Mike Morningstar: Undersung Folk Music Legend – Part 1

Mike Morningstar: Undersung Folk Music Legend – Part 1

INTERVIEW: Two part interview. Part 2 to be released on October 8th, 2025.

I had the chance to sit down and talk with Mike Morningstar, a folk singer/songwriter from West Virginia. He’s lived a long and eventful life, playing juke joints in his teens before shipping off to Vietnam during the war, and learning how to live with it all after coming back home. These experiences have had a massive effect on his music, once only available on cassettes and CDs he sold on tour, which is only now being added to notable streaming services. Mike even plans a vinyl revival of some of his albums. The following interview has been edited as minimally as possible, only skipping or modifying a few of Mike’s self-described “circuitous raps” for clarity.

J Zimmerman:Kevin Lapsley said that you had been working with him and Chris Davisson to get some of your music released. How has that been going?

Mike Morningstar:It’s been going well. I’ve had a lot of people call me and tell me they heard it [on Spotify]. Someone even told me it’d been on the Outlaw Country XM station. Right now they’ve just got my first album, and I think they’re trying to get my second album up. I’ve got nine of them, so it’s gonna take a while.

J Zimmerman:Yeah, your first album is already on Spotify, and I listened through it there. It’s very good.

Mike Morningstar:I’m really thankful for Kevin helping me on this, because I retired 13 years ago because of my hands: I’ve got arthritis and neuropathy and old age problems… I’m 77 years old. It’s caching up to me *laughter*. I played for about 50 years. I got a good run in.

J Zimmerman:That’s a good, long time!

Mike Morningstar:I started when I was 15, and I played ‘til I was 65. Had to quit then because I’d drop the pick all the time and wasn’t able to function, and people were paying a cover charge to see me. I didn’t want them to pay and then have me get up there and sound bad. So I just retired while I was still up on top of it pretty good.

J Zimmerman:That’s definitely a way a folk virtuoso might feel. You’ve been doing so good for so long, and when you start to feel a little off, it starts to feel like robbery.

Mike Morningstar:Well, it is. I had plans to play until I fell off the stage, ya know, *laughter*. But my hands gave me away. I can’t do anything about it. I mean, it’s something that’s just uncontrollable, and I’ve tried all kinds of picks: Thumb picks and finger picks. I never did play finger style. I always played with a pick, flat-pick-style guitar. Runs and chords to accompany myself. I think I had a pretty good run. I know a lot of guys who… it all fell apart when they started getting older, and I kept plumbing away at it.

J Zimmerman:There’s a couple videos of you playing the bow on YouTube.

Mike Morningstar:Yeah! I’m in the process of rebuilding my picking bow. I took it out of the case that I keep it in, and it was broken in half.

J Zimmerman:Oh no!

Mike Morningstar:It’s been inside the house where it’s dry, and I think it just dried up, and because of the tension of the string on it, it just pulled it in half, and it just eventually broke. But I’m building another one right now! I’m gonna do a [couple shows] with the Davisson Brothers… so I’m gonna get my picking bow running. That’ll be the only thing that catches the crowd, probably. I play acoustic music, not like what they do. They play a lot of beautiful music, I think. I love what they’re doing, and I’m tickled to death with the renown they’re accomplishing through their music. They stay true to their West Virginia roots, same thing I did, only I was playing folk music. I tried to stay true to where I was, and that was here. I never really wanted to go anywhere else to play. I left West Virginia several times, went to LA… Went to Florida a couple-three times… I was in South Carolina for a time, but it just… none of it felt like home to me. I was just there to make some money with my music, but at the same time I felt real disoriented by the location itself. All these places, they’re not like West Virginia, *Chuckle*. This is where I belong. I mean, this is where my music is. It’s what I wrote it for, and it’s the people who listen to it, working people.

J Zimmerman:I could hear that in the songs that I had access to. One that stuck out to me while listening through The Original was Coal Country Blues.

Mike Morningstar:I wrote that on Thanksgiving Day, hitchhiking out of Logan County down in the coal country. I had my guitar and a little backpack, and I always carry a notebook with me so if I get an idea, I can write it down before I forget it. That’s how that song got written. I hitchhiked up to Charleston… I knew some people up there… and I got very few rides, and they were real short rides. I think the people picked me up just because I was carrying a guitar. You never know when you’re out there, you’re just kind of in the wind.

