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World Routes

Music: World

Programme exploring music from around the world

Programme exploring music from around the world, featuring interviews with performers, live concerts, monthly CD reviews and special location reports

World Routes: An Appalachian Road Trip

World Routes: An Appalachian Road Trip: Episode 1: Mount Airy Fiddlers Convention

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Music: World: Americas

Mount Airy Fiddlers Convention

Episode 1

Episode 1: Mount Airy Fiddlers Convention

An Appalachian Road Trip

BBC Radio 3 - World Routes, An Appalachian Road Trip, Mount Airy Fiddlers Convention

Banning Eyre visits Mount Airy, North Carolina, and talks to folk musician Mike Seeger.

Banning Eyre discovers American folk music from the Appalachians, visiting Mount Airy, North Carolina, talking to folk musician Mike Seeger and visiting a local radio station.

In the first of two programmes recorded on-location for World Routes, broadcaster, writer and musician Banning Eyre embarks on his own Appalachian roadtrip to discover and record the uniquely American folk music that was born in the southern Appalachian mountains through the 18th and 19th Centuries.

He visits the small town of Mount Airy, in Surry County, North Carolina, home to the Mount Airy Fiddlers Convention, where he meets the extraordinary players and singers that are keeping this music alive, and finds out how Old Time music is the direct precursor of what we now call Country and Bluegrass.

In an interview with musician and field recordist Mike Seeger, recorded just a few months before he died, Banning discovers the roots of the music in the parallel histories of the European settlers and African slaves, and how post-Emancipation a distinctly American music was forged from the interplay of the African banjo and the European fiddle. Surry County musician Paul Brown explains the record companies' part in defining Old Time music as a predominantly white occupation, and what's so speacial about this part of the country. He visits local radio station WPAQ to hear how they are keeping this traditional rural music alive, and tries the festival delicacy that is deep-fried Oreos.

Producer: Peter Meanwell

Repeat.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Banning Eyre discovers American folk music of the southern Appalachian mountains

Broadcaster, writer and musician Banning Eyre discovers and records the uniquely American folk music that was born in the southern Appalachian mountains through the 18th and 19th centuries

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An Appalachian Road Trip

Episode 1: Mount Airy Fiddlers Convention

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