Who Are We?

Mark Davis is the newest member of Bare Bones, the a cappella group known for the past 27 years as The Missing Person Soup Kitchen Gospel Quartet, or Soup Kitchen.

Mark is a resident of Charleston, West Virginia, and is well-known as a percussionist and singer to rock and pop audiences around West Virginia. He performs with the VooDoo Katz and the Latin band Comparsa. Many fans know him as the drummer for the legendary band, Crazy Jane. He is a 1997 graduate of West Virginia University where he majored in voice and percussion and was a member of the acclaimed African Drum and Dance Ensemble. In the summer of 2006, he studied percussion at the African International Center of Music and Dance, University of Ghana, West Africa. An adjunct professor of music at the University of Charleston, he is a certified Orff instructor, which comes in handy on his day job as music specialist for Elk Elementary School in Elkview, WV. The Orff method encourages children to use their natural intuition when it comes to rhythm and melody, so it’s perfect preparation for singing a cappella with Bare Bones.

“Mark seemed only moderately surprised when we handed him no charts, no music, only words,” says Becky Kimmons. “We sing entirely by ear, and come up with our arrangements intuitively, we told him. He didn’t flinch. He pulses with music, so he has picked up quickly on the broad repertoire of music we’ve handed him. When we recorded a version of Blind Alfred Reed’s ‘There’ll Be No Distinction There’ for the first CD to be produced by the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, the sound engineer said Mark’s voice reminded him of Mike Craver’s, the singer who made a major contribution to the distinctive sound of the early Red Clay Ramblers. Mark has the rhythm and pipes required to make a cappella music zing.”

Bill Kimmons came to traditional music accidentally, the same way he landed in West Virginia. Growing up in Statesville, North Carolina, he performed in musical theatre and choirs, and continued to perform as he traveled to Hawaii, California, and several stops in between. One January night in 1976 he found himself in the company of West Virginia musicians David Morris, Paul Salon, Tom King, and the Sweeney Brothers, an old-time harmony duo. It was his first night in West Virginia, his first experience with old-time music, and the first of many times he would add a coveted bass line to an impromptu singers’ jam. By the mid-90s, he was singing bass with Jenny Hawker, Kay Justice, and Tracy Schwarz in classes on four-part harmony and was often bass-at-large at the Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins, West Virginia.

Becky Kimmons spent her childhood years in and around Beckley, West Virginia, listening to the a cappella singing of her Primitive Baptist grandmother, Lily Basham Halstead.

“My grandmother sang only around the house, and usually only fragments of songs. I was in my mid-twenties when I first heard anyone else sing the way she did. I was introduced then to the music of the Hammons Family of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, and I realized that my grandmother sang in an ancient style. I loved that keening, blood curdling voice that was so similar to the singing of West Virginia's Maggie Hammons Parker, which I heard on a Library of Congress record. That same sound lives on in the voices of singers like Ralph Stanley, Larry Sparks, Hazel Dickens, and Ginny Hawker. As Ginny has often said, it’s not sweet singing, but it’s good singing.”

“I never sang in school choirs because when I opened my mouth to sing, I sounded an awful lot like my grandmother, and nobody else sounded that way. I moved my mouth in the high school girls’ Presbyterian church choir but didn’t dare make a sound for fear of being tossed out as a vocal terrorist. But like my grandmother, I sang up a storm at home, in the shower, and in the car by myself.

"By the mid 1970s, encouraged by the discovery of the wonderful singing of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard that was off any charts I knew of, I began to venture outside the house to sing with newfound friends who loved this crazy, charming old-time music.

"In 1980, I met and married Bill Kimmons, and we began singing with friends as the Soup Kitchen Gospel Quartet. The quartet was so often reduced to a trio that we gave up and became The Missing Person Soup Kitchen Gospel Quartet, and finally, simply Soup Kitchen.

"I often said that if we ever changed our name, we’d call ourselves No Longer the Missing Person Soup Kitchen Gospel Quartet, and I must say, that name is mighty tempting. But Bare Bones came to me recently, and there was no denying that it suits us perfectly. Bare Bones we are, and Bare Bones we will be.

“I’ve had the privilege of performing my granny ballad-style version of West Virginia’s official state song, “The West Virginia Hills,” for a Voice of America program, and I’ve enjoyed sharing principles of singing harmony by ear in many workshops. Aside from the pure joy of singing, the best part of our kind of music is the people we meet and the friends we’ve made. We hope that continues for a long, long time.”