of every size and shape that inhabit the mountains, water features, and forest lands of West Virginia while drenching the mind with Dwight’s banjo and fiddle from the great body of recorded music that represents his portfolio.

In my own view, Bates photos and Dwight’s music come together in this video in a way that helps to translate these diverse connections that exist in my mind between West Virginia banjo tunes and fiddle music and my own panoramic memories. His video turns my memories into scenes anchored to West Virginia realities, thus connecting my city boy way of making sense of this music, or searching for visual signals of musical meaning, with firm, enduring images of West Virginia.

I’m unlikely to encounter the West Virginia that Bates and Jody have documented in this film, and in the books Bates has turned out in the course of a great photographic career, and I may not understand the recollections that Dwight’s music signals to him, the images and realities that he associates with this music, and attempts to communicate to a devoted audience.

And that may be the reason I have watched this film over and over, and intend to watch it again.

Overall Rating

9