West Virginia Department of Commerce The Mountain State's Latin music connection

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The Mountain State's Latin music connection



Mountains of Talent
By Andrea B. Bond

Eduardo Canelón, a native of Venezuela, was 9 when he moved to Elkins with his mother, who had been awarded a scholarship to Davis & Elkins College. Their new home was reminiscent of their city in the Andes Mountains, he said.
“She liked the small town and she loved the mountains here in West Virginia. They reminded her a little bit of Mérida” he said, referring to the city in the Andes Mountains from where they originated.

Canelón has played guitar since he was a child. He started with the cuatro, a four-stringed Venezuelan instrument. In high school he pursued a standard musical route – rock and roll – playing backup guitar and singing lead in a garage band led by his older brother.

“I got out of it for eight years,” he said. “I worked lumber mills and several different types of jobs for awhile. That’s when I felt like something was missing and I went back to playing guitar.”

It was another Venezuelan – a student at Davis & Elkins – who introduced Canelón to classical guitar and the music of Venezuelan composer Antonio Lauro. He found he really enjoyed the style.

“I didn't know classical, the whole finger-picking style; I knew what I knew by ear. So I just picked it up and started playing. He said, ‘You should get a guitar.’ That was 10 years ago. We decided to start a Latin band.”

Canelón met his wife, Beth Segessenman, through the music community, and the couple eventually settled in Charleston. She teaches music in Kanawha County Schools and plays flute and auxiliary percussion in the couple’s two bands: Comparsa, an acoustic world beat ensemble; and Dúo Divertido, a Latin jazz duet.

Beth Segessenman and Eduardo CanelonSegessenman was born in Philadelphia and came to the Mountain State by way of West Virginia University. She had an aunt and uncle who lived near Morgantown, and she recalls fond memories of visiting them as a child.

“The first time I came to West Virginia, I was about 7 years old, and it made a big impression on me. I was just really infatuated with the mountains,” Segessenman said.

She graduated from WVU with a degree in music education and moved out of state to teach. “But I felt West Virginia drawing me back like a magnet,” she said.

Her roots lie in classical music, but it didn’t take long to expand her repertoire.

“I was turned on to Jethro Tull in high school; that’s when I became aware there was a whole world of flute outside of classical music,” she said, adding that once she began to experiment with other genres, she found a style of music that was a good fit.


“In Morgantown, I had played reggae and funk, and was looking for a non-classical outlet for performing. None of those worked as well as Comparsa does for me because they all used electric guitar, which was a lot harder to cut through with the flute,” she explained.

She found the flute fit better with the nylon strings of the acoustic guitar in Latin American music, and the rest, as they say, is history. Comparsa has performed on “Mountain Stage” and recorded an original CD while Dúo Divertido remains active in the dinner music setting.

Segessenman and Canelón also enjoy leading educational workshops and sharing their musical knowledge. Canelón has collaborated with the West Virginia Symphony to record a CD-ROM for the state school system in which he talks about Latin American music and composers and demonstrates different styles of music. In addition, he and his wife have developed an all-ages program, “Latin America: Music, Culture and Dance,” in which they share their knowledge of instruments such as the cuatro and styles of music and dance including the bolero, merengue and salsa.

“We want to expose them to something they don't get to see a lot of,” Canelón said.

Segessenman agreed: “There are so many varieties of rhythm and dance styles … so many different countries and subgroups within the Latin American culture.”

“I love to travel, and to me the next-best thing to traveling is learning about different places,” she added. “I like to try and plant that seed for other people to be transported by the music.”

Learn more at: www.latinmusicwv.com.