420 Pre-show
Panel 1 -- WLS
         By the mid-1920s, it had become a commonplace for singers to learn songs from a record instead of a live performance. And across the South, folk music was merging with popular music. But it was the radio--and the beginning of modern mass media--that would change the old-time music forever.
         In the midst of the Depression, many workers fled the South for work in the big cities north of the Mason-Dixon line: Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati. And the radio stations in those markets quickly realized that the newly-arrived "hillbillies" represented a sizable audience.
         WLS in Chicago, a 50,000 watt powerhouse, soon became the nation's most important outlet for country music. Two Kentuckians were instrumental in the station's success: Bradley Kincaid, who quickly became the most popular performer on WLS's National Barn Dance, and John Lair, the station's program manager and music librarian.

 

420 Pre-show (cont.)
Panel 2 -- Barn Dance History
         Once Lair was well-established at WLS radio, he brought to the Barn Dance a number of musicians from his native Renfro Valley area, several of whom formed the Cumberland Ridge Runners, the most popular group on the Barn Dance.
          But in the late 1930s, as country music on the national radio shows began to move away from an Appalachian sound and toward the Western swing of performers like Bob Wills, John Lair began to think seriously about starting his own show, one that would take country music out of the big city theaters and return it to the countryside where it had started.
          "Closely studying the audience from week to week, I noticed that a great many folks who attended the theater came from out of town, apparently combining the show with a trip to the city and a general outing for the party. This set me to thinking that it might work the other way around--that city folks might enjoy a trip to the country to see a show."

 

420 Pre-show (cont.)
Panel 3 -- History of Renfro Valley
         Lair knew from the beginning that his home of Renfro Valley, Kentucky, was where he wanted to locate his new "theater in the country." Lair took the idea to Red Foley--a performer he'd brought to WLS's Barn Dance--and the pair brought in a third investor, Whitey Ford, who was also known as "the Duke of Paducah."
         In 1937, WLW of Cincinnati entered the national market and brought in Lair, who instigated a major shift of country music talent from Chicago to Cincinnati. All the while, Lair, Foley, and Ford were preparing for a trip a bit further south, to their theater in Renfro Valley, only 120 miles from the River City.          Opening night at Renfro Valley was November 4, 1939, and when Lair stepped before the microphone, he said, "This is the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, coming to you direct from a big barn in Renfro Valley, Kentucky--the first and only barn dance on the air presented by the actual residents of an actual community."

 

430 Old-Time Vignette
Panel 1 -- Wilderness Road
         From a time before our recorded history, Native Americans followed a buffalo trace from the coastal plains to the east, over the Appalachian mountains to the west, and finally into the Bluegrass region of present-day Kentucky--through a notch in the mountains Dr. Thomas Walker, one of the regions earliest explorers, called the Cumberland Gap.
         Twenty five years later, and in the service of a North Carolina land speculator, Daniel Boone made the journey and helped clear the way for others. The trail Boone forged into the heart of Kentucky became known--with good reason--as The Wilderness Road.
         Not only was it a difficult journey--the "road" was really no more than a marked trail--but the Indians who were already here were hostile to European settlement. Following Boone were the adventurers, explorers, trappers, and hunters. Later came the land surveyors and the tough-as-nails squatters who were willing to hack out an existence in the western wilderness.

 

430 Old-Time Vignette (cont.)
Panel 2 -- The Songs
         If the earliest European settlers had nothing else to bring with them, because they were frequently destitute, they had the songs they had learned from their elders before them--songs that had been passed for many years from one generation to the next--and that had crossed the Atlantic Ocean with them from Europe to the Americas.
         The ballads and folksongs that the first settlers sang were mostly English and Scottish in origin, and many of those songs either told stories--sometimes about long forgotten, but real enough, events--or explored a particular emotion, which may have been either deadly serious or playfully humorous.
         Some examples are "Little Matty Groves," a song about adultery dating to the time of Shakespeare; "Lord Thomas," in which a man must choose between a poor but beautiful woman and a rich but ugly one; and "Golden Willow Tree" and "Lord Bateman," both of which deal with Anglo-Turkish conflicts and may well date to the 16th Century.

 

430 Old-Time Vignette (cont.)
Panel 3 -- The Singer and the Sound
         Until relatively recently--until the advent of the phonograph and the radio--it was the song itself, and not the singer, that was in the spotlight. And more often than not, it was the women in a family who carried the songs with them in memory and sang them when the occasions arose.
         They typically sang alone, without any instrumental accompaniment. And the effect was stark, haunting and plaintive--in part because the singer performed with a notable lack of outer emotion--often staring into space--but also because the songs were based on a modal scale that doesn't correspond to our major and minor scales, and so might sound at least a little eerie and other-worldly to the contemporary ear.
         If there had been any instrumental accompaniment, it would have been by fiddle, at least a few of which would have been present from the beginning, since the instrument was popular in the British Isles and the other American colonies since well before the settlement of Kentucky.

