Bascom Lamar Lunsford

He was born on 21 March 1882 in Mars Hill, Madison County, North Carolina, and grew up among the songs and fiddle tunes of the mountains. His father, a teacher, gave him a fiddle when he was young, and his mother sang religious songs. He learned songs from family, friends and neighbors and set out to sing and play them so they would not be lost. After Camp Hill Academy in Leicester he went to Rutherford College in 1901 and taught school in Madison County. For two years he sold fruit trees on horseback for the East Tennessee Nursery Company across western North Carolina and the neighboring states, and the work took him to remote families whose songs he collected. He taught again, at Rutherford College from 1906 to 1909 and in McDowell County, then studied at Trinity College (now Duke University) and was licensed to practice law in 1913.

He gave material to Frank C. Brown of Trinity for the North Carolina folklore collection, and in 1922 Brown recorded thirty-two items from him on cylinders. On 15 March 1924, in Atlanta, he made his first commercial record for OKeh, singing with his banjo on “Jesse James” and “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.” In August 1925, in Asheville, he recorded again for OKeh with Blackwell Lunsford on fiddle, and that year he guided Robert W. Gordon of the Library of Congress on a ballad-hunting trip through western North Carolina and South Carolina. On 6 February 1928, in Ashland, Kentucky, billed as “The Minstrel of the Appalachians,” he cut twelve sides for Brunswick, including a new “Mole in the Ground,” “Mountain Dew,” “Lost John Dean,” “Darby’s Ram,” “Little Turtle Dove” and “Dry Bones.” “Mountain Dew” was his own song, written in 1920. His banjo style was the western North Carolina one, with a rhythmic upstroke brushing the strings.

In 1927 the Asheville Chamber of Commerce asked him to bring local musicians and dancers to its Rhododendron Festival. The next year that became the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, often said to be the first event to call itself a folk festival, which he organized and performed at every year into the mid-1960s. He helped found many others, including the first National Folk Festival, in St. Louis in 1934. In 1929 he and the composer Lamar Stringfield published 30 and 1 Folk Songs from the Southern Mountains. In April 1930 he recorded in Atlanta for Columbia, including the spoken “Speaking the Truth” and “A Stump Speech in the 10th District,” and that year Dorothy Scarborough of Columbia University toured the mountains with him.

His own repertory grew into an archive. In 1935 he recorded 315 items for Columbia University, and in March 1949, over two weeks, he recorded about 330 for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, then the largest body of material any single singer had given it. In 1939 he and his Soco Gap dance team performed at the White House for President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and in 1949 he represented the United States at the first International Folk Festival in Venice.

LP releases brought his singing to a new audience. Harry Smith included his “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” and “Dry Bones” on the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952. The same year the Library of Congress issued his ballads of presidential assassinations, and Folkways released Smoky Mountain Ballads in 1953. In September 1956 he recorded Minstrel of the Appalachians for Riverside, with Fred English on guitar. He spent his last years at South Turkey Creek, near Leicester, and died on 4 September 1973, at ninety-one. Rounder issued Music From South Turkey Creek, which shares the album with George Pegram and Red Parham, in 1976. Smithsonian Folkways followed with Ballads, Banjo Tunes and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina in 1996, drawn from his Brunswick and Library of Congress recordings.