Dick Justice Gravesite

Henry Franklin "Dick" Justice is buried in the small, overgrown Yolyn Cemetery on Rum Creek. Dick, a coal miner, is known to blues and folk enthusiasts around the world as one of the best singers and guitar players to come from West Virginia. In 1929, Dick made his way to the Brunswick Recording studios in Chicago, IL, where he recorded several songs, including a wonderful version of Henry Lee--a cut that later became the first track of Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music on the Smithsonian Folkways label.

The music of Dick Justice is known to us because in Chicago on 20 and 21 May 1929 he recorded eight songs for Brunswick Records. Of these six were released: Old Black Dog, Little Lulie, Brown Skin Blues, Cocaine, Henry Lee, and One Cold December Day. With Kanawha County fiddler Reese Jarvis he recorded four more on 20 May and these were issued under the name Jarvis Justice: Guian Valley Waltz, Poor Girl’s Waltz, Poca River Blues, and Muskrat Rag, all mainly instrumental dance tunes with some vocal interjections. In later interviews, Jarvis said that the two of them had never played together before arriving at the Brunswick studio. But in any case they seem to have gotten into a groove together as they played those four tunes in Chicago.

The innovative music Dick Justice made brought together several different influences: ancient Scottish ballads handed down through his family for generations as unaccompanied songs, blues guitar techniques and blues and pre-blues music learned from and with the Black musician Bayless Rose with whom he often played, from records made by other 1920s blues musicians, and mountain banjo songs.He is known to have played at dances and other events with Logan County musicians Frank Hutchison, banjo player Aunt Jenny Wilson, the Williamson Brothers Curry, fiddlers Pete Hill and Sherman Lawson, among others.

Mr. Justice’s place in the pantheon of American vernacular music was doubly ensured when Harry Smith selected his Henry Lee as the first track in his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music , a six-LP compilation of 1920s and early 1930s recordings that jump-started the folk revival. Frank Hutchison’s Stackalee and the Williamson Brothers Curry Gonna Die With My Hammer In My Hand were also included in the Anthology. Thus three of the eighty-four tracks on this influential compilation came from Logan County.

Henry Franklin “Dick” Justice was born 2 April 1903 at East Lynn in the Stonewall district of Wayne County. In 1900 his father Frank Justice was described in the census as a day laborer on his grandfather’s farm there but by 1910 he was a coal miner in that district. By 1915 Dick’s family had moved to Lorado on Buffalo Creek in Logan County so apparently like many mining families there was a movement from place to place as men searched for better working conditions and wages. In 1917, his father was working for the Guyandotte Coal Company at Kitchen in Logan County. And in 1920, Dick was back with his parents in the Stonewall district and both he and his father were miners there once again but in 1921 they were in Stone Branch, Logan County, a mile and a half north of Kitchen along the Guyandotte River. In 1930, the year after his music was recorded in Chicago, Dick was a coal loader in Henlawson, Logan County. In 1940 he was a motorman in a mine at Cora, Logan County, and had two children, a son and a daughter. On his WW II draft registration card he indicated that he was living in Mount Gay, Logan County, and working for the Eagle Mines.

Mr. Justice died on 12 September 1962 and at that time he had been living at Yolyn on Rum Creek in Logan County, working as a miner at least from 1957, and he had been on Rum Creek since at least 1947.He was buried at the Yolyn Cemetery, alongside his son Dallas who had died in 1955 at the age of ten, having been injured at a fire in Slagle, also on Rum Creek, where Dick had worked for a time for the Amherst Coal Company.

I was able to visit the grave of Dick Justice in 2019, in the company of Chris Haddox and Brandon Kirk. Chris recently wrote this about how he located the grave:

"By 2000, the location of Dick's grave site had long been forgotten by his son and daughters. It had been years since they had visited the grave, and they had wondered if coal mining activity had destroyed the small mountainside cemetery."

In 2018, Chris Haddox sought to locate the grave to pay his respects to his fellow Logan County musician. After serval hours of poring over maps, driving up and down Rum Creek, and stopping to talk with a few long-time residents of the Yolyn area, Haddox finally found the cemetery. The pathway leading to the cemetery was anything but obvious, and the cemetery itself was so overgrown that the only clue he had that he was anywhere near a cemetery was the spotting of several old and decaying American flags scattered about from long past Memorial Days. Many of the stones in the cemetery had fallen and those that were still standing were so worn that it was difficult to read the inscriptions. There was no visible path leading to the little fenced in area where Haddox eventually found the headstone of Dick and his 10 year old son, Dallas.

—Gloria Goodwin Raheja, February 2021.

Sources: Gloria Goodwin Raheja’s research for her forthcoming book Logan County Blues: Frank Hutchison in the Sonic Landscape of the Appalachian Coalfields.

1. Gloria Goodwin Raheja’s research for her forthcoming book Logan County Blues: Frank Hutchison in the Sonic Landscape of the Appalachian Coalfields.

2. John Christopher Haddox field work searching for the grave site of Dick Justice, 2018

Please contact me at chris.haddox@mail.wvu.edu if you have information that could improve this entry!