 

430 Old-Time Vignette (cont.)
Panel 4 -- The Athens of the West
         Because of early accounts--frequently by land speculators, and frequently at least somewhat fantastical--of Kentucky as a sort of promised land, a mythical paradise, adventurous souls poured through the Cumberland Gap and, before long, into the Bluegrass region. By 1780, Lexington had been founded and was a frontier town with a future, the "Athens of the West," in fact.
         That was the year the school now known as Transylvania University was chartered by the Virginia legislature. In Lexington, culture--with a capital C--seemed to be taking root. And one afternoon in 1817, a German immigrant and music teacher organized a group of musicians and presented a program to the public that included Beethoven's Symphony No. 1.
         To the east of Lexington, however, something else was stirring, a powerful movement that would change not only local culture but almost the entire South for many years to come--it was a dynamic religious movement known as the "Great Revival."

 

440 Brush Arbor
Panel 1 -- Reawakening, Great Revival
         A religious movement known as the Second Great Awakening--or the Great Revival--made its way into Kentucky at the beginning of the 19th Century. It was led by a Logan County preacher named James McGready, who came up with the idea of taking religion into the countryside and to the people.
         As settlers had moved into Kentucky and other areas of the new American frontier, they often found themselves more and more isolated and ever-further from community life. Still, the frontiersman longed for fellowship and a place to worship with others.
         One of the first great camp meeting took place at Cane Ridge, in Bourbon County, Kentucky, and it was attended by 18 preachers and more than 20,000 worshippers. From this meeting grew the "brush arbor" movement, in which outdoor revivals were held beneath an arbor constructed of logs and poles, and thick, fresh brush served as a roof to shelter the preachers and the congregants from the summer sun.

 

440 Brush Arbor (cont)
Panel 2 -- Music of the Great Revival
         Music played an important role in these brush arbor meetings and in the Great Revival in general. Many groups learned and sang the older hymns with great fervor and displays of emotion. One of the first songbooks with a Kentucky imprint grew out of this movement: William Harris's Hymn Book, published in 1824.
         Other early sources for sacred songs were songbooks published between 1815 and 1855 using "shape notes," in which one of four different shapes--a triangle, a circle, a square, or a diamond--rather than position on a staff, indicated pitch. Shape-note singing not only brought uniformity to group singing, but also made possible the four-part harmony of later gospel singing.
         Shape note singing was also taught in itinerant "Singing Schools"--music teachers or school masters would travel from community to community and conduct two or three week sessions in rural one-room school houses.

 

450 Front Porch Vignette
Panel 1 -- Riverboats
         Since Kentucky's long northern border--from Ashland in the east to Paducah in the west--is defined by the Ohio River, it's no surprise that this and other river routes were important channels for commercial trade and travel throughout the 1800s.
          In the early part of the century, the federal government improved the Ohio River with a series of locks and dams that enabled larger boats to navigate the river. This facilitated not only the expansion of commerce, but the spread of culture as well. By 1850, "floating circuses" were in vogue--and whole troupes of performers, including musicians, entertained crowds in river towns up and down the Ohio.
         Even on boats that were used primarily for passenger travel and cargo, music was important. At night, minstrels--who were usually black--blew and strummed and stomped for the travelers' amusement, and, over time, that music blended with more sophisticated styles from the northern cities and produced uniquely American musical idioms like blues and jazz.

 

450 Front Porch Vignette (cont)
Panel 2 -- Civil War
         The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 brought to a halt almost all boat traffic on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers--but folks still needed to amuse themselves, and the popular music of the day continued to develop in new and interesting ways.
         Kentucky was truly a border state--both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born here--and much of the music that was either popular or originated in the state reflected that; songs like "Lorena" and "Little Drummer Boy of Shiloh"--a song that actually had "North" and "South" versions published by songwriter W. S. Hays.
         William Shakespeare Hays, who was born in Louisville in 1837, was a riverboat captain turned newspaperman, and he wrote songs in his spare time. By the time the Civil War was over, he had established himself as one of the nation's best-known songwriters, and two of his songs, "Write Me a Letter from Home" and "We Parted by the River Side," each sold over 300,000 copies in sheet music.

 

450 Front Porch Vignette (cont)
Panel 3 -- Minstrelry
         Another venue for music in the first half of the 1800s--other than the circuses and riverboats--was the city street corner. Groups of itinerant slaves and freedmen formed bands and played for pennies in towns along the Ohio River, mostly between Louisville and Cincinnati. Some of these musicians achieved regional notariety and a few even played as far away as Canada.
         But by 1828, a struggling Louisville actor, Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice, had invented the odious character "Jim Crow"--whose name was later used to characterize laws oppressing black Americans--as well as a new kind of minstrel show, which featured white men in "blackface," and depicted blacks as singing, dancing, and grinning fools.
         Rice's success was stunning and his imitators were legion--the minstrel show was an entertainment phenomenon that quickly spread across the country. Rice took his show from Louisville to Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York. After 1870, the minstrel show began to die away, and disappeared almost altogether following the advent of motion pictures and radio.

