Southern Mountain Music with Wayne Erbsen

Enjoy this one hour program with Wayne Erbsen, featuring music and stories about pioneers of old-time and bluegrass music. Wayne will also be featuring and selling copies of his book, Southern Mountain Music.

This work represents a lifetime of research by Erbsen, professor of old-time and bluegrass music at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, who interviewed many legendary figures in Appalachian music. Often the first and only scholar to ever collect their stories, he provides in this book an indispensable history of bluegrass and old-time music in Appalachia for generations to come. 

The book begins with stories featuring many pioneers of old-time and bluegrass music. Next are chapters on brother duets from the 1930s, legendary banjo pickers and fiddle players, plus tales of 19th-century songwriters whose songs still populate bluegrass music. Also covered are wide-ranging and whimsical topics such as cowboys in bluegrass music, Charlie Cline’s powerful snoring, a near-encounter with Bigfoot, and Hoss Cartwright’s hat. 

A professor of old-time and bluegrass music at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, Wayne Erbsen has spent most of his life playing, teaching, researching, publishing, and broadcasting southern Appalachian and bluegrass music. He has written 38 books of songs, folklore, and music instruction. He divides his time between his home in Asheville, North Carolina and his family‚ and a Civil War era log cabin in Elk Creek, Virginia.