MountainGrownMusic.org
Title
Mountain Grown Music - Traditional Mountain Music of Haywood County North Carolina
Description
Haywood County residents take great pride in their musical heritage. Many of the older generation worry about keeping such a rich tradition alive, especially as aging musicians and music historians die, taking with them an irreplaceable wealth of oral history. This website is the result of the work of a group of Haywood residents interested in preserving this musical heritage.
Early in 1996, The Enterprise Mountaineer published a series of articles on 14 local musicians and dancers and later republished as a tabloid "Legends of Mountain Music". This series of articles prompted the Haywood County Public Library to establish a task force of interested community groups and musicians charged with establishing an archival and circulating collection of recorded music and memorabilia from Haywood's past and present traditional artists. The partners for this project were: The Friends of the Library, the Haywood County Arts Council, the Smoky Mountain Folk Festival, The Enterprise Mountaineer, the Waynesville Historical Society, and the Haywood County Public Library Foundation.
The task force, that included Ken Wilson, Scott McLeod, Roy "French" Kirkpatrick, Joe Sam Queen, Jim Trantham, Todd Callaway, Michael Beadle, Katherine Armitage, Michael Youngwood, and Jennifer Pratt, met and collected materials over the next two years. The archive includes videotaped interviews, tapes, records, cds, photographs and other materials showcasing the talents of Haywood County's traditional musicians, dancers, and artists. In July 1999, the "Homegrown Music; a Haywood County Tradition" project was accepted into the Library of Congress's Local Legacies project. The task force compiled a cross section of the archived music and video interviews. This compilation included a written report, a copy of the Enterprise Mountaineer tabloid, and extensive liner notes.
