News Release

UNC gets grant to preserve interviews,
music, by Carter Family, Sons of Pioneers

CHAPEL HILL – Inside the guts of the Southern Folklife Collection are many boxes -- reinforced gray boxes lining a warehouse area full of shelves; standard brown boxes recently shipped, decorated with postmarks and postage.

This is Steve Weiss’ turf, a treasure-trove of antiquated recordings. As sound and image librarian and head of the collection, which is housed in Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he handles the preservation of sound and moving images.

This year, the Grammy Foundation awarded the Southern Folklife Collection a $37,000 grant to preserve and provide access to recordings relating to the Carter Family and the Sons of the Pioneers in the Ed Kahn and Eugene Earle Collections.

The Carter Family archive, part of the Ed Kahn collection, consists primarily of reel-to-reel oral history interviews conducted in the 1950s and radio transcriptions and broadcasts. The interviews are with the original Carter Family members – A.P. Carter, his wife, Sarah, and her cousin Maybelle. There are about 17 transcription discs and about 35 cassette tapes at 45 minutes.

In August 1927, the three musicians arrived at a recording studio in Bristol, Tenn., to audition for a talent scout from the Victor Talking Machine Co. Their music was heavily influenced by their native Appalachia.

Their recordings of "Keep on the Sunnyside," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" and "Wildwood Flower" eventually brought the Carter Family national attention and success. The trio continued performing together before disbanding in 1943.

"The Carter Family is one of the most important and most influential groups in country music, and these recordings are rare broadcasts," Weiss said.

The Sons of the Pioneers collection has 900 transcription discs (16-inch lacquer discs) of the "Lucky U" radio program, almost all the shows broadcast during the 1950s — a real treasure, Weiss said. These records were pre-recorded or cut live in the studio for later broadcast.

The group, another rooted in the Great Depression, began when Leonard Slye entered an amateur singing contest on a Los Angeles radio show. A series of events led to the formation of what was to become the Sons of the Pioneers. In 1976, the group was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The two groups have left their mark on the country and western music scene — the Carter Family even provided a family sitcom standard.

"Contemporary country artists pay homage to these early groups without whom there would be no country music as we know it today," said history professor Dr. William Ferris, Joel R. Williamson distinguished professor of history and senior associate director of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South.

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Related release: http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/nov03/earle111903.html

Note: Weiss can be reached at (919) 962-1345 or smweiss@email.unc.edu

News Services contact: L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589