Last Call for Red Robin Inn, Preservation Hall for Appalachia’s Culture

Snap open a beer, tune up the banjo, and drink a toast to last call at the old Red Robin Inn, the Appalachian honky-tonk where coal miners and college boys send mountain songs floating across the Tug Fork River down below.

But sing low, Charles Blevins, the four-lane is coming through your front door.

“You’re sitting right in history here,” Blevins says. “You’ll never see another beer tavern here along this river. This is the only landmark we’ve got left.”

Perched safely above the temperamental Tug, the Red Robin up to now has been passed by progress since Blevins built it 40 years ago, between shifts in the coal mines.

“Working these mines, maybe you got a job today and maybe you don’t,” Blevins says. “There wasn’t much of a future. I wanted to make sure my kids got an education.”

Blevins, 67 and still strapping, except for a cough brought on by 16 years in the mines, is as likely to lead patrons with a song on his banjo as reach into the cooler for a $1.50 Budweiser. He’s the bartender with the Santa Claus beard.

Mountain men don’t come to the Red Robin to be alone. Work is scarce and it is hard, mostly in the “billion-dollar coal field” where West Virginia meets Kentucky.

In these parts, about 80 miles south of Charleston, the Hatfields and McCoys feuded a century ago, and just last August two other families shot it out over the love of a woman a few hollows away.

Coal trucks, loaded and unforgiving, rumble outside on the winding road, a short rock’s throw from a screen door that bangs out a welcome to each visitor. Only the “welcomes” are fewer these days.

Inside, vintage Pepsi-Cola machines chill bottles of beer and cans of Coke. A metal box on the cooler catches ashes from Blevins’ cigar instead of bottle caps.

A pot of chili always simmers and hamburgers are ready should a hungry patron pull up a red bar stool. A Wurlitzer jukebox plays 45s.

The walls are a mother lode of Appalachian lore.

A 1920s flapper hat hangs along with miners’ caps and Blevins’ dinner pail. An Appalachian plucking dulcimer, dating to the Civil War, hangs near an 1800s’ fiddle. His grandmother’s tambourine, which doubled as a church collection plate, rests on a rafter.

“I traded an old preacher out of that,” Blevins says, pointing to a 140-year-old banjo. “I gave him a shotgun. I haven’t heard from him since.”

“He’s the last of a dying breed. He’s proud of his heritage,” says Jack Johnson, 40, of Pike County, Ky., a construction worker and a regular.

Blevins was reared in a coal camp as one of 12 children. The coal companies owned the home his parents lived in and the store they shopped in. His mother, an inspiration for his music, played the organ to accompany silent pictures.

Workers were paid “a corn bread living” in company scrip, redeemable only in company stores.

In the 1920s, Mingo County miners began a decade-long and bloody struggle to organize, and Blevins’ father was thick in the fight. Open rebellion was followed by martial law and evicted coal miners families lived in tents. Thugs attacked the tents.

Blevins says his baby sister died in a tent as bitter winter wind blew through. His dad said the tent was slit by “company thugs.”

Now the highway is doing what the company men couldn’t.

“This here highway’s trying to come in. They don’t realize what we’ve sacrificed,” Blevins says.

Blevins quit school at 15 to join the Civilian Conservation Corps. He sent home $15 a month, half of his salary. At 16, he joined the Navy and, after four years, entered the mines.

Blevins and his father started building the Red Robin in 1953 on land bought from Leckie-Collieries Coal Co. It took them three years, the younger Blevins walking 2 miles to the mines, 2 miles home for a shower and 2 miles to his heart’s work.

The tavern’s prosperity grew until about 1980, when the mines began to close and many young people left the valley to find work. Blevins says it is mainly old-timers who have stayed.