J Zimmerman:A big part of why it stuck out to me was it’s almost hymn-like quality: Most of the other tunes are toe-tappers or story songs, but that one held some reverence.

Mike Morningstar:I never was that much of a singer, *chuckle*. They told me I’m going to be inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. I think the Davisson boys are getting inducted too. And I think it was my songwriting more than my vocal abilities and my guitar. Literally, I just play some chords and a few runs between the chords. More accompaniment than anything else. It really put my poetry to the front, and I think that’s what got me into the hall of fame.

J Zimmerman:All of your songwriting has such character, and I think that your singing voice is honest instead of well-trained, and that helps to deliver those lines.

Mike Morningstar:People have fans, but I didn’t have a big following like some folks. But people knew that when I came to town, it was gonna be a feel-good thing. The biggest compliment anyone could pay to me was, ‘We had a good time tonight.’ I felt like there’s so much detrimental stuff about West Virginian people, and I wanted to write positive things. I wanted people to be proud of who they are and where they’re from. There were a lot of stereotypes people had.

J Zimmerman:I know a little bit about that, being from Arkansas. It’s rough knowing that you have a home other people feel the need to mock.

Mike Morningstar:Oh yeah! I lived on the border, too. I grew up right on the Ohio River. My father worked up at Union Carbide. All the time I was a kid, you’d hear these jokes about Ohio and West Virginia, talking about how stupid people in West Virginia are or whatever. But I used to have one to throw back at them: I’d always say, ‘there was a guy in West Virginia that was so dumb, he moved to Ohio and raised the collective IQ of both states.’ That was one of the jokes I made up. Some of them didn’t even get it.

J Zimmerman:It went right over their heads.

Mike Morningstar:*Chuckle*

J Zimmerman:Richard Anderson made a documentary about you.

Mike Morningstar:Oh yeah, a great one. He did just a magical job, you know. He was so kind to me. When I first met him—And I’d had people before who wanted to do a documentary, young kids, right out of college, and I just didn’t go for it—but when I met Richard, he just seemed so connected to what I was saying. And he has real good friends here in West Virginia. I met him through the Hills; they went to college together. I’d play parties [the Hills] would throw, three or four a year. They’d always have a ‘spring-fling’ party when the weather started coming around and warming up a bit, and they’d have a big summer party with a couple hundred people there. I worked for them for years, and they finally connected me with Richard Anderson. They told him, “We know this folk singer down here in WV that’s writing some good topical songs.” [Richard] had my first album, so when he came down, that was the only reflection he had of my music. I made eight albums after that, and I think my music got better and better as the albums went along. That’s just my opinion. *Chuckle* I don’t know what anyone else thought.

J Zimmerman:I’m looking forward to getting my hands on more for sure!

Mike Morningstar:My writing got stronger, my playing, my vocal power, my harmonica playing. They’ll get to that eventually. And I think as they do, more and more will end up on the Outlaw Country station.

J Zimmerman:That acoustic folk sound really is a classic sound.

Mike Morningstar:Yeah, it is. It’s mostly that all through the rest of the albums. I have the belief that if you can’t make a song that holds up acoustically, all the additional stuff you add is just clutter to mask the inefficiency of the lyrics or whatever. I always tried to write a song that told a story, that was a topical event or something that struck me. It had to have some kind of personal meaning to me. I never was a contriver. A lot of people do that: They get one good verse, and they contrive the rest. And I can tell when I listen to a song that’s got a good start, then it fizzles out… I realize they were just putting in the potatoes. I always called it ‘meat and potatoes.’ *chuckle* The ‘meat’ of the song is what you’re really trying to get across, and the embellishments you put into the song to make it trickier or catchier are the ‘potatoes.’ I always tried to make every song mostly meat. I’ve got a few ‘potatoes’ in there *laugh* I’ll admit it. I’ve got a “bits and pieces” folder, and when I get an idea, I write it down, and then I don’t try to push it, I just throw it in the folder if I can’t finish it. Then in the wintertime, when everything slows down, then I can flesh it out. And even though they don’t always connect, some of those bits and pieces feel the same when you come back and look through them. They might have been written about six months apart, but they’ll feel the same or have the same meter about them, you know, to where they’ll connect. I did that with two or three songs when I was recording Reunion, which is one of my better albums. It was my partner (Rick Roberts) who came back from Nashville—and this guy is a virtuoso. He plays everything, anything with strings on it. He came back from Nashville with a pedal steel guitar. And that’s why that album’s call Reunion, because we were getting back together. Rick’s family was related to the Hammons family, which is a big musical family here in WV, way back from the early 1900s on. They wrote a lot of what’s called now “old-timey music” with traditional bluegrass instruments. We did a song of theirs called Greasy Coat, and it’s just a banjo and a fiddle that run with each other and then against each other, and I’m playing the hickory stick on that one. It’s a unique instrument. We tried to make that album all originals otherwise. Some of those songs were hammered together in the recording studio.

