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John Harrod
moved to Owen County for one reason — Bill Livers. He said
at the time it was like a true Huckleberry Finn story.
“The old black man followed by a lot of young hippies,”
Harrod said. “He was definitely one of the first heroes
fiddling around here.”
Harrod said he learned a lot from Livers and it helped fuel the
passion he had for old-time Kentucky music which takes up a lot
of his free time and recently got him a Folk Heritage Award, one
of the 2004 Governor’s Awards in the Arts.
He was nominated by Tona Barkley who has seen first-hand much
of the work he has done to preserve Kentucky’s musical heritage.
“A couple of our friends have received these awards in the
past,” Barkley said. “And the work he’s done
in folk heritage, preserving it, he’s done very well and
he needed to be recognized.”
Harrod said he started seeking out old recordings and old-time
musicians in the 1970s to preserve the tradition of their work.
He’d record on reel-to-reel tape and cassette tapes when
he didn’t have access to a reel-to-reel machine. He’s
collected pictures and taken some of his own and is sharing his
findings with Kentucky universities.
His entire collection can be found at Berea College, and Morehead
State University is working to add it to their libraries. In fact,
as MSU takes the tapes, they record them on CD and give a copy
to Harrod.
“When they give me back my tapes I also get a CD,”
he said. “That’s part of the deal.”
Though he has days worth of music recorded, only about six or
seven CDs have been released from his collection. He said he needs
to convert the recordings onto CD because the tapes will corrupt
and that music could be lost forever.
He said that some of them already have. He found someone who was
also interested in Kentucky folk music to help restore some of
the recordings.
“There’s a machine and it looks at what happens before
and after (a break) and it just fills it in,” Harrod said.
“I’m sure it’s a long and expensive process.”
Harrod and Gus Meade, formerly of Henry County, have been searching
together for more information and more musicians to record.
“Gus is great,” Harrod said. “He looks at records
from the 1920s and ’30s that weren’t widely distributed.
He’ll track people down by the names who appeared on the
recordings.”
He said that Meade would also look through genealogy records to
see if a musician had passed any of their recordings down the
line.
But Harrod doesn’t think enthusiasts can fully appreciate
the music without a visual which is why he has also videotaped
performances.
“It’s almost athletic, the bowing style and I’ve
always liked athletics, but the way they play is almost as important
as what they play,” he said.
He said that he started playing fiddle what is considered late
in life, when he was 19 or 20, and has tried to imitate the style
used by others he has seen play.
He tries to teach these styles to students he teaches fiddle.
“There’s one girl from Henry County and she’s
just dynamic,” Harrod said. He said she is in middle school,
but is already developing her own playing style. “She takes
what I teach her and goes beyond that, but it still fits in with
the tradition (of the music).”
He said seeing young people play like that gives him hope for
the musical future of Kentucky as many of the old timer players
have died.
“I’ve known more than one young person to abandon
rock and roll,” he said. “I know one that sold a Fender
Stratocaster to buy a fiddle. You can’t get any more extreme.”
For now, Harrod said he will continue to teach fiddle and play
himself.
“I’m going to play as long as I can,” he said,
“until arthritis gets me.”
He’ll travel with his band, Kentucky Wild Horse, and seek
out old recordings and artists.
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