Looking for something to do in southern West Virginia this coming week? Here are some ideas:
January 16: Wine and Dine Night in the Ville
Time to wine and dine the night away in the Ville! Come enjoy a relaxing Sunday evening at The Gaines Estate featuring a delicious four-course meal catered by Dobra Zupas and libations to warm your bones.
Each guest will receive a four-course meal and be able to select one appetizer, entree, and dessert from our menu provided by Dobra Zupas. The entree price includes the entire four courses.
To make reservations, please call The Gaines Estate at 304-382-7509 or 304-237-2193.
January 19: Chill in the Ville
Join The Gaines Estate in Fayetteville at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, January 19, for Chille in the Ville. The event will feature a night filled with fun, laughter, live music and delicious drinks.
The house bar will be open to the public.
January 20: Carnegie Hall Presents “The Lady and the Empress”
Doris Fields, also known as Lady D, brings her one-woman show “The Lady and the Empress” to Carnegie Hall Thursday, January 20, 2022, at 7 p.m. The special event is in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day will take place in the intimate setting Old Stone Room at Carnegie Hall.
The Lady and the Empress is based on the life and music of blues legend, Bessie Smith. Smith was born in the late 1800s in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She grew up in poverty and obscurity and may have made her first public appearance at the age of eight or nine at the Ivory Theatre in her hometown. About 1913 she toured in a show with Ma Rainey, one of the first of the great blues singers, from whom she received some training. For several years Smith traveled through the South singing in tent shows and bars and theatres in small towns and in such cities as Birmingham, Memphis, and Atlanta. After 1920 she made her home in Philadelphia and it was there that she was first heard by Clarence Williams, a representative of Columbia Records.
In February 1923 Smith made her first recordings, including the classic “Down Hearted Blues,” which became an enormous success, selling more than two million copies. She made 160 recordings in all, in many of which she was accompanied by some of the great jazz musicians of the time, including Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong. Her most notable songs included “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do,” “Careless Love Blues,” “Empty Bed Blues,” “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” and “Gimme a Pigfoot.”
Smith’s subject matter was the classic material of the blues: poverty and oppression, love—betrayed or unrequited—and stoic acceptance of defeat at the hands of a cruel and indifferent world. She was known for her rich contralto voice and her breathtaking emotional intensity. The great tragedy of her career was that she outlived the topicality of her idiom. In the late 1920s, her record sales and her fame diminished with the Great Depression and as social forces changed the face of popular music and bowdlerized the earthy realism of the sentiments she expressed in her music. Her gradually increasing alcoholism caused management to become wary of engaging her, but there is no evidence that her actual singing ability ever declined.
Known in her lifetime as the “Empress of the Blues,” Smith was a bold, supremely confident artist who often disdained the use of a microphone and whose art expressed the frustrations and hopes of a whole generation of Black Americans. She appeared in a short motion picture, St. Louis Blues (1929) since 2006 preserved in the National Film Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress. The film, based on the lyrics of the song, which Smith sings, is the only known footage of the singer and shows the emotional power of her performance. She died on September 26, 1937, in Clarksdale, Mississippi from injuries sustained in a road accident. It was said that, had she been white, she would have received medical treatment that would have saved her life, and Edward Albee made this the subject of his play The Death of Bessie Smith (1960). She was inducted into both the Blues Hall of Fame (1980), in its inaugural class, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1989).
The Lady and the Empress are written and performed by Doris Fields. Fields was born in the coalfields of Cabin Creek, West Virginia. She is known as West Virginia’s First Lady of Soul and has released six CDs, including her newest and most recently released, “Disturbing My Peace.” Her original song, “Go Higher” was the winner of the national competition for the best Obama Inaugural Song in 2008. As a result, she and her band MISSION performed at the Obama for Change Inaugural Ball in Washington, DC in January 2009. She also has written a spin-off to The Lady and the Empress called Bessie’s Blues, an abbreviated version of the original show.
Tickets are $10 and may be purchased by visiting www.carnegiehallwv.org, calling the Carnegie Hall Box Office at 304.645.7917, or stopping by at 611 Church Street, Lewisburg, West Virginia. Carnegie Hall Box Office is open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. until 4 p.m.
Carnegie Hall WV is a nonprofit organization supported by individual contributions, grants, and fundraising efforts such as TOOT and The Carnegie Hall Gala. The Hall is located at 611 Church Street, Lewisburg, WV. For more information, please call 304.645.7917 or visit www.carnegiehallwv.org.
January 21: Trivia Night at Lost Paddle
Every Friday, ACE Adventure Resort’s Lost Paddle will host a Trivia Night made complete with pizza, a full bar and good times.
Trivia kicks off at 7 p.m. and will highlight a different theme each week. Weekly winners will get to choose from the prize table and be entered into the yearly grand prize. Drawn at the end of April, the grand prize includes two 2022 waterpark season passes, two Mountain Music Festival tickets, a $500 gift certificate to ACE Adventure Gear, and $500 cash!
You can’t win if you don’t play, so come out, play trivia, eat pizza and win Fridays this winter.
Tickets are $10 per person. Call 800-787-3982.
January 21: Carnegie Hall presents Crys Matthews
Carnegie Hall presents Crys Matthews on Friday, January 21, 2022, at 7:30 p.m. in the newly renovated Hamilton Auditorium. Tickets are $20.
Already being hailed as “the next Woody Guthrie,” DC resident Crys Matthews is among the brightest stars of the new generation of social justice music-makers. A powerful lyricist whose songs of compassionate dissent reflect her lived experience as what she lightheartedly calls “the poster-child for intersectionality,” Justin Hiltner of Bluegrass Situation called Matthews’s gift “a reminder of what beauty can occur when we bridge those divides.” She is made for these times and, with the release of her new, hope-fueled, love-filled social justice album Changemakers, Matthews hopes to take her place alongside some of her heroes in the world of social-justice music like Sweet Honey in the Rock and Holly Near. Of Matthews, ASCAP VP & Creative Director Eric Philbrook says, “By wrapping honest emotions around her socially conscious messages and dynamically delivering them with a warm heart and a strong voice, she lifts our spirits just when we need it most in these troubled times.
January 22: 90’s Night Dance Party with DJ Iron Ring
Ready for a 90’s flashback? Bring your best dance moves and dig into your 90’s wardrobe to party with us at The Lost Paddle.
DJ Iron Ring is back on our stage and ready to bring the energy and spin your favorite tunes from the decade. Cash prizes for the best dressed that night and cabin rentals are available too. Be there or be square!
Tickets are $5 in advance and $10 the day of the show.