Luther Taylor

09/07/2026

Some of the finest things Southwest Virginia has given the world began with someone getting up before daylight.

A miner heading underground. A farmer tending the land. A railroad crew, a carpenter, a factory worker. People who worked with what they had, learned their trade, and helped a neighbor when the day was done.

On Labor Day, we honor those hands and the families behind them. We remember the sacrifices, the lives lost, and those who stood together for safer work and a fair day’s pay.

We’ve inherited a great deal from them. Skill. Patience. Pride in doing something right, even when nobody is watching.

As we look toward what comes next, may we carry those lessons with us, and help build a Southwest Virginia where another generation can make a good living, raise a family, and be proud to call these mountains home.

There is still good work ahead of us.

Happy Labor Day.

09/06/2026

Libby doesn’t play guitar. She just looks like she has a song in her.

09/02/2026

Passed from one family member to another, this 1894 edition of Down in a Mine found its way into my hands when my mother gave it to me just a few weeks ago.

Now it’s on special display at WHAT WE KEPT at Haus of Taylor.

Its stories come from England’s coal-mining communities, but the experiences feel close to home: dangerous work, family, faith, and loss. Things Southwest Virginia knows something about.

For me, the story also lives in the hands that held this book before mine, and the decision, generation after generation, to keep it.

Come see a little of what my family kept. You might recognize something of your own.

What We Kept
https://haus-taylor.com/exhibition/what-we-kept/

08/29/2026

WHAT WE KEPT | WHAT STILL SINGS
A story from Luther Taylor

Sometimes you sit down with somebody you have known your whole life and discover there are still stories you have never heard. My Uncle Leroy turns 89 this Sunday.

I went to see him because I wanted to hear about the old Gretsch Country Gentleman he bought from Buddy’s Music Shop in Baptist Valley sometime around 1968.

Then he started talking.

Uncle Leroy told me that back then, he was playing bass with Darnell Miller, a young musician from nearby Bland County who would go on to build a remarkable career in country music. But then Leroy added another piece. Buddy was there too.

And according to Leroy, the Buddy he remembers playing with was the same Buddy who owned Buddy’s Music Shop in Baptist Valley.

Suddenly that little music store became more than a place where somebody bought a guitar.

It was part of the music scene itself.

These were musicians playing Tazewell, Richlands, Bluefield, Princeton and communities throughout the mountains. They knew one another. They played together. They traded stories. They bought instruments from one another.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, Leroy walked into Buddy’s Music Shop and bought that Gretsch. He still has it. Nearly seventy years later, I sat in his living room and watched him play it. Then he pulled out his old dobro and played “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

And at that moment, What We Kept made perfect sense to me.

We didn't keep Buddy’s Music Shop.
We didn't keep every stage they played.
We didn't keep every Saturday night, every band or every musician who passed through those rooms.
But some things survived.
The guitar survived.
The dobro survived.
The stories survived.
And Uncle Leroy is still here to tell them.

You can still find him playing his dobro on Saturday mornings right here in Tazewell. At almost 89 years old, the love of music never left him.

Maybe that's what we kept.
We may not have kept Buddy’s Music Shop.

But what came through its doors still sings.

— Luther Taylor

Visit Tazewell County Presents
WHAT WE KEPT
An Interactive Community Memory Archive
Haus of Taylor Gallery | Tazewell, Virginia

08/26/2026

I love this photo of Libby dressed like Dolly because it makes me smile—and because it feels like such a sweet little tribute to a woman who made art out of where she came from.

But there is also a magical part of Dolly’s story that makes this quote feel even more meaningful.

Dolly once said:
“My art is painting a picture through music. David paints his on canvas…”

She was talking about artist David Diskin, who listened to eight of Dolly’s songs and translated them into paintings for the Dolly Parton: From the HeART collection. The project celebrated Dolly’s 50th anniversary as a member of the Grand Ole Opry, and the paintings were created in partnership with the Opry and Kirkland’s, with proceeds benefiting the Opry Trust Fund.

Think about how beautiful that is.

Dolly wrote songs that painted pictures in people’s minds—and then another artist took those songs and painted them on canvas.

Her music became visual art.

That is the part I love most. Dolly understood that art does not have to stay in one form. A song can become a painting. A painting can bring a story back to life. A dress, a photograph, a quilt, a garden, a handmade object, or a child pretending to be someone she admires can all carry a little piece of meaning.

That is why this photo of Libby feels so special to me.

It is playful, of course. It makes me smile. But it also feels like a tiny meeting place for music, fashion, photography, storytelling, and memory, and I love that Haus of Taylor helped bring that vision to life.

Dolly took the mountains, the people, the heartache, the humor and the beauty of home and turned them into songs the whole world could see.

She reminded us that Appalachian people have always been artists. Sometimes the canvas was a quilt, a porch, a garden, a hymn, a story—or three chords and the truth.

Sometimes the art was in the way someone fixed a room, dressed for church, arranged flowers, cooked for a crowd or told a story so well that everyone at the table could see it happening.

Dolly showed us that where you come from doesn’t limit what you can create.

