The photo above appears as part of Visualizing American Roots Music, an exhibit presented by the Southern Folklife Collection of twenty rare and unique photographs of iconic musicians. On view in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of the Wilson Special Collections Library through Dec. 31, 2013.
Found this brilliantly colored and designed Columbia folk music catalog from 1952 in the Southern Folklife Collection Discographical Files (collection #30014) while doing some searching for a patron. The catalog is not what I was looking for, but you can probably tell why it caught my eye.
Don’t forget, the Southern Folklife Collection Steel Guitar Symposium and Concert is coming up this Saturday, March 23 at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro, NC. Tickets are available now. More information below. Check in tomorrow to Field Trip South for some steel driving tunes from the SFC.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Earl Wynn Theater
The ArtsCenter
300-G East Main St
Carrboro, NC 27510
Sponsored by the Southern Folklife Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Symposium:
2pm: Lectures by scholars John Troutman and Tim Miller
3:30pm: Musical conversation with Allyn Love and Cindy Cashdollar
Symposium is free and open to the public.
Concert:
8:00pm: Chris Scruggs and His Steel Guitar
9:00pm: Cindy Cashdollar with Bill Kirchen and Too Much Fun
Concert tickets are required for admission.
Single: $15
ArtsCenter Friends and UNC Students, Staff & Faculty: $8
Day of Show: $19
For tickets call: 919.929.2787 ext. 201
The photo above appears as part of Visualizing American Roots Music, an exhibit presented by the Southern Folklife Collection of twenty rare and unique photographs of iconic musicians. On view in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of the Wilson Special Collections Library through Dec. 31, 2013.
The photo above appears as part of Visualizing American Roots Music, an exhibit presented by the Southern Folklife Collection of twenty rare and unique photographs of iconic musicians. On view in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of the Wilson Special Collections Library through Dec. 31, 2013.
The Southern Folklife Collection takes great pleasure in curating exhibits of collection material for spaces across the UNC campus and especially in The Wilson Special Collections Library. It’s exciting to share the artifacts and fieldwork–music, memorabilia, images, publications, film and video–assembled in the SFC and encourage conversations about our cultural past, present and future.
Our current exhibit, Visualizing American Roots Music, features twenty rare and unique photographs of iconic musicians. The photographs showcase a wide spectrum of American Roots Music—ranging from the blues, bluegrass, and country, to rock and roll—and highlight its popular and commercial development over the last century. The exhibit is currently on view in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of the Wilson Special Collections Library through Dec. 31, 2013, and starting today will be on view via Field Trip South. We recognize that some of you may not be able to visit us in Chapel Hill, so we are exited to make the exhibit available digitally for our remote researchers and patrons. We will post one image from the Visualizing American Roots Music, Monday through Friday, for the next four weeks. Comments are welcome.
The Wilson Special Collections Library is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays, and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. The Pleasants Family Assembly Room is not available at all times. Call (919) 962-0104 for exhibit availability.
Another research query to share this week. I found the Standard Program Library 16-inch transcription disc pictured above, call number TR1180 from the Southern Folklife Collection Transcription Discs (#30024), while assisting a patron searching for a recording of a track called “Mussin’ Frets,” a novelty guitar instrumental by the excellent Prairie Ramblers [bio by Greensboro, NC resident Eugene Chadbourne!]. The group coalesced in the 1930s appearing on numerous radio stations before settling down at WLS in Chicago. Featuring mandolinist Charles Chick Hurt, bassist “Happy” Jack Taylor, fiddler Tex Atchison, and Floyd “Salty” Holmes, a multi-instrumentalist and master of the harmonica, the group rose to fame after partnering up with a young Patsy Montana. Comfortable jumping from old-time stringband music, to country, to western swing, they went on to appear in numerous cowboy films with Gene Autry and other singing cowboys before splitting up for good in 1947 (well after Montana left to pursue her solo career). But back to the disc, Here’s “Huckleberry Picnic” to wet your whistle.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Unfortunately, we were unable to locate “Mussin’ Frets,” but fortunately we were able to digitze TR1180 to share with you fine readers and listeners. These recordings feature a Post-War incarnation of the Prairie Ramblers, aka The Westernaires at this time, after Atchison and Holmes had left the band. Rusty Gill, the vocalist on this disc, including the classic cowboy number “Ridin’ Old Paint in the Sky,” was married to Carolyn DeZurik of the remarkable DeZurik Sisters. If any of you have any information about “Mussin’ Frets,’ please do let us know.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Thanks to a recent correspondence with a descendant of Iver Edwards, ukelele player for The Stoneman Family band [pictured below], we have changed the caption of our original post of this photo in 2010 to include the correct spelling Edwards’s first name. The correct spelling is “Iver Edwards,” rather than “Ives Edwards” as we originally posted. Many thanks to all the readers that help us with our work.
Taken in Galax, Virginia, in 1928. From left to right: Iver Edwards, George Stoneman, Eck Dunford, Ernest Stoneman, Hattie Stoneman, and Balen Frost.
The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax
Friday, Feb. 22, 2013
Wilson Special Collections Library
5:30 p.m. Program | Pleasants Family Assembly Room
Free and open to the public
Information: Liza Terll, Friends of the Library, (919) 548-1203
Folklorist Alan Lomax, who recorded music of the American South in the 1930s and 1940s, will be the subject of an evening of lectures and performances Friday, Feb. 22, at the Wilson Special Collections Library.
Lomax’s daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, and Grammy Award-winning music writer Tom Piazza will discuss The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax (W.W. Norton, 2012). The book features largely unpublished images of Southern blues and folk musicians, church worshippers, and workers from Lomax’s tour through backcountry Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee taken between Aug. 1959 and May 1960. The book also includes an essay by Piazza.
UNC professor Bill Ferris, who wrote an introduction to the book, will introduce Lomax Wood and Piazza, along with the evening’s other speakers and performers: Columbia University Professor John Szwed, author of Alan Lomax: the Man who Recorded the World (Viking Penguin, 2010); archivist, musician, and curator of the Alan Lomax ArchiveNathan Salsburg; and musician Rayna Gellert.
Piazza is the author of ten books, including Devil Sent the Rain (HarperPerennial, 2011) and Why New Orleans Matters (HarperPerennial, 2008). He is currently a writer for the HBO television show Treme.
Lomax Wood is director of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), a center established to explore and preserve the world’s expressive traditions.
The lecture is co-sponsored by the Friends of the Library, the UNC Department of American Studies, the Center for the Study of the American South, the Southern Folklife Collection, and the UNC Department of Music.