Searching for the wonderfully talented people of the Appalachian Mountains.
The focus of David Hoffman’s 1965 film, Music Makers of the Blue Ridge, is Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who was responsible for preserving a great deal of music and dance in Southern Appalachia.
In 1965, almost 60 years ago, Hoffman came to Madison County and made one of the first documentary films on Appalachian Music — a black and white film called Music Makers of the Blue Ridge (Bluegrass Roots). In the film, Hoffman follows Mr. Lunsford and his wife Freda through the backroads of Madison County, capturing some of our special musicians, dancers, and personalities from that era, including Obray Ramsey and Ray Lunsford.
Rare Bird Farm has plans to bring Mr. Hoffman to Madison County for a reunion with the children in the film and with descendants of the musicians and other folks he filmed almost 60 years ago.
A screening of Music Makers of the Blue Ridge (Bluegrass Roots) and a Q&A with Emmy and Academy award-winning filmmaker David Hoffman is planned for Friday, September 21, 2023. The reunion will take place as an adjunct to the 2023 Lunsford Festival on September 23, 2023. There will be a Reunion barn dance at Rare Bird Farm on Sunday afternoon, September 24, 2023.
A short clip from the documentary featuring dancers from Madison County.
Lunsford’s vast preservation efforts include two memory collection recordings for Columbia University (1935) and the Library of Congress (1949), each comprised of over 300 songs, tunes, and games, commercial recordings. Lunsford also founded the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in 1928, and collected the texts for thousands of songs and ballads. That collection is now housed, along with letters, newspaper clippings, a scrapbook, and other ephemera, in the Southern Appalachian Archives at Mars Hill University.
MHU’s Lunsford Festival was begun in 1968 and is the second-longest-running folk festival in Western North Carolina. The festival brings out the region’s finest musicians, ballad singers, and dancers and it happens on the same day as the Madison Heritage Arts Festival in Mars Hill.
Rare Bird Farm is working with the Madison County Tourism Development Association, the Liston B. Ramsey Center for Appalachian Studies at Mars Hill University (MHU), the Lunsford Festival, and a growing list of partners around Madison County to produce this special event. Learn more at rarebirdfarm.org/movie.
