The Pigtown Fling

By Laiken Boyd

In Hampshire County, you’ll find the small town of Augusta, about nine miles east of Romney. For 35 years, one Augusta family shared a music tradition with their friends, families, and community. The annual Pigtown Fling celebrated its final gathering in 2016. I got a chance to chat with some of the folks who made the Fling so special and unique.

Paul Roomsburg, with help from Ed Meyers and Andy Agnew, first had the idea for the event. The friends met in 1970 at Potomac State College in Keyser. Their comradery and newfound friendship sparked the tradition that eventually spanned decades and generations, and started countless personal and musical friendships.

Pat Shields, artist-in-residence at Potomac State at the time, had received a grant to start fiddle and banjo contests in the Eastern Panhandle. Pat recalls, “All the contests were in the middle of the state, or down in the southern part, so this worked out really well. We had [musicians] like John McCutcheon and Malcolm Dalglish, you know, entertainers that would come to do concerts. . . . We would have lectures and all kinds of things. All the old fiddlers would come—Melvin Wine, Wilson Douglas, nearly all the old West Virginia fiddlers—and the banjo players.”

The contests ran for a few years with the help of students and faculty. Pat recalls the contests’ influence on one particular group of students, including Paul Roomsburg: “Paul really took this music to heart and started playing with a fellow named Sloan Staggs. That really surprised me at the time. So, Paul has always been involved with the local musicians up there. The whole history of those boys that are all playing music together started right there at Potomac State.”

Paul tells how the Fling grew over three-and-a-half decades: “It started in 1982 at our farm in Augusta with my wife, Lisa, and it was like a glorified picnic. We cooked a hog and had people over on Saturday evening to play music. At that time, we didn’t play a lot of old-time. I was in sort of a bluegrass band. That’s how it started, and it evolved over 35 years. A lot of musicians have come through. A lot of young people have grown up at the Fling. It’s been 98 percent old-time for the last 20-some years. We did a sign-in sheet one year. We had people from 13 states and six different countries, so that was pretty cool.”

As for the name, Paul says, “We had hogs we couldn’t keep in, and little pigs were running around everywhere, and so that’s why we called it the Pigtown Fling. When everybody came for the music and the party, we always brought out the pigs and let them run . . . back to the barn.”

In addition to the Fling’s great food and community spirit, there was always the music. As the years went by, the celebration became more and more about passing the music on to younger generations. “Between the Romney bunch and Sam and Joe Herrmann,” Pat explains, “I bet they’ve taught over 80 kids to play music. And that’s what this is all about, the traditional music. It doesn’t happen unless you have someone to present it. You don’t have to be good; you just have to have fun doing it. That’s the way it started.”

Andy Agnew, another Fling founder, shared some of his memories: “It was just a bunch of us that got together to play some music, and it eventually turned into an old-time music festival. Most of us didn’t have kids. My second child was on the way at that point, and it grew into something that we all started taking our families to. Our kids grew up listening to the music, learning to play the music. It was a way to pass on the old-time music.

“A lot of people call it bluegrass, but it’s really not bluegrass. It’s an old-time, traditional, generational type of music. It’s what our ancestors brought over from Ireland, and England, and Germany, and it continues to be passed on over in Hampshire County. There’s something very special about old-time music that just reaches out and grabs you. That’s what the Fling turned into: passing the music on to our children, or others who took an interest. I was just very lucky to be a part of all that.”

Sam Herrmann and her husband, Joe, are well-known old-time musicians from the nearby Mineral County town of Paw Paw. Sam has very fond feelings about the Fling: “We used to go before we had kids, and then after we had kids, they went as well. The Fling people have memories of us playing music with them on our backpacks.”

Joe interjects, “It was just a great gathering of the community around the music, and around the community idea of having a covered dish—hundreds of people, sometimes two, three hundred people.”

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