Of stories and song: Tom Breiding ties them together
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Tom Breiding sings last year during his return to Leaf & Bean’s Songwriter Saturday series.
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Tom Breiding performs during the 2006 release show for his album “Time To Roll” at Cefalo’s in Carnegie.
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Tom Breiding, left, performs with Scott Township musician Bill Toms for Songwriter Saturday on New Year’s Eve 2005 at Leaf & Bean in the Strip District.
Tom Breiding and friends perform in July at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Guthrie’s hometown of Okemah, Okla., where Breiding was in invited artist.
Tom Breiding performs in 2006 at Cefalo’s in Carnegie.
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Tom Breiding performs at Leaf & Bean in August.
Tom Breiding at Leaf & Bean
By Harry Funk
Staff writer
hfunk@thealmanac.net
Amid the bustle that’s typical for a Saturday in Pittsburgh’s Strip District is a refuge for music enthusiasts, the Penn Avenue purveyor of cigars and coffee appropriately called Leaf & Bean.
Today, the place is packed for a performance by a man, his guitar and lots of original tunes.
“How the hell is everybody?” he says into the microphone. “Long time, no see.”
Once a regularly featured artist for Leaf & Bean’s Songwriter Saturday, Peters Township resident Tom Breiding has a loaded schedule that’s kept him away for a while. But he’s back, and he starts with a story about his opening number:
“I wrote this about a place called Kayford Mountain. It’s a crazy place. It’s a strip site in West Virginia in what used to be these beautiful mountains, and there’s nothing left.”
The song tells a story, too, and that’s what Breiding has tended to do since he started writing music: tales from America’s heartland, if you will. They’re derived from his experiences growing up in Wheeling, W.Va., through his work for the past seven years as immersion trips coordinator for the Clifford M. Lewis Appalachian Institute at Wheeling University.
- Railroad Town (1992)
- The Next Heartache (1997)
- Guitar and Pen (1998)
- Happy Hour in the Round Hotel (2000)
- American Son (2001)
- Two Tone Chevrolet (2004)
- Guitar and Pen Volume II (2005)
- Time to Roll (2006)
- The Unbroken Circle (2007)
- Beauty in Paradise (2011)
- Fairness at Patriot (2013)
- Live at the Leaf and Bean: Bootleg (2014)
- River, Rails or Road (2015) – includes the Jeff Sewald film “Tom Breiding’s Wheeling”
“We provide service and learning opportunities for universities and high schools from across the country,” he explains. “There are 30-plus groups a year that come, and I coordinate and schedule all of their programming, their housing, basically all of the logistics.”
He also accompanies the students as they travel to assist with various challenges within the 205,000-square-mile Appalachian Region, which includes all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states.
Along the way, his musical storytelling helps enhance everyone’s experience, and he constantly is coming up with inspiration for new material. For example, a song on his forthcoming album, “Love Commits Me Here,” is based on a 2016 service trip to heavily flooded Richwood, W.Va.
“We were the boots on the ground, me and a bunch of high school boys from Cleveland. We were there before the governor,” Breiding tells his Leaf & Bean audience.
“After serving the residents of Richwood for one day, we went back to the housing facility and the next morning, got up and drove back to help them some more. I just kept my phone running, and I didn’t have a guitar with me,” he explains. “And I just wrote this whole thing:”
Who from the flood shall be spared? Who left untouched served as witness there? Whose cares and worries, whose cross to bear? Who from the flood shall be spared?
A few songs later, he announces, “One from my hell-raising days” and launches into another question-filled composition, “Peabody Lied:”
Did you work in the mine since you were young and strong? Did you work for that company your whole life long? Did you give them all the best years you had to live? To provide for your family on what they promised they’d give?
In this case, the story he tells is of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, and its 2013 attempts to eliminate benefits for retirees. And it joins others he wrote and performed as a musician in residence for the United Mine Workers of America as an active supporter of the union’s cause.
“The mine workers settled with Peabody to the tune of $490 million, and that has allowed their 18,000 workers to have their healthcare and their pensions,” he reports. “That’s really where I became aware of how my songs could find their power. So that’s where my focus has been since, in doing positive and constructive things with my music, because I saw results.”
Breiding features songs from that time frame on “River, Rails or Road,” the latest in a series of his albums that began with “Railroad Town” in 1992. “Love Commits Me Here” represents his first new release in four years.
“It’s an eclectic mix of songs, and the approach is pretty unified in that I’m trying to kind of keep it very simplistic: no studio trickery at all,” he says. “I’m just recording these songs live in the studio with guitar and vocal.”
The album will lack an overriding theme, something that has worked well on previous releases. For example, “The Unbroken Circle: Songs of the West Virginia Coalfields” (2009) has drawn praise from country music legend Tom T. Hall – “Shades of Woody Guthrie, these recordings contribute to the historical understanding of this much misunderstood region” – and, given the subject matter, fits right in with his Appalachian Institute work.
That works both ways.
“I consider myself to be a full-time musician,” Breiding says. “A big part of my job at the institute is to share my songs, which in turn shares the culture of our people here in Appalachia. It’s definitely an extension of my work as a musician.”