The Moonshiner's Newsletter

Born in 1911 and raised along little Horse Creek, he was the youngest of eight children. Frank's father, Avery Blevins, was an accomplished fiddler who exposed his children to the traditional music of the Lost Provinces. By the age of six Frank was teaching...

Whitter was a millhand from a cotton mill town, Fries, Virginia, in Grayson Counthy, near the head of the New River Valley. That county and neighborning Carroll county produced many early string band musicians and Whitter was the first from there to record....

Gilliam Banmon Grayson was known to most residents of northeastern Tennessee as "Banmon" when these recordings were made. He was born in Ashe County, N.C. on November 11, 1887. His family moved a few miles west when he was two years old, into Johnson...

Hobart Smith was born in Smyth County, Virginia, on May 10, 1897. He was the oldest of four brothers in a family of eight children born to King and Louvine Smith. Hobart says that his is the seventh generation of Smiths in Virginia since his ancestors...

Fred Cockerham, one of the seven children of Elias and Betty Jane Cockerham, was born on November 3, 1905. He was the only one from the Round Peak community to attempt the difficult life of a professional rural musician. The way that Fred began playing...

In a West Virginia hollow, mountain music thrives. Linda and Lester McCumbers carry on an oral tradition from a time when, as Lester puts it, 'music was something that you made'. CALHOUN COUNTY, W.Va. -- After burying their son Roger, music didn't sit...

Tom Clarence Ashley From the time of Tom Clarence Ashley's birth, he was surrounded by the old-time music and the ballads that had traveled the Atlantic along with America's early settlers. The Ashley family came to America from Ireland before the turn...

Of the founding fathers and mothers of country music and bluegrass, Charlie Poole has remained a shadowy figure until now. Born in rural North Carolina in 1892, Poole packed several lifetimes of hard and fast living into his 39 years. Textile mill worker,...

Josh and Henry Reed, ca. 1903. James Henry Neel Reed, known as Henry Reed, was born on April 28, 1884, in Monroe County, West Virginia, a rural county lying along the Virginia border in the Appalachian Mountains of southeastern West Virginia. His parents...

"The High Lonesome Sound" will generate thought and discussion in numerous courses in American studies, folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, the arts and humanities, sociology, and filmmaking. It was produced by renowned filmmaker and musician...