Appalachian Figures
When people talk about the old Tug Fork coalfields, they often end up talking about a place that is gone. For forty years the Red Robin Inn sat just above the river at Borderland, West Virginia, a neon roadhouse filled with homemade banjos, antique guns, and stories. At its center stood Charles Vernon “Charlie” Blevins, a Pike County born coal miner turned innkeeper, musician, and curator of a one room museum of Appalachian memory.
By the time highway crews took the building for U.S. 119 in the early 1990s, Blevins had become something like an unofficial cultural ambassador for the Pike–Mingo border. A short modern biography on him pulls together birth records from Pike County, his years in the Borderland mines, his service aboard the battleship USS Alabama, decades behind the bar at the Red Robin, and later appearances in documentaries and field recordings that carried his voice far beyond the Tug Valley.
Today most of what we know about him comes from primary and near primary sources: photographs and film in the West Virginia & Regional History Center, taped interviews in collections at UNC Chapel Hill, Augusta Heritage, and Berea College, and magazine and newspaper profiles from the inn’s heyday and its last days. Together they sketch the life of a man who treated a coal camp tavern as both living room and listening room, a place where homemade music and what he called “coon dog truth” mattered as much as the drinks.
Coal camp roots on the Tug Fork
Charles Vernon Blevins was born in 1925 in McVeigh, a coal town in Pike County, Kentucky, only a short distance from the West Virginia line. Family histories and later scholarly work on the Tug Valley coalfields place his people among the many families who left older farming counties such as Clay County, Kentucky, for mine work in the booming Pike–Mingo border camps in the early twentieth century.
As an adult, Blevins followed the same path into the Borderland Coal Corporation operations across the Tug Fork in Mingo County, West Virginia. A biographical sketch compiled from interviews and local records notes that he spent about sixteen years underground before leaving the mines. Those years in the pits and in coal camp housing later colored his stories. In taped interviews from the 1990s, he recalled relatives who had worked the border country long before him and described coal mining as simply what families like his did, moving back and forth across the state line wherever work opened up.
World War II took him a long way from the Tug Fork. Navy records and later summaries agree that he served aboard the battleship USS Alabama, a posting that carried him into the vast machinery of the Pacific war before he finally came home. Like many Appalachian veterans, he walked back into an economy that still revolved around coal, road houses, and the muddy river between Kentucky and West Virginia.
Opening the Red Robin Inn
In 1953 Blevins and his father opened the Red Robin Inn at Borderland, West Virginia, on the narrow river shelf between the Norfolk & Western tracks and the Tug Fork. The building was small by highway roadhouse standards, but its location on the main road and near coal camps made it a natural stopping point.
The West Virginia Encyclopedia’s entry on the inn, written by folklorist Michael Kline, traces how it grew from a local bar into a kind of informal cultural center for the Tug Valley, known for its music, antiques, and stories as much as for beer. Kline’s 1982 Goldenseal article “The Coon Dog Truth: Charlie Blevins at the Red Robin Inn” deepened that picture, describing long evenings when miners, truck drivers, college students, and travelers found themselves packed into the same small room while Blevins swapped tales and tunes.
Photographs from the West Virginia & Regional History Center show why the place stuck in people’s memories. In one 1974 image titled “Homemade Banjo Belonging to Charles Blevins, Borderland, W. Va.,” archivists note that the instrument is “part of Charlie Blevins’ collection of antiques on display at the Red Robin Inn.” Other photos in the same series show him actually playing a homemade banjo, surrounded by old tools, rifles, and dulcimers, giving the impression that customers were drinking inside a personal museum of borderland life rather than a generic bar.
Homemade banjos, dulcimers, and flintlocks
Blevins did not simply collect instruments. He built them. Oral history recordings and photo captions alike emphasize his love of homemade banjos and mountain dulcimers, often made from scavenged or repurposed materials. His fascination with older crafts did not stop with music. A brief but oft cited appearance in the Foxfire 5 volume on Appalachian crafts shows “Charlie Blevins” demonstrating flintlock work, placing him among the many regional artisans who kept older technologies alive for visitors and interviewers.
Visitors remembered his instruments and his stories together. In taped interviews preserved in collections at the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina (notably SFC Audio Cassette 13321, recorded at Borderland in January 1991), he talks at length about how he learned music from his mother and grandmother, both of whom played at home, and about his desire to keep that sound alive. Later sessions recorded at Augusta Heritage in 1994 and in the Michael and Carrie Kline collection at Berea College capture him picking his own instruments while explaining how he put them together and why certain old tunes suited them.
Those recordings and transcripts are some of the most important primary sources we have for Blevins. They preserve the cadences of his speech, his sense of humor, and the way he folded family stories, Tug Valley gossip, and regional history into a single stream of talk and music.
On film and on the air
If the Red Robin Inn made Blevins a local figure, film and broadcasting introduced him to a much wider audience. In the 1970s he appeared in the West Virginia Public Broadcasting documentary Mountaineer, a portrait of West Virginia culture that features him playing his homemade banjo. The program’s credits and descriptions single him out by name, and some soundtrack notes even specify “homemade banjo played by Charlie Blevins,” treating the instrument and the man as a matched pair.
Decades later, Michael and Carrie Kline drew on their fieldwork at Borderland to produce the audio feature “The Red Robin Inn – Charlie Blevins” for their Talking Across the Lines series. Built around Blevins’s own voice and music, the piece has become one of the most widely shared introductions to him in old time and dulcimer communities, turning his corner of the Tug Fork into a kind of radio legend.
