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This collection has access restrictions. For details, please see the restrictions.
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in our reading room, and not digitally available through the World Wide Web. See the Duplication Policy section for more information.
Archival processing of the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Family Collection was made possible through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Collection Overview
| Size | 14 items |
| Abstract | The Bascom Lamar Lunsford Family Collection consists of studio and field recordings, 1935-1972, created or compiled by Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973), a white North Carolina lawyer, folklorist, performer and festival promoter, and his daughter, Kern Lunsford. The majority of these tapes are part of Bascom Lamar Lunsford's "personal memory collection" of folks songs, which he made in collaboration with Columbia University in 1935. With the help of George W. Hibbett, a professor in the English Department at Columbia, and recording engineer, Walter C. Garwick, Lunsford recorded more than three hundred mountain songs, folk ballads, folk readings, poetry, spirituals, and folk games that he had personally collected over several decades in the mountains of southern Appalachia. On the recordings Lunsford sings, plays fiddle, banjo, and guitar, recites poetry, tells jokes and stories, reads sermons and speeches, and gives detailed background information for each recorded track. The Bascom Lamar Lunsford Family Collection also includes recordings, circa 1970-1972, compiled by Lunsford's daughter, Kern Lunsford. These recordings include dubs of previous recordings as well as field recordings of North Carolina based gospel singers and country-western singers, including recordings of Reverend W. S. Woody (b. 1885), a white old-time Baptist preacher from Spruce Pine, N.C., singing sacred songs, and recordings of Mr. and Mrs. Calvin Boone and Evelyn Boone of Green Mountain, N.C., singing country-western and gospel songs both a cappella and with guitar accompaniment from song sheets. |
| Creator | Lunsford (Family: Lunsford, Bascom Lamar, 1882-1973) |
| Curatorial Unit | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Folklife Collection. |
| Language | English |
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Information For Users
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Processing Information
Encoded by: Anne Wells, February 2016
Archival processing of the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Family Collection was made possible through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Since August 2017, we have added ethnic and racial identities for individuals and families represented in collections. To determine identity, we rely on self-identification; other information supplied to the repository by collection creators or sources; public records, press accounts, and secondary sources; and contextual information in the collection materials. Omissions of ethnic and racial identities in finding aids created or updated after August 2017 are an indication of insufficient information to make an educated guess or an individual's preference for identity information to be excluded from description. When we have misidentified, please let us know at wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.
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Subject Headings
The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.
Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.
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Biographical Information
Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973), a white performer and collector of folk music and organizer of folk festivals, was born in Mars Hill, Madison County, N.C. He was the son of James Bassett and Luarta Leah Buckner Lunsford and the great-grandson of Thomas Shepard Deaver, a founder of Mars Hill College. Having grown up in a rural area where folk songs, ballads, and instrumental tunes provided entertainment in homes, at square dances, and at other social functions, Lunsford developed an early appreciation for this music. He and his brother Blackwell were accomplished fiddlers by their teens, and they often performed for neighbors and at school entertainments. Even as a young man Lunsford sought songs and tunes from family, friends, and acquaintances, learning to sing and play them in order to collect and preserve them.
Following graduation from Camp Hill Academy in Leicester (Buncombe County), he enrolled in Rutherford College in 1901. A year later he accepted a teaching position in Madison County. After leaving that post Lunsford worked for two years for the East Tennessee Nursery Company, traveling on horseback to sell fruit trees throughout western North Carolina and adjacent states. This job enabled him to contact families in remote areas and collect even more songs and tunes. He returned to Rutherford College from 1906 to 1909, then taught school in McDowell County. In 1912, having studied law on his own, he entered Trinity College (now Duke University) as a second-year student where he studied under Samuel Fox Mordecai. He received his law degree and license to practice in 1913. Returning to western North Carolina, he pursued a number of occupations during the next decade. These included practicing law, newspaper publishing, and investigating draft evaders for the U.S. Department of Justice in New York.
