University of Virginia Library

Hope & Hard Times In Music

By PATTI KYLE

The finest traditions of
foot-stomping mountain music will
come to the University in the fifth
annual Ole Time Mountain Music
Show. Ballads and bluegrass,
southern style, will be served up by
a troupe of country musicians
presently on a tour of the
Appalachian towns. The music
festival, presented by the Virginia
Weekly and the People's Music
Committee, is part of the Southern
Folk Cultural Revival Project.

Organized over five years ago,
the project tours mountain
communities throughout the
southeast, bringing together a wide
assortment of performers. The
musicians hall from a variety of
backgrounds, and include a former
cotton mill worker, a West Virginia
coal miner's daughter and a country
rock singer.

Ballads singer and songwriter
Anne Romaine originally conceived
the idea of bringing the mountain
musicians together. Her own
specialty is country-western ballads,
as well as songs from the cotton
mills and coal mining South. A
former student at the University,
Miss Romaine will also entertain
with some of her own protest songs
on the contemporary struggles of
the grassroots South.

Mike Seeger, well known to the
"real folk" music circles as an
extremely talented singer, musician
and folklorist, will make a return
visit. He drew a record crowd in
Cabell Hall when he appeared a few
years ago with the New Lost City
Ramblers. He is now recording on
Folkways, specializing in mountain
ballads and industrial songs.

Country-rock artist Jack Wright
will also appear. A versatile singer
from the coal camps of southwest
Virginia, his style reflects the
contemporary influences of James
Taylor.

Kilby Snow, another native
Virginian, will perform his own
hard driving arrangements of some
familiar mountain tunes. Mr.
Snow's unique style of auto harp
picking should be a new experience
for bluegrass enthusiasts.

Rounding out the entertainment
will be Alice Foster and Hazel
Dickens. Cutting loose on the lively
close-harmony bluegrass for which
their West Virginia hills are famous,
the duet will also sing ballads and
blues, while accompanying
themselves on banjo, guitar, and
auto harp. The pair will
undoubtedly delight audiences here
as they have at the Newport Folk

Festival, American Folk Life
Festival, and numerous other
concerts.

The variety of musicians who
will perform gives you some idea of
the diversity of their material. The
show will be a blend of ballads,
white mountain blues, gospel songs,
and bluegrass, as well as topical
songs of the coal mines and cotton
mills. It weaves together the
Southern people's story of hard
times and high hopes, of death and
the dignity of struggle.

As a modern counterpart of the
story of struggling Southern
workers, several members of IUE
Local 174, currently engaged in a
long and difficult strike against the
Alliance Manufacturing Company
in Shenandoah, Virginia, will be on
hand. They will briefly relate the
story of their strike and ask for
support from members of the
University community.