Sometimes, it is exactly where the art begins.

08/22/2026

Her love for this place shows in everything she does.

Our director celebrated her birthday yesterday, and she could have stayed anywhere. Where did she choose? The Farmhouse Suite at Haus of Taylor, right here on Historic Main Street in Tazewell, Virginia.

That says something about the place, but it says even more about her heart.

Here’s to many more birthdays, and thank you for continuing to inspire our Southwest Virginia artist community. We are grateful for you.

08/19/2026

There are performances that make you appreciate a musician — and then there are performances that make you rethink what an instrument is capable of doing.

Watch Stanley Jordan perform “Eleanor Rigby” at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1986. Instead of playing guitar conventionally, Jordan uses his extraordinary two-handed touch technique, treating the fretboard almost like a pianist treats a keyboard — melody, harmony and bass unfolding beneath both hands at once.

And understand this: that man is coming to Tazewell County, Virginia.

Stanley Jordan is a four-time Grammy-nominated artist whose groundbreaking Magic Touch spent an astonishing 51 weeks at #1 on Billboard’s jazz chart. He has performed around the world and alongside some of the greatest musicians of his generation.

But on Friday, August 28, you won’t have to travel to Newport, New York, Nashville, or some major metropolitan concert hall to experience him.

You can walk through the doors of Wayfarer Appalachia, right here in Tazewell, Virginia, and see Stanley Jordan perform in the intimacy of the Velvet Room. The show runs from 7–9 PM, and tickets are on sale now. That is something worth recognizing.

Great music doesn’t always have to happen somewhere else. Sometimes the extraordinary comes right up Main Street in Southwest Virginia.

Stanley Jordan
Wayfarer Appalachia — The Velvet Room
Friday, August 28, 2026 | 7 PM
Tazewell, Virginia

If you’ve never seen what Stanley Jordan can do with a guitar, watch “Eleanor Rigby.” Then imagine experiencing it from a few feet away. This one is special, Tazewell County.

Experience a revolutionary take on a Beatles classic with Stanley J...

08/18/2026

Our daughter was in Sedona the other day and photographed the little chapel at Tlaquepaque Arts & Shopping Village.

I looked at the photograph and knew almost immediately what caught her eye. And I smiled, because I think her eye is becoming a lot like mine.

When she was younger, Saturdays were often ours. We would grab the cameras and wander all over Raleigh looking for something worth stopping for. Sometimes she was my subject. Sometimes she carried a camera herself. Somewhere along the way she went from being the kid standing on the other side of my lens to becoming my student.

Although I’m not sure either one of us ever called it that.

You just walk, you look, you wait on the light, and eventually you learn that photography isn't really about pointing a camera at something beautiful. It's learning to recognize the thing everybody else walked past.

Now she's clear across the country in Sedona, Arizona, and I'm sitting here looking at what she decided was worth stopping for.

That gets a father.

Tlaquepaque itself was created in the early 1970s by Abe Miller, inspired by the old artisan villages of Mexico. He and architect Bob McIntyre traveled through Mexico studying those places and bringing back carved doors, ironwork, tile and other pieces made by craftsmen. The little chapel she photographed grew from that vision—a place deliberately built to feel as though it had been there much longer than it actually had.

Maybe that's part of why she saw it: the texture, the age, the shadows, the craftsmanship, and that little bit of imperfection that makes something feel alive. Those are the things I would have stopped for too.

I still have enough pride in me that I'm not going to admit she's a better photographer than her old man just yet. A father can't surrender that easily.

But there's a strange thing about being a dad. There are very few people in this world you genuinely hope will become better than you. Your children are different.

With them, being surpassed doesn't feel much like losing. It feels like winning.

Because somewhere in her photograph is a Saturday afternoon in Raleigh twenty years ago. Somewhere in the way she framed that chapel is a conversation we had walking down some street with cameras hanging around our necks. Somewhere in the fraction of a second when she decided, right there... that's it, might be a little piece of what I taught her.

And then she added her own eye to it.

That's the part I love most.

Someday she may be standing in Sedona, or Paris, or some little town neither of us has ever heard of yet, and she'll lift a camera because something about the light made her stop. I'll probably be hundreds or thousands of miles away, but a little piece of my passion will be standing there with her.

And when that shutter clicks, something we shared all those Saturdays ago keeps traveling.

I can live with her becoming better than me.

Eventually.

She's still going to have to prove it.

08/17/2026

WHEN THE TRAIN STOPPED IN TAZEWELL
There are so many people in this photograph. That may be what gets me more than the locomotive.

Look past the great steam engine for a minute. Look at the men standing beside the tracks. The families gathered around the depot. The automobiles lined up along the road. Somebody is arriving. Somebody is leaving. Somebody is waiting on somebody they love.

For a long stretch of Tazewell’s history, this was one of the places where life happened.

Before the railroad came, Tazewell was still very much a mountain courthouse town. The old turnpikes were our connection to the outside world. Then, in the 1880s, Norfolk & Western began pushing its Clinch Valley Line through these mountains, following the Clinch River toward the coalfields.

