Photo by Tom Pich.
The news of the passing of Elder Frank Newsome, beloved preacher of the Little David Old Regular Baptist Church located deep in the Virginia coalfields along the Kentucky border, came with great sadness, but also with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Gratitude for the many years of joy and laughter we shared, for the countless lives he touched during his 85 years, and, of course, for that incredible singing voice that will forever live inside all who heard it.
I have been blessed to be in the presence of many brilliant singers over the course of my career, and I’d put Frank among the very top of the list. His voice was overwhelmingly soulful, unapologetically raw, and possessed a power that could literally stop people in their tracks—a phenomenon I witnessed many times when we presented Frank on one of our festival stages. Hearing Frank sing often brought goosebumps and unexpected tears, to the point that I made sure to bring my sunglasses whenever I sat beside him for a public workshop or performance.
What made Frank’s voice even more remarkable was the fact that it somehow came from a pair of lungs ravaged by the dreaded black lung. Born one of 22 children and raised in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky under extremely modest circumstances, Frank went to work in the mines, as so many young men of that region have and continue to do. There, Frank operated the “pin top,” a roof-bolting machine used to secure the freshly cut rock ceiling above his fellow miners. It was a job that carried tremendous responsibility while exposing him to the unrelenting dust that would eventually wreak havoc on his lungs.
Coal mining is notoriously dangerous and physically demanding work, often matched by its psychological and emotional toll. Miners can literally go for an entire week without seeing sunlight, entering the pitch-black mine in the predawn hours and emerging from their shifts beneath a blanket of darkness.
It was in this darkest of places that Frank found salvation. There, in the darkness beneath the mountain, Frank asked God for forgiveness for his sins, which for him included playing guitar in local bluegrass bands—an act forbidden in the Old Regular Baptist Church that he, his family, and his neighbors attended. This spiritual transformation, along with his diagnosis of black lung disease, led Frank to leave the mines and move to nearby Haysi, Virginia, where he became an ordained minister in the Little David Old Regular Baptist Church.
The Old Regular Baptists are a small and deeply rooted faith community with roughly a dozen congregations along the Kentucky-Virginia border. Their services are known for passionate sermons, intense call-and-response singing, and soulful hymns, always sung without musical accompaniment. Even in a congregation led by generations of gifted singing preachers, Frank was quickly recognized as being without peer, and for decades Frank was in high demand, logging thousands of miles across mountain country roads performing guest services, funerals, weddings, and countless baptisms in the waters of the Clinch Mountain River.
“When you’re between two rocks…” Newsome said, reflecting on his underground moment of salvation, “when you go under the mountain, you don’t know whether you’re going to see daylight again or not. I just began to look up and talk to the Good Lord to have mercy upon me and bless me to get out and see my family again.”
That family included, first and foremost, his beloved wife and first love, Geraldine—a tall stunning blonde who famously wore her golden hair in a beehive, with compassionate blue eyes and a smile that exuded a kindness generously offered to family and strangers alike. Together they had three children and eventually an abundance of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, joining an expansive network of siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews that, to me, seemed to comprise half the town.
We got to know this wonderful family well over the years, not only through my periodic visits to Haysi for a church service and one of Geraldine’s epic family suppers, but even more so through Frank’s frequent appearances at the Richmond Folk Festival and other events, where they were always by his side.
For many years, we began every Richmond Folk Festival weekend with Frank coming to the stage to sing a song from his Old Regular Baptist hymn book, just as he had long done at the Hills of Home festival at the homeplace of his friend and neighbor, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley.
Many people commented over the years on how much Frank’s voice sounded like Ralph’s. I always enjoyed telling them that it would be more accurate to say that Ralph sounded like Frank. Ralph, too, came up in the Old Regular Baptist tradition and was an attendee of Frank’s church. Before Ralph died in 2016, he asked if Frank would perform his funeral, which Frank faithfully did. And just as Ralph had done back in 1984, Frank received the NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 2011, the highest honor the United States bestows on traditional artists. It was a fitting recognition of a voice so deeply evocative of the Southern Appalachian coalfields from which Frank came.
Frank received this prestigious honor at an awards ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The Newsomes were understandably overwhelmed by the idea of driving to D.C., so they insisted on meeting me in the parking lot of the Charlottesville Golden Corral to take the wheel of their family station wagon. It was packed with as many Newsomes as they could fit, along with bags of canned goods and food that they always brought with them when away from home. That joy and laughter-filled journey will forever remain one of my fondest memories.
Soon after Frank and I first met, I went down to Haysi with my songwriting friend Jim Lauderdale to record Frank singing from his pulpit one stormy Thursday evening at Little David. The result was his beautiful album, Gone Away With a Friend, which I also filmed with my trusty field video camera. I posted a few videos from that session on the Virginia Folklife Program’s YouTube channel, where they have been viewed tens of thousands of times over the years and brought comfort and solace to so many.
Frank offered these thoughts after the recording:
I’m doing this all for this Little David Church to try and make things a little better. I most of all want to thank God Almighty that He’s given me the gift that He has to sing, and if it will profit anybody anything, if it’ll cause them to turn from their sins into the Good Lord, then it’s worth every bit of it. I’m not doing this for no big name or no pat on the back. No, I don’t need that. I’m just an old country feller. I ain’t got nothing and I ain’t looking for nothing, but I believe I’ve got a home in Heaven when I leave here.
It is this last sentiment that has been a source of great solace to so many who loved Frank. There is no denying that his final years were incredibly difficult, with his black lung finally catching up with him and the devastating loss of his beloved Geraldine. His fellow Elders, parishioners, neighbors and family, while deeply saddened by his passing, are comforted by the knowledge that he is in a better place, reunited with Geraldine, free from suffering and breathing easy once again.
While we will all forever miss you, brother Frank,we know you have only gone away with a friend.
–Jon Lohman, September 2026
