skip to main content

Wilkes Heritage Museum

Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame

Candlelight Ghost Tours

Hall of Fame
About Us
Sponsors
Contact
Tickets

Media and Scholar

Musicologist, writer, and producer Alan Lomax spent over six decades working to promote knowledge and appreciation of the world’s folk music. He began his career in 1933 alongside his father, the pioneering folklorist John Avery Lomax, author of the best-selling Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. In 1934, the two launched an effort to expand the holdings of recorded folk music at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress (established 1928), gathering thousands of field recordings of folk musicians throughout the American South, Southwest, Midwest, and Northeast, as well as in Haiti and the Bahamas. Their collecting resulted in several popular and influential anthologies of American folk songs, including American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York: Macmillan, 1934); Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (New York: Macmillan, 1936), the first in depth biographical study of an American folk musician; Our Singing Country (with Ruth Crawford Seeger) (New York: Macmillan, 1941); and Folk Song USA (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce 1947).

Published in 2016

Alan Lomax

Bluegrass Unlimited is a monthly magazine dedicated to the furtherance of bluegrass and old-time musicians, devotees and associates. The magazine was first published in 1966 and is considered the premier magazine for bluegrass music. Founded by Pete and Marion Kuykendall, the magazine moved from an informal to a full-time operation in the fall of 1970. The 1996 International Bluegrass Hall of Fame citation inducting Pete Kuykendall says that Bluegrass Unlimited magazine is “a publication affectionately referred to as the ‘bible of bluegrass music’”.

Published in 2013

Pete Kuykendall

Ralph Epperson was born in Ararat, Virginia. He translated his love of mountain music into a focal point for community life: a radio station. WPAQ was his brainchild and later he acquired WBRF. Paul Brown said it best, “Where Ralph was concerned, the more layers one pulled back, the more one would find. He was a … radio engineer, a deep thinker, an explainer, and an enthusiast.” He tirelessly encouraged musicians young and old.

Published in 2008

Ralph Epperson

In the spring of 1966, a group of Washington, D.C. area bluegrass fans came together for a very important meeting. They met to discuss producing a newsletter to keep the bluegrass faithful in the area up-to-date on band appearances. The group decided to include articles and record reviews and Bluegrass Unlimited, Volume 1, Number 1, a nine-page edition was published in July 1966. The newsletter’s first cover was a picture honoring Carter Stanley who had passed away that same year. By 1977 the magazine evolved from the stapled-in-the-corner mimeograph form to an offset press production. Today the magazine has a circulation of 12,000, has moved into the electronic age, and considered the foremost magazine for bluegrass music.

Published in 2019

Bluegrass Unlimited

Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame

100 East Main Street P.O. Box 935 Wilkesboro, NC 28697 • 336-667-3171

Copyright © Wilkes Heritage Museum

Wilkesboro, NC Web Design by Cube Creative Design