 

450 Front Porch Vignette (cont)
Panel 4 -- Tin Pan Alley
          "Tin Pan Alley" refers primarily not to a place or a style of music, but to a business practice--for much of the 19th and 20th Centuries, publishers of sheet music hired in-house musicians to compose songs for sale to the public. Only secondarily does the term refer to the music that came from New York and other big northern cities. Finally, it also refers to the racket that emenated from the areas of a city where the songwriters worked, banging out tunes for the eager public to buy.
         But the music from Tin Pan Alley affected Kentuckians as much as it did other Americans. There were composers from Kentucky--like W.S. Hayes--and there were composers who took Kentucky as their subject. For instance, the riflemen from Kentucky who had been instrumental in 1815 in the Battle of New Orleans, were glorified in "The Hunters of Kentucky," a popular song written by Samuel Woodworth, a Massachusetts newspaper editor.
         None, however, had more impact on the nation's conception of the Bluegrass State than Stephen Foster. A native of Pittsburgh who spent most of his adult life in New York, Foster wrote several songs for a stage adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, including "My Old Kentucky Home," which has, through the years, become the official state song.

 

450 II Front Porch Vignette (cont)
Panel 6 -- Mountains, mountain music, coal
         Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, music was especially important in Appalachian culture, because no other folk art was as pervasive or served as important a social function. Nearly everyone either played an instrument, sang, or had family members who did. So music was part of the routine of daily life.
         Hymns were sung without accompaniment in churches. Fiddles were sawed on front porches after dinner. And lively string bands played at dances and other social functions. But since newspapers were in short supply, and well-informed travelers scarce, music brought the news as well--though the news the songs brought was often of the tabloid variety, about notorious murders, and love gone bad.
         Because the songs were often topical, it's not very surprising that, after about 1870--as coal production began to grow--life as a miner or as a miner's wife became a common subject in popular music. This is reflected in such songs as "Coal Tipple Blues" and "Only a Miner." Mostly, these songs were sung in the spirit of the lament.

 

450 II Front Porch Vignette (cont)
Panel 7 -- Big coal, RRs, accessibility
         As the main source of fuel for the Industrial Revolution in America, coal production became increasingly important in the last quarter of the 19th Century. By the beginning of the 20th Century, railroad construction had largely been completed, and many more seams were now open to production in the eastern Kentucky mountains.
         Also at this time--and arriving by rail-- many new immigrants were flooding into the coalfields to work as miners, quite a few of them from eastern European countries. It is even thought that, at one time, some Kentucky counties might have had majority-eastern European populations. So the railroads were not only carrying coal out of the mountains, but were carrying new peoples, cultures, and ideas in.
         Prior to 1900, the state had made some feeble statutory attempts to ensure mine safety, but it was inevitable that unions would attempt to step in and speak for the miners--men who otherwise had little leverage against the companies for whom they labored. And protest songs became an important element in the unions' battle for workers' rights.

 

450 II Front Porch Vignette (cont)
Panel 8 -- "Protest" music, Aunt Molly Jackson
         In the first two decades of the 20th Century--the era preceding the advent of radio and motion pictures--popular songs were a means for spreading the news of the day. And the "news" the unions meant to spread was that workers, if they expected to be treated fairly, needed to organize and protest against the practices of management. Song was a primary vehicle for spreading the word.
         Half-sisters Sara Ogan Gunning and "Aunt" Molly Jackson were two of Kentucky's most important protest singers. They grew up in various coal camps in eastern Kentucky, and witnessed firsthand the bloody coal mining wars of the early '30s. Gunning, who was married to a coal miner, almost always wrote from personal experience, and her most famous song, "Come All Ye Miners," urges miners to "sink this capitalist system to the darkest pits of Hell."
          "Aunt" Molly Jackson was also married to a coal miner, and she was not only a folksinger of protest songs, but a midwife, a union organizer, and social activist whose work had won national recognition as early as the 1920s. Both Gunning and Jackson eventually played their songs for New York audiences and at other venues around the country.

