Related Berea Sound Archives Sites
- Traditional Music and Spoken Word Performances This link opens in a new windowListen to selected musical performances and storytelling from the Berea Sound Archives.
- Alan Lomax Kentucky CollectionListen to ocumentary sound recordings of rural Kentucky music and lore collected under the auspices of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress between 1933 and 1942.
- Oral History Collections GuideBerea's online oral history collections cover a broad range of topics in the areas of Appalachian history and culture, and the history of Berea College. In many instances searchable transcripts accompany the digitized audio recordings.
- Examples of Oral Histories For Use As Primary SourcesSelected interview texts and recordings covering a wide range of topics.
- Sound Recording Analysis WorksheetA teaching / learning resource from the National Archives.
- Sound Archives Research GuidesResearch guides are the work of Archives staff and the College's Sound Archives Fellows. Using audio and video illustrations, the guides cover a wide range of topics.
- Sound Preservation ProgramThe program's focus is on Berea's collections of noncommercial recordings that document Appalachian history and culture and the history of Berea College.
- Berea Sound Archives HomepageBrowse By Topic
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Eric Strother
Eric Strother was a musicology doctoral candidate at the University of Kentucky, with research interests in jazz, popular music, sacred music, and Appalachian ballad and fiddle traditions. His musical roots are in West Virginia where he grew up hearing the fiddle and mandolin playing of his stepfather and other family members.
Eric's work in the Berea Archives (July 2008) centered on transcribing and analyzing tune performances of West Virginia fiddlers Melvin Wine and Ernie Carpenter. His approach was to document not only the tune but the complete performance which will allow future researchers to analyze the constants and variations in each repetition to gain insight into the performer’s characteristic style.
Tune Transcriptions and Audio
These transcriptions and commentaries are based on audio and video recordings of Ernie Carpenter and Melvin Wine performing at the Berea College Celebration of Traditional Music at various times 1987 - 1994. Both fiddlers are accompanied on banjo by Gerald Milnes. Because the transcriptions are intended to capture a particular performance, the keys given for the tunes are the sounding keys and may differ from the keys intended by the performers. See the Fellowship Activity Final Report for biography, playing style descriptions, and additional commentary.
