Bluegrass music.

Abstract

Records documenting the Celebration of Traditional Music, an annual event striving to represent homemade music passed on from person to person in the Appalachian Region and the musicians who play it.

Abstract Homer C. Ledford was an instrument maker and bluegrass musician from Winchester, Kentucky who specialized in making dulcimers, banjos, and mandolins. He was born in Alpine, Tennessee, where he started building instruments at an early age. At age eighteen he became a student at John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina and eventually went on to Berea College, and what is now Eastern Kentucky University where he graduated in 1954. Ledford taught industrial arts at George...

Abstract Growing up in low country South Carolina in the 1930s and 1940s, Jim Smoak immersed himself in the music of his family and of the live radio broadcasts to which they listened.  Smoak especially admired the innovative banjo playing of Snuffy Jenkins, whom he heard daily on Columbia’s WIS Station.  Jenkins would become a family friend and mentor, inspiring Smoak to pursue work as a banjo player.  Smoak would become one of the first generation of banjo players to bring three-finger style to...

Scope and Contents This collection is comprised of bluegrass music performance recordings from the Cincinnati / Dayton, Ohio area, Kentucky, and Virginia, 1973-1980. The recordings were donated to Berea by Lukas Murphy. They were made by his father, Ron Murphy who provided the sound for the events. Venues include bluegrass music festivals, college campus concerts, and bars. These recordings help document the thriving bluegrass music scene that had developed in the industrial region of Cincinnati, Dayton,...