Presented by John Harrod, Sonny Rawlings and Don Rogers at The 8th Annual Morehead Old Time Music Festival in Morehead, Ky July 30, 2013 Morehead Old Time Music Festival
The first person I knew in Bath County was George Lee Hawkins… I was hanging around with George back in the late 1970s. I met George Hawkins, from Bath Country. And I started growing up there. I will just tell you just one little anecdote. I think it was 1977. I went to a fiddle contest at the Bath County Fair. In those days you wouldnt have found something like this in very many places. But in that fiddle contest, in 1977, there was George Lee Hawkins, Bob Prater, Alfred Bailey, Eldon Calbert and a couple other people I didnt know.
Not playing bluegrass. Not playing B’il Them Cabbage Down. After the contest was over all these fiddlers were jamming out in the parking lot. And the crowd there, people who did not play the fiddle, were calling for tunes like, play Weddington’s Reel. Play Brickyard Joe. And I was amazed.
Those were the local tunes that were not known anywhere else except among those fiddlers. But you see, the people in the community who didn’t even play the fiddle, knew those tunes. And those tunes belonged to them and that’s what they wanted to hear. I became fascinated with just the way that whole little scene had survived intact, that late after it had already disappeared every where else…” ~ John Harrod
website MoreheadOldTime.com
Video by David Slone
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