The Pondering Bascom Performing Arts and Education Center, a new organization dedicated to Appalachian traditional arts, regional history, and sustainable lifestyle practices, has been founded at the Leicester, North Carolina, homeplace of banjo player and music collector Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882 – 1973). The organization “will follow in Bascom’s footsteps by providing an intimate community gathering space for performance, promotion, education and hands-on workshops at his old homestead,” while also “preserving Bascom’s home, his life’s work, and his legacy for future generations.” More inf ..read more

The Birmingham, Alabama, Southern Music Research Center, founded in 2023 by folklorist and music historian Burgin Mathews, is “a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization devoted to the documentation, preservation, and public presentation of the American South’s diverse music histories and ongoing forms of musical expression.” In April, its new website will debut with “the Southern Music Research Center Digital Archive […] a free public database of materials – including photographs, rare recordings, oral histories, and visual art – documenting the broadest range of musical expression in the So ..read more

This year will mark the 96th annual Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, and 57th year of the concert series Shindig on the Green, in Asheville, North Carolina. Judy Miller, a member of the Folk Heritage Committee which directs the events, shares this tribute. During both the good times and the crises faced by this country over nearly a century, here in western North Carolina there has been at least one constant, a yearly respite from the worries of the region and the nation. The brainchild of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, then a young man from South Turkey Creek, the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival wa ..read more

The Brooklyn Folk Festival will celebrate three major anniversaries at this year’s festival, to be held November 10 – 12 at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn. The 2023 gathering will mark the 15th anniversary of the festival’s founding. It will also include special concerts, workshops, and panel discussions, in partnership with and to mark the 75th anniversary of Folkways Records. Films and other special events will also mark the 100th birthday of music collector Harry Smith, compiler of the Archive of American Folk Music. Details and updates can be found at brooklynfolkfest.com. The post Brooklyn ..read more

Traditional music is central to the history of Ashe County, North Carolina. From its inception, the county has produced talented musicians, most rooted in folk and traditional forms, and many of these musicians have been able, through skill and good fortune, to reach audiences beyond the local area. Ashe County natives like Frank Blevins, Al Hopkins, Howard Miller, and G.B. Grayson all made notable contributions to the earliest days of country music. Herb Hooven, a native of West Jefferson, became an influential fiddler in the Boston bluegrass scene of the 1960s, playing with Bill Keith and th ..read more

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) has released its first-ever album, presenting an international collection of pre-1923 recordings. Some of the material has not been available since it was first released, while other tracks are represented with better sound quality than ever before. The CD is paired with a special Winter 2021 issue of the ARSC Journal, which focuses on US public domain and contains detailed essays on each of the 27 tracks, as well as color images of rare labels and other documents from the pre-1923 era. The ARSC Journal is a semi-annual, peer-reviewed publi ..read more

Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwestern Ohio’s Musical Legacy Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison, editors Ohio is not the first place that comes to mind when one thinks of bluegrass music. However, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, southwestern Ohio became a stronghold for the style. Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwestern Ohio’s Musical Legacy, published in 2021 by the University of Illinois Press, collects a series of essays that explain how this region developed a thriving bluegrass scene that both attracted and fostered its own national touring bands, such as the Osborne Brothers ..read more

Naomi “Omie” Wise: Here Life, Death and Legend by Hal E. Pugh and Eleanor Minnock-Pugh “Greedy girl goes to Adam’s Spring with liar; lives just long enough to regret it.” That’s Harry Smith’s acerbic summary of “Ommie Wise,” from the notes to his Anthology of American Folk Music, an unsentimental take on a history that, as the authors of this detailed volume point out, lent itself to a variety of sentimental posturing. Naomi Wise, their research shows, was no romantic heroine, hardly innocent, probably not beautiful, certainly not refined, none of which matters at all in the light of her suffe ..read more

You don’t run into too many recordings by traditional musicians that include a “Ballad for Edward Thomas,” the English poet, friend to Robert Frost, casualty of the concussion of an exploding shell on a battlefield in France in 1917. But then you don’t run into too many traditional musicians with Dudley Laufman’s experiences. A 2009 National Heritage Fellow, a performer at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan went electric, a dance caller since high school, a founding figure in the New England Contra Dance scene, the ringleader of the well-recorded Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra ..read more

The subtitle of this very enjoyable CD is “A daughter’s take on her father’s tunes.” Madeline Levy’s introductory essay, liner notes, and her fiddling style, all emphasize the tradition from which the tunes on this all-instrumental album derive. Her father, Bertram Levy, was playing many of these tunes with the Hollow Rock String Band fifty years ago. The elder Levy learned them directly from musicians such as Henry Reed, Oscar Wright, Earl Collins, and H.O. Jenkins. However, the tunes go farther back in oral and written tradition: Reed learned many of his tunes from Quince Dillon in the 19th ..read more