 

450 II Front Porch Vignette (cont)
Panel 5 -- Folklorists, Musicologists
         If it weren't for the hard work and diligence of enterprising folklorists, musicologists, and other collectors, innumerable songs would have been lost to us forever. Two of the earliest were Emma Bell Miles, who published Spirit of the Mountains in 1905, and British collector Cecil Sharpe, who published English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians in 1917.
         Although this list cannot be exhaustive, some other important collectors would have to include Josiah Combs (Folk Songs of the Southern United States); Henry Fuson (Ballads of the Kentucky Highlands); Josephine McGill (Folk Songs of the Kentucky Mountains); and John Jacob Niles (The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles).
         Some other important collectors are Jean Thomas (Ballad Makin' in the Hills of Kentucky and Devil's Ditties); Mary Wheeler (Kentucky Mountain Songs); radio star Bradley Kincaid (Mountain Ballads and Old-Time Songs); and Renfro Valley founder John Lair, who especially enjoyed collecting ballads about badmen.

 

460 Broadcast/Reception Vignette
Panel 1 -- Growth of Broadcast/City-Country
         In the 1920s, there were two important developments in the way that music was disseminated: the first was the proliferation of commercial radio stations; and the second was the coming of the Great Depression, which wrecked the market for phonograph records. Music on the radio was free, but records cost money.
         Very early on, programmers realized that "hillbilly" music was not only quite popular with listeners, but was inexpensive to produce as well. And by 1935 there were more than 5000 radio programs around the country that featured "hillbilly" music. One of the most popular was the National Barn Dance on WLS in Chicago, which featured a number of Kentuckians.
         Here in Kentucky, however, there weren't many outlets for our homegrown musicians. In 1932, there were only five radio stations in the state, and of those, only one, WHAS in Louisville, was broadcasting at more than 5000 watts. But at 25,000 watts, WHAS had the power to broadcast into most every nook and cranny of the hills and hollows around the state, and featured on its shows hundreds of musicians, local and otherwise.

 

460 Broadcast/Reception Vignette (cont)
Panel 2 -- Singer Replacing Song
         The performers on the early "hillbilly" radio programs generally weren't paid much--$10 or $15 dollars for a night's work. So they realized early on that to make a living they'd have to continue taking their shows on the road, for the paying customers who still wanted to see live music. On the other hand, the radio shows were useful for building an audience, and for on-air promotion of the live shows.
         Early collectors of folksongs remarked on the singers' lack of emotive expression and trancelike performances--even Bradley Kincaid, one of radio's first big singing stars, had a plain, stripped-down style. But over time, radio performers came to see the advantage of developing a more personal style that set them apart from other performers: if the fans liked it, they'd pay to experience the show--the costumes, the banter, the stories--as well as to hear the songs.
         Successful musicians became personalities--they had to--and soon their importance eclipsed that of the songs they sang. They wore outrageous costumes--from overalls and blacked-out teeth, to fancy western shirts and cowboy hats--and developed singing and playing styles that were more or less unique to the individual performers.

 

470 Folk Ballads
Panel 1 -- The Songs
         The folk ballad has a long history, extending far back in time and all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to England, Scotland, and Ireland--where many "American" folk ballads have their roots. Most folklorists define a ballad as as folk song that tells a story, in extremely condensed form.
         Train songs were a popular sub-type of the folk ballad. "Number Twenty-Nine" celebrated the success of a new locomotive. "Casey Jones," on the other hand--a song imported to Kentucky--was about a horrific 1902 train wreck and the engineer who died trying to prevent it. Jones, whose given name was John, was called Casey because he was from Cayce, Kentucky--ronounced locally as Kay-see.
          In 1925, an amateur cave-explorer named Floyd Collins became trapped below ground in the Mammoth Cave area. For 17 days, rescuers tried to free Collins, and it became a national media sensation. Collins died in the cave before his would-be rescuers could free him, but he was memorialized in a song, "The Death of Floyd Collins," which swept across the South like wildfire.

 

470 Folk Ballads
Panel 2 -- Burnett and Rutherford
         In 1907, Dick Burnett, of Wayne County, Kentucky, was shot in the face in the course of an armed robbery. Blinded by the shot, he turned to music to make a living--and became one of our greatest collectors, composers, and performers of folk ballads. With his partner Leonard Rutherford, Burnett was also one of the most important early performers to record folk ballads and his own music.
         Early on, Burnett picked up a partner: a fourteen year old named Leonard Rutherford, who the older man taught to play fiddle, to accompany Burnett's banjo or guitar. The two developed a "unison" style of playing, in which both instruments played the melody, side by side, note for note. Basically, Burnett had re-invented and updated an archaic style of play he'd heard as a boy.
         Their 1927 recordings of "Ladies on the Steamboat" and "Billy in the Lowground" are among the finest known examples of Burnett and Rutherford's "unison" style of play. Burnett's own compositions included "The Orphan Boy" and "Farewell Song," which we now know as "Man of Constant Sorrow," and which has been recorded by the Stanley Brothers, Bob Dylan, Waylon Jennings, and many others.

