Crooked Road CD Series [Back]

Mullins Family Anthology:
Let Your Light Shine Out

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My father, Billy Gene Mullins, was a coal miner and a laborer. He was raised in a lifestyle that consisted of hard labor and sacrifice, on the family farm in the little community called Ghost Rock just a few short miles from the sleepy town of Clintwood.  If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat.  My mother too, was born into that same kind of life.  Her parents were Isabell Edwards Rose and the Reverend Gobel Rose of Clinchco, Virginia.  Grandpa Rose was a long-time millworker, pastor, and minister of the gospel in Dickenson County.

I am happy to declare that there are many things worth remembering about my childhood.  There are lots of memories that have evaporated over time, but the earliest sights and sounds that still ring the most clearly are those of music and singing.  I have come to understand that the love of making music with one’s voice has long been a central part of my family.  I may never know exactly how far back the story goes, but I do know that singing has to be just about as much a part of my being as living and breathing.

The Mullins family has demonstrated a devotion to singing for generations now.  My great-grandfather, Dock Mullins was a song leader in the Cumberland Church of the Brethren.  He taught just about every one of his children to sing, I’m told, around the fireplace in the winter months when the bulk of the family farming work was suspended for a short while.  It was from that family circle that my grandfather, the Reverend Hie A. Mullins, found his own voice to make music.

We’d gather around the fireplace.  Sometimes we’d have one songbook and sometimes we’d sing from memory, and everybody would learn his part.  We sang that way for many years.

My grandfather reminisced about the first time he sang with my grandmother when they were both small children growing up in the church:

Dad was a deacon in the Cumberland church.  I was too small to stand almost, to stand with the congregation.  They placed me up on the roster to sing from there.  My first wife, Frances, she was some younger than me.  She’d sit on one side of the roster and I was on the other side and we sang together then.  She was only four years old when we first began singin’.

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