DESCRIPTION:
This scene presents a fiddle player who lived way back up in the backcountry of Appalachian North Carolina. They called him Lost John the fiddling man. Back in 1965, a 22 yr. old me went down to spend three weeks driving around Madison County, North Carolina, in the center of Appalachia, with the 82 year old founder of the Asheville Mountain Music and Dance Festival, Bascom Lamar Lunsford. The resulting 16mm one hour film, "Bluegrass Roots" lets you hear and experience the hard scrabbling, dirt road real people and the music and stories that dominated the southern mountains 50 years ago. My film presents a string of the most extraordinary singers, players and dancers that the Bluegrass Mountains had to offer. Many later became famous. Some were never heard from again. Most of the songs are classics, including Lunsford's own tune, "Mountain Dew."

Some of my subscribers make the comment that they have heard better. Of course this is a matter of personal taste but to me, great bluegrass country mountain fiddling has to be gritty and raw – just like the way Lost John plays it in this sequence. And, respecting Bascom Lunsford who had spent 60 years going around the mountains looking for the best (and he considered Lost John the best) even if I didn't feel the absolute brilliance in this man, Bascom did. I recorded this with one heavy 16mm handheld camera and one heavy Nagra audio tape recorder with a shotgun microphone.

When the film aired on Public Television in 1965, TV Guide gave it a full-page positive review, because Americans had never seen a documentary on the roots of Bluegrass and Country music. Today, the dirt roads and the moonshine counties are largely modernized, and Bluegrass Roots, stands as a record of a uniquely talented group of people at a time just before the coming of television, changed them.