 

470 Bluegrass
Panel 3 -- Bill Monroe and Bluegrass
         Born in 1911 near Rosine, Kentucky, Bill Monroe was to change the course of country music: he is now known as "the father of bluegrass music." His was a musical family--as a boy, he'd had to take up the mandolin because it was the only instrument nobody else in the family played--and young Bill was performing in public with his Uncle Pen by the time he was in his early teens.
         But his family was not the only musical influence in Monroe's life. As a boy, he'd gone to a school that taught shape-note singing, which found expression in his notion of vocal harmonizing and helped define the "bluegrass sound." The other major influence was a man named Arnold Shultz, a black man who lived in the area and played country blues on his guitar. From Shultz, Monroe learned not only technique, but to allow his emotions to spill freely into his singing and playing.
         Two of Bill's older brothers were important in his development as a musician: Charlie, who played guitar and sang; and Birch, who played fiddle and string bass. When the brothers were offered a full-time radio job, Birch dropped out, and now there was a new emphasis on Bill's mandolin. And it was the Monroe Brothers' instrumental virtuosity that began to attract attention.

 

470 Bluegrass (cont)
Panel 4 -- Bill Monroe and Bluegrass
         The Monroe Brothers' first hit record was "What Will You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?" They followed up with a string of hits that have since become standards: "All the Good Times Are Passed and Gone," "New River Train," and "Roll in My Sweet Baby�s Arms" among them. Then, after four years, the brothers parted ways.
         Bill Monroe formed The Blue Grass Boys--a band that brought a new caliber of musicianship to the Grand Ole Opry stage. In fact, nobody had heard anything quite like it before. The Blue Grass boys speeded things up--sometimes playing familiar songs at three times their ordinary tempo--and played in keys that were unheard of in country music. Some listeners complained, but most of them loved it.
         As if they�d just been warming up, in 1945 the Blue Grass Boys shot into overdrive, when Monroe hired Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and Chubby Wise to join the band. Flatt brought a strong lead voice, Wise added a blues-tinged fiddle, and Scruggs electrified audiences with a three-finger banjo style that most listeners still think of as bluegrass music's prime characteristic.

 

470 Bluegrass (cont)
Panel 5 -- Bluegrass Development
         While Bill Monroe didn't exactly invent the music from scratch, his was the hand that shaped the sound we still recognize as bluegrass music today. Since then, however, other musicians have come along to add something of their own and make it all brand new again.
         Ironically, few of Bill Monroe's principal players hailed from the Bluegrass State--but other players in the next generation would, beginning with the Osborne Brothers, Bobby and Sonny, from Hyden, Kentucky. They emerged in the late 1960s as one of the most innovative and commercial of the newer bluegrass bands (they even played electrified instruments)--and, like Monroe before them, set the stage for new and even more innovative bands yet to come.
         By the 1970s, some bands were playing what was called "progressive bluegrass"�that is to say, a style of music that had some traditionalists pulling their hair out. The Newgrass Revival, out if Louisville, featured a chromatic banjo and electric instruments, and played contemporary rock songs alongside the traditional favorites. Not to be outdone was J.D. Crowe and the New South, out of Lexington--which featured a young mandolin and fiddle player named Ricky Skaggs.

 

470 Bluegrass (cont)
Panel 6 -- Development of Bluegrass
         Although Bill Monroe had such a prominent role in the development of bluegrass music, he changed as the times demanded it and adapted himself and his music to new audiences. He recognized early on--as the primary audience for country music moved toward Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and rock and roll--that there was a broader, as yet untapped, audience available to him: northerners, college students, and urbanites.
         The bluegrass festival--of which there are now literally scores, from sea to shining sea--really came into its own around 1970, and drew many members of this new, non-traditional audience. As the festivals grew, so did the pool of "outsider" musicians, who were not from the south and had not been spoon-fed country music since they were peeking through the bars of their cribs. In this way, bluegrass moved into the mainstream of American music.
         Bluegrass endures and is perhaps more popular today than ever before--especially since the release of the film O Brother Where Art Thou, and since the CD inspired by the movie, Down From the Mountain, garnered a slew of Grammy nominations. Bluegrass music has been as analyzed and studied as jazz music, and is recognized worldwide as a uniquely American art form.

 

480 Technology
Panel 1
         In 1877, Thomas Edison and Charles Cros, a Frenchman, were both working on sound recording, but Edison produced the first practical working model. His original prototype and his manufactured versions relied on a pre-grooved metal cylinder, which was turned by hand--and not very surprisingly, its sound quality was very poor.
         Edison might be credited with the invention of sound recording, but because he recorded to the expensive and difficult to mass produce cylinder, there was a need for something both simpler and better. In 1888, a German immigrant named Emile Berliner developed a "gramophone," as he called it, that played flat, inexpensive disks--and in essence, Berliner had figured out almost all there was to know about making records.
         By 1910, the disc had become the dominant format, which was just about inevitable, mostly because thousands of copies could be produced from just one "master." And ease of recording attracted musicians to the format. But the disc had limitations, too: it reproduced loud sounds better than soft ones, and the human voice better than musical instuments.

