Jennie Halperin (NC/NY)

Jennie Halperin is the curator and archivist of the Bascom Lamar Lunsford collection at Columbia University's Center for Ethnomusicology. Lunsford was a lawyer, folklorist and performer of traditional music from western North Carolina. More than 315 of his songs and tunes are documented in sound recordings he made at Columbia in 1935.

Jennie's Fellowship research will focus on the extensive recorded interviews, manuscript, photographs, and music recordings of Lunsford and his contemporaries found in Berea's Bascom Lunsford Collection.

Her work is in support of a Center for Ethnomusicology project that will create an open source, free, and downloadable teaching website that will make Lunsford's folk music legacy readily available to university and primary school settings. In addition to the Columbia and Berea collections, the project will draw upon materials from the Lunsford family, Mars Hill College, and the Library of Congress.

Marina Peterson (Ohio)

Marina Peterson is an anthropologist and is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. Her Berea Fellowship work will be in furtherance of research relating to a publication project on the 1940s musician's union recording bans.

Use of Berea's archival audio material will allow her to move beyond print accounts to get a sense of what the recording bans sounded like especially in the form of radio programs. Major themes to be addressed include music as labor, labor legislation, music commercialization, creation of regional identity through radio broadcasts, and how Appalachians were connected to the nation. Recordings and related manuscript materials that will be drawn upon are from collections in the areas of early commercial country music, commercialization of traditional music, Kentucky radio broadcasts, and traditional crafts and occupations.

Research outcomes will include a series of conference papers at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) and the Southern Labor Studies Conference. Journal articles will be submitted to journals in anthropology, performance studies, popular music studies, and labor studies. Marina's Fellowship Activity Report is available as a pdf file (document will open a new window).

Barbara Taylor (Santa Barbara, CA / Boone, NC)

Barbara Taylor is an old-time fiddle and banjo player, a doctoral student in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a master's student in Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University. Her classroom experience has included being a teaching assistant at UC, Santa Barbara and adjunct general studies faculty at Appalachian State. She has also served as Assistant Editor of Ethnomusicology, the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Taylor's Berea Fellowship work will be primarily in support of dissertation research on various aspects of African and African America history of the banjo. A secondary focus will be on the place of women in old-time music and the intersections of race and gender in American vernacular music practices. She will be making use of several of Berea's traditional music related collections that include field recordings, early commercial recordings, radio broadcasts, and related manuscript and print materials.

Anticipated research outcomes include paper presentations at national academic society meetings such as the American Folklore Society and an article in an appropriate peer-reviewed journal such as the Journal of Appalachian Studies or the Black Music Research Journal. Likely topics include repertoire and style transmission between black and white musicians and comparison of meter and rhythmic structure between African American and Euro-American performances of the same pieces.

Mary Ruth Isaacs (KY)

Mary Ruth Isaacs is working toward a Doctor of Education (Ed.D) degree at the University of the Cumberlands. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Berea and the University of Kentucky are in Child Development and Family Studies. She has taught undergraduate courses at the University of Kentucky and is currently an adjunct instructor at Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

This Fellowship will support the development of a college-level course tentatively titled, "Childhood in Appalachia." Isaacs will be using audio recordings and transcriptions from Berea's folklore collections, especially those from the 1940s-1950s. Songs and stories that reflect beliefs, customs, attitudes, and traditions relating to children and families in Appalachia will serve as one means of developing an understanding of the dynamics that existed in a period when television and social media were not the pervasive influence which they have become at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Kate Larken (Kentucky)

Kate Larken is a Kentucky musician, writer, educator and publisher with much experience in media production, teaching, and roots music management. She was a founding member of Public Outcry the performance group that used music, spoken word and images to raise awareness of pressing Appalachian environmental issues. She has produced several albums of her own songs and has appeared on recordings by a number of other artists.

Her Berea Fellowship research will be in support of developing a publication project tentatively titled Rural Radio: The Tool that Transformed a Culture. Her resultant nonfiction book and companion website will focus on roots music in the rural south. Particular attention will be paid to developing an understanding how rural people saw themselves and their homemade music, and how radio changed that vision.

Recordings and related manuscripts, photographs and print material that will be drawn upon are from Berea collections in the areas of Kentucky radio program recordings, field recordings of traditional musicians and singers, and personal papers of musicians and others involved in the commercialization of traditional music.

Cassie Patterson (Ohio)

Cassie Patterson is a PhD student in the English department at Ohio State University. Her areas of study are Folklore, Ethnography, Appalachian Studies and Literary Studies. Her Fellowship project was in furtherance of her doctoral research which addresses the complexity of Appalachian educational practices, both historical and contemporary. She is especially interested in how interventions by outsiders collide with local community traditions, both as critique and romanticization of culture.

The primary focus of her Fellowship work was the audio recordings in Berea's Leonard Roberts Collection that documented Roberts' use of folktales as a teaching resource. A secondary focus was the early records that documented educational philosophy and methodology of Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky where in later years, Leonard Roberts was a teacher. A near term outcome of her Fellowship study is a conference paper at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in Nashville, October 2010. Cassie's Fellowship Activity Report is available as a pdf file. (Document will open a new window.)

John McCurley is a young fiddler living in Bloomington, Indiana. His musical interests date from high-school years in Berea after which he went on to Reed College in Oregon where he majored in philosophy. His Fellowship work at Berea was the initial research phase for the development of a free educational website that will serve present day fiddlers who are showing increasing interest in adding Kentucky fiddle tunes to their repertoires. From many hours of auditioning archival recordings, fifteen tunes were selected to be featured on the website. The site will be a resource for experienced musicians and a non-intimidating medium for those new to traditional music to learn a few fundamentals of fiddling and develop a small set of tunes that they can play. Recognizing the importance in the learning process of watching someone play a fiddle tune, the site will include video performances of each tune by a series of current-day fiddlers in addition to the source recordings from the Berea collection. John's Fellowship Activity Report is available as a pdf file. (Document will open a new window.)