The Lunsford Festival and the Heritage Festival will take place on Saturday, October 24, 2015.
Activities will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Mars Hill University’s upper quad. Admission to the Lunsford Festival and to the Mars Hill Heritage Festival, held simultaneously in downtown Mars Hill, is free. Parking will be limited but a free shuttle will run from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. from the top of the hill near the Comfort Inn at the junction of U.S. 19/23 (Future I-26) and N.C. 213.
Activities include games, jam sessions, craft demonstrations, exhibitors, dancing, an apple-butter-making demonstration hosted by Madison County 4-H, and a traditional ballad and story swap from 1:30 until 3:30 p.m. The daytime music and dance stage will feature a performance by Mars Hill University’s Bailey Mountain Cloggers. Other musicians to take the stage will include Joe Penland, Kathryn Parham Brickey, the Midnight Plowboys, Lonesome Mountain Ears, the Cole Mountain Cloggers, and many others.
This year’s festival also features a showing of the Roger Howell Documentary Project at 12:30 p.m. in Peterson Conference Center in Blackwell Hall. The film is the culmination of a year of filming, interviewing, and following Master Fiddler Roger Howell from festivals to hollers, mines in Mitchell County to his repair shop on Banjo Branch in Mars Hill. The filmmakers say his story is an important one, for its reminder that music preservation, like that of Bascom Lamar Lunsford and others, doesn’t happen without dedication, forethought, and hours of work. With the keen eye of filmmaker Rebecca Jones and the teamwork of the Liston B. Ramsey Center for Regional Studies staff, Hannah Furgiuele and Karen Paar, and many supportive community members, the film portrays the life and work of Howell and highlights his incredible memory collection and field recordings.
At the October 3 Lunsford Festival Concert, traditional musician Peter Gott received the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Award. Gott and his wife, Polly, moved to Madison County in the 1960s. Gott immersed himself in the music and heritage of the region, and is widely known and respected for his work both in performing and preserving mountain music traditions, and for his work in building hand-hewn log houses.
This is the 48th year of the Bascom Lamar Lunsford “Minstrel of Appalachia” Festival. The festival is named for musician and folklorist Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who dedicated his life to traveling the hills and coves of the Appalachian Mountains to find, memorize, and record the songs and dances so intimately woven into the mountain culture. He started the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville in 1928, and from there was enlisted to help start the National Folk Festival. He became instrumental in the creation of multiple festivals throughout the United States. Lunsford allowed creators of the Mars Hill festival to carry his name, only with the clear understanding the festival would be dedicated to authentic mountain music and dance.
Full schedule of performers can be found on the Lunsford Festival website, www.lunsfordfestival.com.
