Bascom Lunsford was born in 1882 into a musical family on the campus of Mars Hill College, where his father taught. Surrounded by the rural mountain life of western North Carolina, Bascom grew up steeped in traditional music. His great-uncle sawed up a storm on the fiddle while his mother’s voice rang with ancient ballads.

Bascom quickly caught the music bug himself. As a boy, he first plucked out tunes on a cigar box fiddle before graduating to a real instrument. In his teens, he added a banjo to the mix.

In adulthood, Bascom lived on a farm in Leicester, North Carolina. He was a man of many trades – selling fruit trees, promoting bees and honey, teaching deaf students, practicing law, lecturing on English and history, and publishing newspapers. But of all his vocations, collecting and performing the cherished music of southern Appalachia was Bascom’s true calling.

“One voice seized me more than the rest. Over a simply picked banjo, the voice sang mournfully about a mole in the ground. Elsewhere, the same voice preached, over that same simple banjo, about dry bones. Like so many folk tunes, these told strange, elliptical stories, dense with images, exploding with emotion.  (Chris King, recounting the first time he heard Bascom Lamar Lunsford.)”

Bascom’s passion for collecting folk songs soon brought him to the attention of a growing circle of folklorists. They were inspired by British collector Cecil Sharp, who had trekked through the southern mountains from 1916-1918. Though Bascom never met Sharp himself, he became acquainted with Sharp’s assistant Maud Karpeles.

Eager to contribute, Bascom shared countless songs with folklorist Frank C. Brown at Duke University. In 1925, Bascom accompanied Dr. Robert Gordon, the first head of the Library of Congress Folklore Archive, on a ballad-hunting mission through the Carolinas. Gordon encouraged Bascom to keep preserving the treasures he uncovered, advising a systematic approach.

Another folklore luminary, Dr. Dorothy Scarborough from Columbia University, also toured the region with Bascom in 1930. Recognizing the wealth of his “personal memory collection,” Columbia invited Bascom to New York in 1935 to record over 300 of his songs. Then in 1949, Bascom pulled off a two-week recording marathon for the Library of Congress, contributing a staggering 330 items – the largest repertoire from a single source at the time.

Through skill and passion, Bascom Lunsford became a critical bridge between vanishing Appalachian traditions and the growing folklore archives destined to preserve them.

Much more about Bascom on this link.