Featured Grants
Deep Traditions, New Expressions
Recent VFH Grants Explore Virginia’s Musical Heritage
Three recent grants from VFH, all awarded in December 2007, will result in new recordings, publications, and exhibits exploring Virginia’s music traditions and their continuing vitality in the present day.
Rockbridge Friends of Mountain Music and Dance
Rockbridge Friends of Mountain Music and Dance received a grant for interviews and video “field recordings” of traditional banjo players. The result will be a double music CD with in-depth liner notes and an accompanying DVD documenting various claw-hammer and picking styles whose roots extend back prior to the advent of Bluegrass music in the 1940s and ‘50s. The collection is mainly on younger players in their 30s and 40s, illustrating how this branch of the “roots music” of the southern Blue Ridge and Appalachian regions continues to evolve. The interviews and the liner notes will be written by Mike Seeger, himself a master of many musical styles and instruments (including the banjo), and one of the greatest living scholars of American traditional music and a 2006 Master Artist in the VFH Folklife Apprenticeship Program. This compilation will be published and distributed nationally by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College
Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College received support for an exhibit, an accompanying double-CD with extensive liner notes, and a related publication, all focusing on the history and musical and cultural impact of Rockabilly music in Virginia. Rockabilly is an engaging and often edgy blend of blues, country, and rock-and-roll that had its zenith in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, attracting a broad spectrum of enthusiastic listeners and profoundly influencing the later growth and development of rock-and-roll. Its influence continues to be felt today. The collection will include recordings by more than 50 Virginia Rockabilly artists, including one former member of the General Assembly; and many of the musicians who are still living have already been interviewed with support from a previous VFH grant.
The Lonesome Pine Office on Youth
The Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, in Big Stone Gap, recently received a grant which resulted in the production of a companion CD of contemporary Appalachian music that was released in tandem with the film series Appalachia which recently premiered on PBS with national distribution and superlative reviews. (Ten years ago, VFH provided funds to support research and script development for this four-part documentary film series.) Liner notes were written by Ted Olson, Director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University. The project director, Paul Kuczko, was the Executive Producer of the “Music of Coal” compilation, also supported by a grant from VFH (see VFH Views, Spring 2006). Kuczko is also the founder of Lonesome Records, which is the publisher of both collections.
All three of these projects will make extraordinary individual contributions to our understanding of Virginia’s musical traditions. Together, they offer listeners a rich trove of great music, and we encourage all our readers to take advantage of the pleasures these collections offer.