The tracks reached Tazewell in 1888. And almost immediately, things changed.

The station was built down along the Clinch at a place people knew as Kelly’s Mill, about a mile and a half below the courthouse. There had been a mill and a handful of buildings there. Then the railroad came.

Stores opened. Warehouses went up. A sawmill appeared. Houses followed. Kelly’s Mill became North Tazewell.

Within months the railroad was reporting heavy freight traffic and good passenger business. Before long this little depot was handling far more than coal. Cattle came down from the farms. Timber came out of these mountains. There was limestone, sheep wool, poultry, eggs and butter headed to markets that had suddenly become reachable.

The depot had telegraph service. There were stock pens beside the tracks. Warehouses grew around it. A lumber yard came. Standard Oil had a facility nearby. Across from the station there would eventually be the Clinchview Hotel, stores, a drugstore, a post office, a restaurant and even a movie theatre.

And if you arrived in Tazewell by train, you didn't necessarily stop here. For ten cents, you could climb aboard Tazewell's little streetcar and ride from the depot up the Car Line toward Main Street.

At first it was pulled by a horse or mule. In 1904 it became electric, giving Tazewell the remarkable distinction of being called the smallest town in America with an electric streetcar.

Think about that scene for a moment. A steam locomotive easing into North Tazewell. Freight being unloaded. Cattle in the stock pens. Telegraph messages coming and going. A hotel across the way. People carrying bags toward the trolley. And that little electric car climbing back toward Main Street.

This wasn't some sleepy outpost. This was Tazewell's front door.

By the years before World War I, there were four passenger trains a day stopping here. Business became so substantial that the original wooden depot simply wasn't enough anymore.

And there is another part of this history I love. The brick depot that survives today wasn't simply handed to Tazewell by the railroad. Local people pushed for it.

After World War I, members of the local American Legion and Tazewell's coal operators, lumbermen and livestock shippers argued that this community deserved a larger, modern passenger station. Norfolk & Western fought the requirement. Tazewell fought back.

The case went before the State Corporation Commission. N&W even appealed. Tazewell won.

And in 1928, the beautiful brick passenger depot we still have today was built beside the older wooden freight station.

That's a pretty Appalachian story in itself. Sometimes you have to remind somebody that the little mountain town at the end of their railroad is producing an awful lot of what makes their railroad profitable.

But if we are going to love our history, we ought to love it enough to tell the whole thing. The 1928 station was also built during Jim Crow. Black passengers had a separate waiting room and ticket booth.

That was part of daily life here too. History doesn't become less valuable when we acknowledge its failures. I think it becomes more human.

And then, almost quietly, the world began changing.

The first warning may have been the automobile. By 1933, buses and automobiles had taken enough passengers away that Tazewell's little streetcar made its final run.

After World War II, automobile ownership exploded. Roads improved. Trucks began doing work that once belonged almost exclusively to railroads. Passenger trains became fewer. The crowds got smaller.

By 1957, the old 1888 wooden depot was no longer needed and was torn down. The brick passenger station was modified to handle freight too. Only two passenger trains remained.

One of them had become a flag stop — the train stopped only if somebody was actually waiting to board.

There is something almost heartbreaking about that. A place that once helped determine where an entire community grew had reached the point where a train might simply pass it by.

Then came Saturday, April 4, 1959. Norfolk & Western ran the final passenger train over the Clinch Valley Line. People gathered at the Tazewell station one more time. And then passenger rail in Tazewell was over.

Freight kept the depot alive for another fifteen years. Finally, in 1974, the station closed altogether.

The Town of Tazewell's own history marks that year as the end of North Tazewell's time as the community's commercial hub.

I think that's worth sitting with. Because towns rarely change in one dramatic moment.

They change when the trolley quits running. When there are four trains instead of two. Then one train only stops when somebody waves it down. The hotel gets quieter. The warehouses don't need as many men. Commerce moves toward the highway. And eventually a place that everybody once had a reason to go becomes a place everybody remembers going.

Thankfully, we didn't lose all of it.

The brick Tazewell Depot survived. Of the 29 depots that once served the 103-mile Clinch Valley Line between Bluefield and Norton, only two remain — and Tazewell's is the only surviving brick depot on that line.

The Town eventually brought it home and restored it.

I'm grateful for that. Because when I look at photographs like this, I don't really see railroad history.

I see people history.

Somebody standing in this photograph probably kissed their mother goodbye here. Somebody came home here. Some farmer watched a year's worth of work leave those stock pens headed toward a market he could never have reached a generation earlier.

Some child probably stood close enough to that locomotive to feel the ground shake and remembered it for the rest of his life.

And thousands of ordinary people walked across these tracks without ever imagining that someday we would study a photograph of them and try to understand the world they knew.

That's what old places can do for us.

They remind us that before history becomes history, it is just Tuesday morning somewhere — and people are busy living it.

Tazewell, Virginia. Our mountains. Our people. Our story.

And for a while, one of the ways the whole world reached us was right here beside the Clinch River.