J Zimmerman:As someone who typically writes essays and fiction, the process of songwriting has always seemed a bit magical to me, how you can take a poem and just set it to music, and that makes it mean more.

Mike Morningstar:I’ve done that with some of my brother’s poetry. He’s a great artist, and everything he does has a real magical quality to it. Two of the best songs that I ever did—Buffalo Creek, which was that coal-mine disaster in 1972, and Steve [Morningstar] wrote most of that one, I just pulled his poem together with a chorus and wrote the last verse. He also did the East End Bar which is on Reunion, and it’s a great song about an old friend of ours who was a fantastic piano player and ended up ruining his life with drink. Steve did most of that one, I just did the chorus. We’re still working on stuff. We’re getting ready to design some t-shirts that we can sell with the album. I’m gonna do that first album as a record and have a deal where you can get a t-shirt with it.

J Zimmerman:I’ll be looking out for that! I love a good record.

Mike Morningstar:It’s kinda funny because my whole career the thing that held me back was I never promoted myself. I just couldn’t do it.

J Zimmerman:Yeah! It’s hard for people who have trouble bragging.

Mike Morningstar:I had a booking agent when I first started out—a couple of ‘em—who ripped me off, so I thought, ‘hell, I can do my own booking,’ so I set my phone up for unlimited long distance, and I just started calling people. Some of those places would look promising, so I’d go in and buy a beer and have a look at the jukebox. If the jukebox had some interesting stuff on it that wasn’t just plain shit-kicking country or rock and roll, I’d go talk to the management. I’d try to get into places that weren’t real big, because I didn’t want to compete with house bands. Little small bars were mostly where I made my money, and I’d tell them, “if you don’t put a cover charge on, I’ll pass the hat.” I’d play places that were only paying me $25 or $30, but I could make $150 if I could pass a hat: Let the crowd actually contribute. If the crowd was friendly to my music, and if everybody threw a buck in the hat, I’d make out okay. I started off like that. I had been in bands for about six years at that point, and I just got tired of doing loud music and I went to acoustic. That was mainly what my career was, as a single entertainer. I started out in ‘62 at fifteen years old in a black soul band.

J Zimmerman:That’s really cool. Some of my favorite songs are funk and soul from that era.

Mike Morningstar:We’d play at the black Elk’s clubs and other places like that, because people wouldn’t serve black people [because of segregation]. And I carry that experience with me. Those guys played real close to the heart, far as I can tell. Way back then, the music I was listening to was The Supremes and Wilson Pickett and Jackie Wilson and all these soul people who really got the crowd up and moving. That was the one thing I loved about soul music, was the beat and the rhythm… the pounding bass. Just the whole feel of the soul song that’s done right. In fact, I’ve written a song—If I can get the Davisson boys… They wanna back me up and let me finish another album—but I wrote a soul song, and I’m gonna do it. I’ve got an old friend of mine in Parkersburg who’s a horn player, and I asked if his lips are still good, *Chuckle* because my hands are shot right now. Anyway, this guy who plays trumpet, I’m gonna take a tape down to him when I get that song done just like I want it. He’s got his own studio, and he says, “Bring it down here, and I’ll put a trumpet on it, or a couple of trumpets if you want a kind of horn section.” He’s a hell of a trumpet player. He could put that song right over the top.

[End of “Mike Morningstar: Undersung Folk Music Legend – Part 1”]

To finish the remainder of the interview check back to IndieMR on October 8th, 2025 for “Mike Morningstar: Undersung Folk Music Legend – Part 2”.

Richard Anderson’s documentary, Mike Morningstar: Here’s to the Working Man, will be screening as a part of the CARE Awards in Parkersburg, WV on November 7th, 2025. A DVD is available at the film’s official website. Mike will be performing with the Davisson Brothers on November 1st. Find more information on Facebook. You can find Mike’s first album, The Original, streaming on Spotify and Apple Music, and it’s also available for purchase on Amazon.