Fiddler Wilson Douglas (October 22, 1922 - March 11, 1999) was one of West Virginia’s most revered old-time musicians. In a posthumous assessment of Douglas’s life, his son James Wilson Douglas noted that his father “was a man of contradictions, a purveyor of accidental and unintended humor, an over-user of trite expressions, a self-appointed perpetrator of homilies, and a human time capsule of Civil War-era fiddle tunes.”

Wilson Douglas was born at Hartland in Clay County to Shirley and Goldie Morris Douglas. He grew up on the family farm.

Music was all around the young Wilson Douglas. He was related to another celebrated central West Virginia traditional music family, the Morrises. His father played banjo, and mother sang ballads. His first musical inspiration was his maternal grandmother, Rosie Ross Morris, a “fine square dance fiddler,” according to Douglas. As a boy, he would accompany her on guitar in the “Carter Family style” of strumming. He recalled that her fiddle was “patched with solder, carpet tacks, and various other things.”

She taught him to play the traditional tune “Soldier’s Joy,” which he practiced repeatedly until he “got the sound,” as he called it. His real passion for fiddling began around 1939, when he first heard Ed Haley, a fabled blind fiddler originally from Logan County. Haley advised Douglas to give up the guitar and focus on fiddling. Douglas saved up money from working on a farm and bought a $9.95 fiddle from Sears, Roebuck ($10.40, counting postage, and the bow cost extra). He began apprenticing with another notable local musician, French Carpenter.

During World War II, Douglas was a machine gunner in the Army’s 44^th Battalion, 217^th Field Artillery and took part in the Normandy Invasion and Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he returned to Clay County and married Mary Lou Brannon on November 24, 1946. They settled in Ivydale and raised sons James (Jim) and Wayne. He was later married to Delma Cruickshanks.

After working construction six days a week, he would fiddle each night until the early hours of the morning. In the 1950s, the family moved for a few years to Ohio, where Douglas worked in a Ford Motor plant. He despised factory work, however, and moved back to Clay County in 1958. On his return, he went into the water-drilling business with his father, and resumed playing with Carpenter, the fiddler who influenced him the most.

For six-plus years, Douglas learned hundreds of traditional tunes from Carpenter, who knew his time was limited due to a bad heart condition and wanted Douglas to carry on the Clay County fiddle tradition. Carpenter died in 1965 at age 59. For the rest of Douglas’s life, he praised Carpenter’s fiddling and regretted that he “had a couple of tunes I never got to learn.” While he captured the feeling of Carpenter’s fiddling, Douglas would carve out a style all of his own.

Douglas’s intricate style often incorporated what traditional musicians call “crooked” or “bent” time signatures, meaning that he occasionally dropped a beat over the course of 12 or 16 bars of music. His bowing was distinct from other fiddlers but difficult to describe. He often made up ambiguous words, some borrowed from Carpenter, to describe his bowing techniques: “stabs” (shuffles), “jabs,” “wobbles” (short up-and-down strokes), “rocks,” “double dips,” and the “chalk note,” defined by Douglas to interviewer Paul Gartner as “the hand is quicker than the eye.”

Douglas became a regular at old-time music festivals during the folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a fixture at the state Folk Festival, Mountain State Art & Craft Fair, Stonewall Jackson Jubilee, and Vandalia Gathering, among others. He also taught workshops at the Augusta Heritage Center and released six recordings; his first was The Right Hand Fork of Rush’s Creek (1975), one of the first old-time albums Rounder Records ever produced.

In the process, he garnered a legion of devotees by sharing his knowledge with younger generations just as French Carpenter had done with him. For his effort in preserving traditional music, Douglas was honored in 1992 with the Vandalia Award, West Virginia’s highest folklife recognition.

Prolific banjo player Kim Johnson performed and recorded with Douglas from 1979 until his death 20 years later. In 2015, she and her band, The Modock Rounders, recorded an entire CD based on Douglas’s repertoire, Old Tunes & New Blood: The Legacy of Wilson Douglas.

Douglas described his approach to musicianship in a 1977 interview for Goldenseal magazine:

“Each one is expressing his past, his present, what he should have been, and what he hopes to be. And he’s expressing all of his sorrows, all of his happiness. If you study him close you can almost read his life. And then when they’re all playing good, clean, honest music—banjo-picking, guitar-playing, fiddling, what have you—I think you’re just as close to heaven on this earth as you’ll ever be. If you’ve got the music in you.”