Library to preserve sounds of Southern music

CHAPEL HILL -- Recorded interviews and performances by Southern traditional musicians including Ralph Stanley, Doc Watson and Elizabeth Cotten will be available free next year to library visitors at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Staff at Wilson Library also soon will preserve amateur films shot in Florence, S.C., in the 1920s, showing scenes of social gatherings, plantations and local families and giving a sense of what life was like in the South at that time.

The projects are funded by new grants of $138,275 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and $6,000 from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

The library's Southern Folklife Collection will use the first grant to preserve and make accessible 2,350 hours of unique and endangered musical recordings. Upon the project's estimated completion in July 2009, researchers will enjoy free on-site access to the sounds of Stanley and others.

The project also includes live recordings made between 1970 and 2000 at the Ole Time Fiddler's & Bluegrass Festival in Union Grove and WPAQ radio broadcasts from the collection of the late Ralph D. Epperson, who founded the Mount Airy station in 1948.

"These recordings are part of the tremendous collections that make UNC one of the premier repositories for the study of Southern traditional music," said Steve Weiss, head of the folklife collection.