Chemical Valley, Hold Your Nose (2026)

Charleston sings in first person, and it starts with a smell. On January 9, 2014, a one-inch hole in a storage tank at a Freedom Industries facility let crude MCHM — the chemical foam used to wash coal — run into the Elk River, about a mile upstream of the intake that supplies the Kanawha Valley's drinking water. 1 People smelled licorice in the air hours before anyone warned them not to use the tap. Up to 300,000 residents across nine counties were told not to drink, cook, wash, or bathe with the water, and the order held for five days. 2 The tank had not been inspected since 1991. 1 Eight days later, Freedom Industries filed for bankruptcy. 1

The valley has been called Chemical Valley since the Second World War, when the Kanawha ran at capacity for the war effort and became the chemical center of the world, with South Charleston nicknamed Chemical City. 3 The song's second verse is about what that meant. Union Carbide's plant at Institute, a few miles downriver, was for years the only facility in the United States that made methyl isocyanate, the gas that killed thousands in Bhopal, India in December 1984. 4 In August 1985 the Institute plant released an MIC cloud of its own, and 135 people went to the hospital. 5

The sound underneath the confession is Appalachian old-time string band: clawhammer banjo, sawing fiddle, flatpicked acoustic guitar, upright bass, mountain dulcimer, and a brushed snare, with a lonesome two-part harmony arriving on the last chorus. The voice stays in front of the band throughout — spare at the open, pushing to a communal finish, then stepping back for one last line.

There is an older bill underneath the spill. In late August 1921, some 10,000 armed coal miners marched on Logan County and fought company forces and the sheriff's men in the largest labor uprising in American history; private planes dropped homemade bombs on the miners, and it took federal troops to end it. 6 The battlefield was later stripped for coal and pulled off the National Register of Historic Places before the keeper of the register restored it in 2018. 7 The bridge carries the rest of the weird inheritance: an official state song about a river in Virginia that was written by a man who had never been there, 8 a pepperoni roll invented in Fairmont in 1927 to pack into a miner's lunch, 9 and the highest overdose death rate in the country. 10

Listen on a porch above the river at dusk, on a long drive home through the hollows, or any time you want a town to tell the truth about its water.