On 2 June 1906, Lunsford married Nellie Sara Triplett (22 June 1881-4 May 1960). The couple had seven children: Sara Kern, Blackwell Lamar, Ellen Chapman, Lynn Huntington, Nellie Triplett, Merton Bacum, and Josepha Belle. After the death of his first wife, Lunsford married Mrs. Freda Metcalf English on 25 August 1960.
Lunsford's interest in collecting folk songs brought him to the attention of the growing number of folklorists following the British collector Cecil Sharp, who toured the southern mountains between 1916 and 1918. Although Lunsford never met Sharp, he did make the acquaintance of his assistant, Maud Karpeles. Lunsford contributed innumerable items to Frank C. Brown of Duke University for the North Carolina Folklore collection. In 1925 he accompanied Dr. Robert W. Gordon, the first head of the Library of Congress Archive of Folksong, on a search for ballads and songs in western North Carolina and South Carolina. Gordon encouraged Lunsford to continue collecting and preserving the songs and to be thorough and systematic in his approach. Dr. Dorothy Scarborough, from Columbia University, also toured the mountains with Lunsford in 1930. As a result of these contacts, in March 1935 Lunsford received an invitation to go to New York to record his "Personal Memory Collection" for Columbia; the collection included 315 items. In 1949, in a two-week marathon session, Lunsford recorded 330 items for the Library of Congress. Up to that time his was the largest repertory that a single informant had contributed to the Archive of Folksong.
In addition to collecting traditional songs, Lunsford composed several new ones, including "Good Old Mountain Dew" in 1920. In 1929 he and composer Lamar Stringfield collaborated on 30 and 1 Folk Songs from the Southern Mountains, a volume of songs arranged with musical accompaniment. Lunsford's major contribution to the perpetuation of folk music was the formation and promotion of folk festivals. In 1927 he advised the Asheville Chamber of Commerce to add a program of dancing and singing to its Rhododendron Festival. The program was so successful that the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival was established the next year. Lunsford organized or helped to found numerous festivals throughout his life, including the first National Folk Festival in St. Louis in 1934.
A high point in his career as a performer and promoter occurred in 1939, when 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 of Great Britain. In 1949 Lunsford represented the United States at the first International Folk Festival in Venice, Italy. He spent his later years at home in South Turkey Creek, near Leicester, where he continued to receive and entertain visitors and to participate in local festivals until his death at age ninety-one. He was buried in the Old Brick Church Cemetery, Leicester. (Biography courtesy of NCpedia)
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Scope and Content
The Bascom Lamar Lunsford Family Collection consists of 14 1/4" open reel audio tapes, 1935-1972, created or compiled by Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973), a white North Carolina lawyer, folklorist, performer and festival promoter, and his daughter, Kern Lunsford. With the help of George W. Hibbett, a professor in the English Department at Columbia, and recording engineer, Walter C. Garwick, Lunsford recorded more than three hundred mountain songs, folk ballads, folk readings, poetry, spirituals, and folk games that he had personally collected over several decades in the mountains of southern Appalachia. Over a series of 10 1/4" open reel audio tapes, Lunsford sings, plays fiddle, banjo, and guitar, recites poetry, tells jokes and stories, reads sermons and speeches, and gives detailed background information for each recorded track. The Bascom Lamar Lunsford Family Collection also includes 4 1/4" open reel audio recordings, circa 1970-1972, compiled by Lunsford's daughter, Kern Lunsford. These recordings include dubs of previous recordings as well as field recordings of North Carolina based gospel singers and country-western singers, including recordings of Reverend W. S. Woody (b. 1885), a white old-time Baptist preacher from Spruce Pine, N.C., singing sacred songs, and recordings of Mr. and Mrs. Calvin Boone and Evelyn Boone of Green Mountain, N.C., singing country-western and gospel songs both a cappella and with guitar accompaniment from song sheets.
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Bascom Lamar Lunsford Family Collection, 1935-1972.
Arrangement: Chronological.
Processing information: Titles and descriptions compiled from the SFC database.
Field notes, or supporting documentation, for these recordings reside in the Southern Folklife Collection Field Notes Collection (#30025).
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Items Separated