 

480 Technology (cont)
Panel 2
         Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, the quality of sound recording improved incrementally. But until 1948, the maximum playing time of a 12-inch record was still only five minutes--just long enough for one good pop tune. After World War II, CBS engineers pioneered "microgroove" technology to produce the first LP, or long-playing album. Then, in 1956, a small label called Audio Fidelity released the first stereo record.
         From the begining, radio had had music at its core--it was cheap to produce, and listerners loved it. And all the advances in recording technology carried over into--and helped improve--radio as well. Soon, not only were the musicians stars, but some of the disc jockeys were, too. The years following the war produced a number of DJs who were celebrities in their own right.
         Television was not to be outdone, and it had something radio didn�t--pictures. Of singers singing. Of kids dancing. Your Hit Parade was among the first of the new "dance shows," followed closely by American Bandstand and others. But variety shows got in on the act, too, and nobody who saw it will ever forget Elvis Presley's debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was a signal moment, a before-and-after event, like when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin disembarked from their lunar craft and went walking on the surface of the moon.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 3 -- Little Enis
         Born in 1934, at Hogue Holler in Boyle County, Kentucky, Carlos Toadvine--known as "Little Enis" to his fans--played his own special brand of rockabilly and country music in Lexington and elsewhere for twenty years. He learned music from his mother�s side of the family: she sang, an uncle was a champion fiddler, and some other family members performed professionally.
         Enis didn�t make his mark with the old standards, however--by 1956 he was covering Elvis Presley and Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis, sneering, snarling, and shouting his way through "All Shook Up," "Great Balls of Fire," and "Hound Dog." But at five foot four--and as a left-handed upside-down guitar player--Enis cut a remarkable figure. A few years later, he was touring with Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as with Fats Domino and Henry Mancini.
         But by the mid-70s, Enis' hand was about played out--his liver was failing, and he was playing solo at dives around Lexington, almost anonymously. But in 1974, Kentucky writer Ed McClanahan immortalized Enis in an article for Playboy magazine, "Little Enis Pursues His Muse." And the legacy of his music lives on: his daughter Donna Faye is a country music performer and has played, among other venues, Renfro Valley. Enis died in 1976.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 4 -- Mary Travers
         The daughter of two newspaper reporters, Mary Travers was born in Louisville in 1936. While she was still a toddler, her parents moved to New York City, and Mary grew up in Greenwich Village, where she absorbed the music and the folk styles that were then coming into vogue. By the time Travers was 20, folk music was about to explode on the national scene.
         In the early 60s, Travers, Peter Yarrow, and Paul Stookey formed the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, and played at seminal folk venues like the Bitter End, Chicago's Gate of Horn, and San Fransisco's Hungry I. This was essentially the beginning of a tour that would last ten years--in '62, the group had a hit with "If I Had a Hammer," and then in '63 "Puff the Magic Dragon" was a big follow-up hit.
         Besides playing music, the group engaged in social activism as well--they stood with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma; they were deeply involved in the anti-Vietnam war effort; and in 1969, at the March On Washington, they played before 500,000 protesters. And the music kept coming: by 1970, Peter, Paul and Mary had earned eight gold and five platinum albums.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 5 -- Crystal Gayle
         Born Brenda Gail Webb in Paintsville, Kentucky, Crystal Gayle is the younger half-sister of country legend Loretta Lynn--a fact which later both bolstered and hindered her career, as agents and promoters tried to force upon her Lynn's style, manager, and even Lynn's hand-me-down songs.
         But Gayle found her own style. Her 1975 self-titled debut album spawned three hits, and later that same year, she released her second album, Somebody Loves You, and began to build a fan base separate from Lynn's--Gayle had a pop crossover potential that had mostly eluded Lynn. Then, in 1977, Gayle had her first number one hit with "Don�t It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue."
         Throughout the rest of the 1970s and 80s, Gayle continued to record hit songs and albums--she had three more number one songs, a gold album, and a platinum album. And she took risks--in 1982 , she recorded, with surrealist troubadour Tom Waits, the soundtrack for the Francis Ford Coppola film, One from the Heart. Though the film was generally panned, Waits and Gayle were singled out and praised for their work on the soundtrack--Gayle in particular for her interpretations of the soundtrack's lush and smoky torch songs.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 6 -- The Judds
