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Where Have All the Fiddles Gone? Joseph Dinwiddie In October of 1996, 1 attended my first Celebration of Traditional Music festival held at Berea College. I had recently returned home to Kentucky, where I was born and raised, after five years of living in California and was thrilled to hear three days of the regional music I had sorely missed. The mixture of black gospel, bluegrass, country, folk, and old-timey music at the festival includes the very genres I enjoy the most, and at which I aspire to become better as a novice musician myself. After five years of listening to much ridicule about Kentucky and the South, I felt at home in Berea that weekend amidst the music of the region in which I had great pride. Four months later, I applied to Berea College in hopes of learning more about Southern Appalachia. One of my particular interests was to receive instruction on my principal instrument, the banjo, as well as in country-style piano and bluegrass harmony singing. Much to my surprise, none of these options were available through the music department of Berea College. The counties of Southern Appalachia and the state of Kentucky comprise a region with a rich heritage of folk, country, bluegrass, gospel, and old-timey music which are still popular genres today. Many schools and colleges in the region offer music lessons and group ensembles in these genres of music. However, with few exceptions, Berea College teaches exclusively classical music in the Western tradition. This is despite the fact that Berea draws 80 percent of its students from the region and has a stated mission of serving the needs of those students. Given this internal conflict, it may well be time for Berea College to reassess how well its music program is accomplishing the college's stated purpose. Southern Appalachia has generated some of the best known musicians in folk, bluegrass, country, gospel and old-timey music. Jean Ritchie was born and raised in Viper, Kentucky. She has shared, worldwide, the ballad singing and dulcimer playing traditions of her region and family for nearly fifty years through books, articles, performances , recordings, and speaking engagements. From Deep Gap, Joseph Dinwiddie is a senior at Berea College with an independent major in Appalachian Studies. He plays the banjo, jawharp, and piano with the regional roots music hand The Bellybakers. 6 North Carolina, Doc Watson has been tremendously influential as a guitar, banjo, and harmonica player, and as a singer whose music has synthesized numerous southern genres. Loretta Lynn, from Van Lear, Kentucky, Dolly Parton, from Sevier County, Tennessee, and Patsy Cline, from Winchester, Virginia, are three of the most prominent names among female country music stars. The Country Music Hall of Fame elected Roy Acuff, from Maynardville, Tennessee, as the first living person to receive that honor. Acuff was the dominant country singer of the World War II years. Country music's first family, the Carter Family, from the southwestern counties of Virginia, has had a significant impact on the history of country music. Their songs and melodies continue to be popular with musicians in numerous genres. The Stanley Brothers, from Dickenson County, Virginia, have been bluegrass music's second most recognizable band. After the death of Bill Monroe last year, many have felt that Ralph Stanley has now inherited the bluegrass throne. Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, from northern Georgia, to a large degree set the standard for energetic old-time string band music. Bill Monroe, from Rosine, Kentucky, is generally recognized as the father of bluegrass music. The name for bluegrass music originated with Monroe's band, the Bluegrass Boys, which Monroe named after his home state. In addition to Monroe, at least three other musicians from Kentucky have been elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame: Grandpa Jones, who just recently died, Red Foley, and Merle Travis. Bradley Kincaid, who, like Red Foley, was born near Berea, was one of the biggest early names in radio broadcasts of Chicago's National Barn Dance. So many musicians from Kentucky have been prominent in country and folk music that scholar Charles Wolfe wrote a book on that subject, Kentucky Country: Folk...

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