West Virginia

West Virginia native to take ‘America’s Got Talent’ stage

Published

2 years ago

May 26, 2023

West Virginia native to take ‘America’s Got Talent’ stage

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) – A musician with roots in Appalachia will share his talent on the national stage next week.

Philip Bowen has been playing the fiddle all his life and now he’s sharing his love of old-time music on America’s Got Talent.

The Montgomery native wears a WV on his hat with pride. It’s one of the many hats he wears every day.

“I’m a singer and a songwriter, I’ve been playing the fiddle my whole life. I do the artist thing, I do the fiddle thing.”

A fiddle player, a husband, a father of three – those are the foundations of Bowen’s life. His music is the soundtrack of it.

“I’ve been playing the fiddle since I was like four,” said Bowen. “I used to go to Vandalia gathering every year, and my dad would walk me up to musicians and I would just start playing with everybody.”

It’s always been Bowen’s dream to make a career out of his music.(WSAZ/ NBC’s America’s Got Talent)

It’s always been Bowen’s dream to make a career out of his music. In 2019, he chose the right time to go for it.

“COVID happened and the whole world shut down, so I started to do it online because I wanted to do it for real and it just changed my whole life,” said Bowen.

You may have seen him on your For You page on Tik Tok, playing covers of songs in which you wouldn’t normally hear the fiddle along with some original music.

“Got a few followers on there, we hit like a million the other day, so that’s very surreal,” said Bowen.

His efforts on Tik Tok are paying off, because his next adventure is much bigger.

Bowen is taking his skills to America’s Got Talent.

“I went for it this year, and I got invited to go out to Pasadena, California to film it,” said Bowen. “I was out there for a week doing filming, and the audition, which is what you’ll see on TV, the audition in front of the judges.”

“It was a really cool experience to be able to do the Pasadena part was incredible,” said Bowen.

“I wanted to do something maybe a little bit unexpected, so when you see this 100-year-old wooden fiddle and somebody coming up from West Virginia, you may have a certain expectation about what you’re about to experience. My goal with the audition was to show them something they hadn’t seen before in a way they hadn’t seen before.”

A new perspective on music, because Bowen hears and senses music differently than most people do. It’s what experts have told him is called synesthesia.

“The reason I close my eyes so much is because I experience it very visually, almost like colors. If you’re trying to recreate a painting layer by layer, like there’s some red, there’s some colorful things at the top that are like the melody, those are maybe bright things to me. I try to have a conversation with the song.”

You can see the soul in the way he plays, and his soul, he says, belongs in Appalachia.

“West Virginia is still a big part of my life, I’m here all the time, most of my family is still here. To me, it’s a special place that can often be misunderstood.”

Bowen has played big stages far and wide, but you know what they say about country roads.

“Sometimes the further you get from home the more you realize what you had when you were there,” said Bowen. “At whatever scale it happens for me, I enjoy I can be proud of where I’m from.”

Bowen’s first album, called “Old Kanawha” after the Kanawha River, debuts later this summer. To find out how he did in his audition on America’s Got Talent, you can tune in right here on WSAZ on Tuesday evening.

Keep checking the WSAZ app for the latest information.

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West Virginia

Travis Trickett Set to Return to West Virginia, Join Rich Rodriguez’s Coaching Staff

Published

3 hours ago

January 6, 2025

Press Room

Travis Trickett Set to Return to West Virginia, Join Rich Rodriguez’s Coaching Staff

Rich Rodriguez is putting the finishing touches to his coaching staff at West Virginia and he was able to reel in one member of the Trickett family. According to Matt Zenitz of 247 Sports, the Mountaineers are expected to hire Travis Trickett. Details of the role have not been announced at this moment.

Trickett was a student assistant on Rodriguez’s staff at WVU from 2003-06 before becoming a grad assistant at Alabama. From 2008-10, he served as a grad assistant on the same staff as his father, Rick, at Florida State under Bobby Bowden and Jimbo Fisher. He landed his first full-time coaching gig as the tight ends coach at Samford which he parlayed into a promotion, earning the offensive coordinator title there. Trickett then spent time at Florida Atlantic (2016) and Georgia State (2017-18) as a quarterbacks coach/offensive coordinator before making his return to Morgantown.

In 2019, Trickett was hired as a part of Neal Brown’s initial staff, coaching the inside receivers and tight ends for three seasons. During his time in Morgantown, Trickett was one of the team’s top recruiters, specifically in Florida and Georgia. He left WVU to become the offensive coordinator at South Florida in 2022 and has spent the last two seasons as the offensive coordinator at Coastal Carolina.

West Virginia

Wintry mix slams West Virginia, with more accumulation and cold temps still coming – WV MetroNews

Published

10 hours ago

January 6, 2025

Press Room

Wintry mix slams West Virginia, with more accumulation and cold temps still coming – WV MetroNews

A winter storm that barreled into West Virginia dropped snow and ice across the state, making travel treacherous and knocking out power to thousands of residents in southern counties.

“Mother nature pretty well threw the kitchen sink at us last night,” state Transportation Secretary Jimmy Wriston said.

Forecasters predicted another wave of one to three inches of accumulation in the hours ahead and extremely cold temperatures at midweek.

“There’s a low behind this system that’s going to ride right behind it — wrap around; we’re going to get colder air injection and all the rain or whatever wintry mix precipitation that we have leftover is going to pretty much turn into all snow from west to east,” said National Weather Service meteorologist James Zvolensky.

Then, Zvolensky told MetroNews, “We’re going to get really cold Wednesday night, Thursday night, even Friday night — down to single digits most of the areas.”

As of 9 a.m., Appalachian Power reported outages to43,000 West Virginia customers. The power company described complications from heavy accumulations of ice and snow coupled with low temperatures that can bring down utility poles, trees and limbs, resulting in a multi-day restoration event.

The power company also said extreme cold temperatures can cause line overload problems when trying to restore a large number of customers.

“In many cases, we must restore large outages in smaller groups, letting the electric load settle before restoring additional customers. Customers with outages can assist by turning off large electric users, such as heaters and water heaters until 15 or more minutes after power has been restored,” according to the power company.

Aside from emergency services, government activities were canceled everywhere. For example, legislative interim meetings that were supposed to start today were backed up until Tuesday. And Charleston Mayor Amy Goodwin’s State of the City address that had been set for tonight was instead put off until Thursday.

“We keep our eye to the sky,” Goodwin said on “The Dave Allen Show” on WCHS Radio. “We’ve got 17 salt trucks that have been working around the clock. When I say around the clock, I mean around the clock.”

Goodwin continued by saying, “We planned for this, but it’s Mother Nature and we live in Appalachia. So snow is always an issue, but it is the ice that snarls traffic and causes most of our accidents and the power outages that you see.

“We are getting ready for another system to come through.”

City of Charleston Public Works Director Brent Webster described “incredible challenges” because of the weather that has already hit.

“Last night was a pretty incredible snowstorm, and then of course it did exactly what was forecast: it turned over to ice around 10 or 11 p.m. and then it ran through early this morning and that has created some incredible challenges above and beyond just salting and plowing,” Webster told MetroNews.

“Now we have a lot of trees that went down. Many of them we’re clearing, but that’s taken away from our salting and plowing. Many others are in power lines, and of course AEP is a great partner, but of course we can’t work on downed, live lines.”

Webster continued, “It’s going to be a slow process. We’ve got more snow coming, I think one to three inches. It’s a bigger snowstorm than we’ve had for a while.”

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