         The Judds, mother Naomi and daughter Wynonna, recorded together for eight years, had fourteen number one singles, and eventually became the most successful duo in country music history. With Wynonna's strong bluesy style and Naomi's exquisite harmonies, the Judds presented a compelling image to the public that was at once downhome and city-sophisticated.
         After a number of years away from Kentucky, Naomi returned to the Ashland area in 1976 with daughters Wynonna and Ashley in tow. The three of them lived without a television or a phone, but listened to locally produced music shows and the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. Naomi and Wynonna began to sing together--and it wasn't long before Naomi realized her older daughter had a very real musical talent. So she loaded up the family and relocated to Nashville.
         In 1983, Naomi and Wynonna, now officially "The Judds," released their first album. But in 1984, with "Mama He's Crazy," the Judds began a streak of eight consecutive number one hits, and the song won that year's CMA Single of the Year Award. In 1991, the mother-daughter team split up, due to Naomi's poor health--but only after a 124 city farewell tour. In her solo career following the breakup, Wynonna has flourished, and in 1993 Naomi published her autobiography, Love Can Build a Bridge.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 7 -- Gary Stewart
         Born in Letcher County, Kentucky, Gary Stewart is one of the great practitioners of the unvarnished, hardcore honky-tonk school of country music. Stewart escaped a lifetime of working in an airplane factory when he showed some songs of his to soon-to-be RCA country label boss Jerry Bradley. Bradley became Stewart's Nashville advocate, and in 1975, Stewart released Out of Hand, an album that featured the hit single, "She's Actin' Single (I'm Drinking Doubles)."
         Although he composed songs for Grand Ole Opry stars like Cal Smith and Hank Snow, Stewart himself never had much interest in a traditional Music City life--he was a renegade, and he caroused and played music with Southern rock musicians like the Allman Brothers. Despite the excesses of his personal life, the late 70s were a productive time for Stewart, culminating with the release of Your Place or Mine--a rollicking, original, and personal piece of work that earned critical praise.
         By 1980, it looked as if Stewart's career had about ground to a halt--battles with alcohol and drugs had taken their toll, and Stewart simply stopped writing and recording. But clean and sober--and surprising almost everyone--Stewart returned in 1988 with Brand New, a strong comeback effort, and proved once more that Stewart deserves to be celebrated for his considerable talent and influence.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 8 -- Exile
         In 1963, J.P. Pennington and some of his friends from Richmond started a band and called themselves The Exiles--a reflection of how the motley crew or rock and rollers felt in their hometown. But in 1965, the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars picked up The Exiles for several dates in and around Kentucky, and recruited them again for the next year.
         Musical chameleons, the band tried on a number of styles almost from the beginning--and even changed their name, shortening it to Exile. In the late 60s, they produced several regional hits--such as "Devil's Bite' and "Church Street Soul Revival"--but finally hit it big in 1978 with a number one pop smash, "Kiss You All Over."
          By the early 80s, Exile had switched gears yet again and had begun writing hit songs for Nashville musicians such as Alabama, Janie Fricke, and Kenny Rogers. Then Exile had their second number one hit--"Woke Up In Love"--only this time on the country music charts. A string of country hits followed, and earned them eleven nominations for either Vocal or Instrumental Group of the Year from the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 9 -- New Grass Revival
         Bluegrass had from the beginning--and almost by its very nature--been seen as a kind of "traditional" music. But in the early 70s, there were a number of bluegrass musicians who were beginning to think about the music in new ways. In 1972, Sam Bush and Courtney Johnson of The Bluegrass Alliance struck out on their own, in an almost wholly new direction, and formed a band called New Grass Revival.
         The band's image--long hair and jeans--its electrified instruments and its non-standard repetoire of songs stood in stark contrast to bluegrass godfathers like Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley. Their first album, Arrival of the New Grass Revival, announced their presense on the bluegrass scene--and incorporated elements of rock and roll, jazz, and blues. Not very surprisingly, some traditionalists scorned the new sound.
         In 1981, banjoist Bela Fleck joined the Revival, and two years later the band released a self-titled album that broke through to the mainstream. Two singles from the album--"What You Do To Me" and "Ain't That Peculiar"--were minor country hits, and Fleck's showcase song, "Seven By Seven," was nominated for a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental. In 1989, the Revival had their first top 40 hit with "Callin' Baton Rouge."

