White Top Folk Festival

White Top Folk Festival

Appalachian music
Folk music
Folk festivals
Folk revivals

The White Top Folk Festival grew out of a suggestion made to Abingdon attorney John Blakemore that a fiddler’s contest be held on White Top on the 4th of July. 13 In addition to being an attorney, Blakemore was a well-connected politician and an officer in the White Top Company which owned the mountain. The wife of Blakemore’s cousin John Buchanan, Annabel Morris Buchanan was a member of the Federated Women’s Music Clubs of America and director of the Federation’s folk music section. A gifted musician in her own right, Mrs. Buchanan hosted a weekly Monday Afternoon Music Club in Marion, Virginia and in that capacity had become acquainted with John Powell, a southern classical musician of some distinction. “In addition to being a composer and prominent pianist, Powell lectured, wrote articles, and sponsored associations and festivals designed to promote the preservation of the folk music of the south.” 14 He was also an advocate for the belief that mountain life, and especially the ballads that musicologists like Cecil Sharp and others had “discovered” in Appalachia a decade earlier, represented the last bastion of Anglo-Saxon purity in a rapidly expanding, increasingly urbanized, and ethnically diverse America. Texan Annabel Morris Buchanan, Virginia composer and proponent of the Anglo-Saxon folk-song school and local entrepreneur John Blakemore: from this star-crossed trio emerged the idea for the White Top Folk Festival.

See also: Folk Revival, Encyclopedia Of Appalachia.

William Stein

Washington County Public Library

August 8, 2014

David Winship

Washington County Public Library

Appalachian Journey, featuring Tommy Jarrel, Nimrod Workman, Janette Carter, Sheila Kay Adams, Frank Proffit, Jr. Film by Alan Lomax. PBS "Patchwork Series." Media Generation, c. 1991.

Homemade American Music, featuring Mike Seeger, Alice Gerrard. Film by Yasha Aginsky, Carrie Aginsky. Aginsky Productions, c. 1980.

To Hear Your Banjo Play, featuring Pete Seeger, Texas Gladden. Film by Irving Lerner and WillardVan Dyke, c. 1946.

White Top Folk Festival 1938 radio transcription.

English

Text (documents)
Images
Sound (oral history)

1931-1939