Saving a Kentucky community, one kid at a time

Mountain Music, Sojourners Magazine/December 2008

Ten years ago old-time music was dying in the Kentucky mountains where it was born. “Fiddlers were hard to find around here,” says Knott County banjo player Randy Wilson. “I could count the ones I knew of on one hand.”

The Cowan Creek Mountain Music School was founded with the hope of reversing that trend. For seven years, the best old-time musicians in Kentucky have come to the school, in Letcher County near Whitesburg, to spend the last week of June teaching old-time tunes to mixed classes of children and adults. The school defines “old time” as the indigenous music that was in the mountains before the advent of radio and recordings.

The results of this cultural rescue mission are already evident