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 10 -- NRBQ
          NRBQ--or the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet--was formed, depending on who you ask, in either Florida or Louisville in 1967. That sense of confusion, or of multiple identities, has marked the band and its music for more than 30 years now. But Terry Adams and Steve Ferguson, the longtime nucleus of the band, are native Louisvillians. That much is certain.
         What is not at all certain is what you might hear on an NRBQ album or at one of their live shows--the band is known for a wild eclecticism, veering from country to rockabilly to pop to blues to free-form jazz, all on one record or in one night. And their superb musicianship--regardless of what genre they�re attacking--has earned the band a fanatical cult following.
         Immediately after NRBQ formed, the band's musical skills attracted attention from record companies, and they signed with Columbia. On their 1969 self-titled debut, they covered both a rockabilly number and a tune by Sun Ra, jazz music's strange visionary. Critics loved it, but Columbia was unhappy with the group's sales. Over the years, NRBQ has worked with rockabilly star Carl Perkins, country singer Skeeter Davis, John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful, and professional wrestler Captain Lou Albano.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 11 -- Dwight Yoakam
         Born in Betsey Lane, Kentucky, Dwight Yoakam learned the rudiments of the guitar at age six, then taught himself the musical licks of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and, most important, Buck Owens--it has been Owens with whom Yoakam's music has become most closely identified, for consciously evoking the so-called "Bakersfield" sound, Owens trademark.
         This stripped-down, straight ahead approach to honky tonk didn't earn Yoakam many fans along Nashville's Music Row, or among the city's other denizens, for that matter--as Yoakam's career developed, it was roots and rock fans who bought his records and attended his shows, not the traditional fans of country and western music.
         Spurned in Nashville, Yoakam headed for L.A., where he recorded his debut album, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., in 1986--and it was an instant sensation. Several singles were hits not only on college and rock stations, but on country stations as well. Yoakam followed up with a string of commercially and critically successful albums, including Hillbilly Deluxe, Buenos Noches from a Lonely Room, and If There Was a Way.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 12 -- Keith Whitley
         When he was only eight years old, Keith Whitley sang on radio for the first time. At 13, he formed his first band--a straight bluegrass outfit--and a few years later he formed the Lonesome Mountain Boys with his high school friend Ricky Skaggs. And a couple of years after that, in the late 1960s, Ralph Stanley invited Whitley and Skaggs to join Stanley's Clinch Mountain Boys. Both young men accepted the offer.
         After quitting the Clinch Mountain Boys and bouncing around a bit, Whitley played for five years with The New South, a seminal country-bluegrass band out of Central Kentucky. His debut album as a solo artist was Hard Act to Follow, an exercise in a rather pure brand of honky tonk that the record-buying public wasn't much interested in. For his second album, L.A. to Miami, Whitley softened his sound and found commercial success.
         But that "softer" sound never suited Whitley, and in 1988 he convinced RCA to let him make a record his way--the result was Don't Close Your Eyes, a critical success that also spawned three top ten hits. But behind the scenes, Whitley was battling an alcohol problem to which he would eventually succumb--he died of alcohol poisoning in 1989, just before the release of his fourth album, I Wonder Do You Think of Me. That recording, and subsequent posthumous releases, have only solidified Whitley's reputation.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 14 -- Patty Loveless
          Born in Pikeville, Kentucky, Patty Loveless was a precocious musician. By the time she was twelve years old, she had begun writing and singing songs for her older brother Roger. Within a couple of more years, she'd written dozens of songs. And when she graduated from high school, she signed a contract with Surefire Music as a singer and a songwriter.
         When her contract with Surefire expired, Loveless married a fellow musician and left Nashville for North Carolina, where they played in several local bands. Then, in 1985, she returned to Nashville to record a demo tape--her sound drew on the honky tonk tradition, but with a bit of a rock edge--and two months later she signed a contract with MCA.
         Between 1985 and 1987, Loveless cracked the charts four times, and in 1987 she scored two top ten hits with "If My Heart Had Windows" and "A Little Bit of Love." The next year, her album Honky Tonk Angels spawned five successful singles, including the chart-topping hits "Timber I'm Falling In Love" and "Chains." Subsequent albums, Loveless' Greatest Hits and When Angels Fall, both went platinum and produced another string of hit songs. Mountain Soul was released in the summer of 2001.

 

480 The Artists, 1950-present
Panel 15 -- Joan Osborne
         Joan Osborne was born in Anchorage, Kentucky, near Louisville, in 1963, and since childhood had harbored a secret passion for singing. One night, at an open mic night in New York--Osborne was attending NYU's film school--she took to the stage and sang the Billie Holiday standard, "God Save the Child." Elated at the crowd's response, Osborne continued to perform in clubs around the city, developing a bluesy style, and penning confessional songs with sexually and spiritually themed lyrics.
         Soon, she developed a fan following, and with the help of her manager, she released the CD Soul Show and an EP, Blue Million Miles, on her own Womanly Hips label. Both were be re-issued by Mercury--on one disc, titled Early Recordings--when Osborne signed with the label.
         Relish, Osborne's first album for Mercury--and her first major label release--reached the top ten on the charts in 1995, won seven Grammy nominations, and was named Entertainment Weekly's Album of the Year. Besides recording her music, Osborne has developed into an outspoken social activist, earning her the enmity of a number of conservative critics and plaudits from feminists groups and other progressive organizations.