Between these broadcasts and the surviving tapes at UNC, Augusta, and Berea, listeners today can still hear the way he shifted from story to tune and back again. He might describe a coal camp prank or a fox hunt, then slide into an old ballad or breakdown on a banjo he had built himself. In that seamless blend of narrative and performance, he stood in a long line of Appalachian storytellers whose “shows” were as much about conversation as about any set list.
“Preservation Hall for Appalachia’s culture”
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Red Robin Inn was famous enough that national reporters began to notice what might be lost if it disappeared. Associated Press writer Nancy Nussbaum wrote two widely reprinted pieces in 1992 about the inn’s uncertain future as highway engineers prepared to widen U.S. 119. One, carried by the Los Angeles Times and other papers, borrowed a phrase that stuck, describing the Red Robin as something like a Preservation Hall for Appalachian culture on the West Virginia–Kentucky line.
Those articles emphasized the same details that folk music communities already knew from Kline’s Goldenseal essay and from field recordings. The inn was a place where coal miners, truckers, professors, and folk festival visitors could all end up listening to the same homemade banjo. It was a private business, not a museum, but over the years it had begun to function as an unofficial heritage site, complete with antique displays and a proprietor who could talk at length about early coal camps, fox hunting, dulcimer building, and the rough humor of border country.
Highway construction won. In 1993 the original Red Robin Inn building was demolished to make way for the Corridor G upgrade of U.S. 119. For locals and longtime visitors, the loss felt deeper than the removal of one more roadside bar. It erased a physical anchor point for a particular style of borderlands talk and music.
Red Robin Plateau and late recognition
Blevins did not give up when the bulldozers came. A short distance away, across the Tug Fork in Pike County, Kentucky, he opened a new space called Red Robin Plateau, part museum and part gathering spot that tried to carry forward the inn’s spirit. Newspaper features and obituaries remember him continuing to entertain visitors there with the same combination of stories and tunes while his collection of antique guns, tools, and instruments ringed the room.
Around the same time, West Virginia cultural institutions began recognizing what he had been doing all along. The West Virginia Encyclopedia identifies him explicitly as a culture bearer as well as an innkeeper, and later reference works on Appalachian music and dulcimer history lean heavily on the same photographs, tapes, and magazine pieces that documented his life while he was still alive.
Blevins died at Borderland in August 2004 at the age of seventy eight. A Find A Grave entry, echoing local obituaries, notes his coal mining years, his service aboard the Alabama, his decades running the Red Robin, and his later work at Red Robin Plateau. Taken together with the surviving audio and visual sources, those short notices confirm how tightly his personal story was bound up with the geography of the Pike–Mingo border and the changing economy of the Tug Valley.
Why Charlie Blevins matters
Seen from a distance, the story of Charles Blevins might look like a familiar outline. Coal miner’s son goes into the mines, serves in the war, opens a tavern, and plays old time music on homemade instruments. What makes him stand out is the way his life stitches together so many strands of borderland history.
He was rooted in a family that had already moved once from older Kentucky counties into the new coal camps along the Tug Fork. He spent his formative years navigating the dangerous work of underground mining before stepping behind a bar that served miners, truckers, and river men. He took the skills and sounds learned from his mother and grandmother, combined them with his own knack for tinkering, and used them to turn a simple roadhouse into a place where visitors could encounter homemade banjos, antique rifles, and stories about fox hunts and early union days in one sitting.
The primary sources we have on him – the West Virginia University photographs of his banjo and of the inn’s interior, the 1991 UNC interview, the Augusta and Berea recordings, Michael Kline’s Goldenseal and encyclopedia pieces, the Talking Across the Lines audio feature, and the Associated Press coverage of the inn’s final years – do more than preserve an individual biography. They show how one man consciously leaned into the role of culture bearer at a time when highways and mine closures were reshaping the Tug Valley.
For Appalachian history, Blevins offers a reminder that some of the most important “archives” in the region have been roadhouses, living rooms, and kitchen tables where music, talk, and memory mingle. The Red Robin Inn no longer stands beside the river at Borderland. U.S. 119 roars past on its widened route, carrying travelers who may never know what once sat beside the road. But in the surviving photographs and tapes, you can still hear Charlie’s homemade banjo and his voice rising over the hum of conversation in a crowded room, insisting that the border between Kentucky and West Virginia can also be a meeting place.
Sources and further listening
Key primary and near primary sources on Blevins include the West Virginia & Regional History Center’s West Virginia History OnView photographs of his homemade banjo and of the Red Robin Inn interior, along with catalog entries that identify these items as part of his antique collection on display at the inn. OnView
The Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina holds SFC Audio Cassette 13321, a 1991 interview with “Charlie Blevins” recorded at Borderland, while Augusta Heritage (now Augusta Arts and Culture) preserves “Charlie Blevins tunes and interview; 10/31/1994,” and the Michael and Carrie Kline Collection at Berea College includes an interview transcript from the mid 1990s.
Michael Kline’s work is central, including his Goldenseal article “The Coon Dog Truth: Charlie Blevins at the Red Robin Inn” and his later “Red Robin Inn” entry in the West Virginia Encyclopedia.
For Blevins’s wider public presence, see the West Virginia Public Broadcasting documentary Mountaineer, where he appears as a featured performer, and the Talking Across the Lines audio feature “The Red Robin Inn – Charlie Blevins.”
Modern summaries that pull these strands together include the Wikipedia article “Charles Blevins,” which cites the dulcimer association biography “Charles Vernon Blevins,” the AP features by Nancy Nussbaum on the inn’s closing, and the encyclopedia and archival materials listed above. Wikipedia