The Brandywine Friends of Old Time Music, who have hosted the annual Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival since 1972, have recently donated their entire collection of audio recordings to the Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies program at East Tennessee State University.
These are board tapes of all the performances on stage at the festival over the years, which includes sets by nearly every notable bluegrass artist excepting The Stanley Brothers and Flatt & Scruggs who were inactive when the festival started. They will be housed at ETSU by their Archive of Appalachia, who will start working on digitizing the entire collection of tapes as time allows.
Once the digitization is completed, ETSU will make the audio available to students and visiting scholars researching bluegrass music. There are no plans to release any of the music commercially.
During the World of Bluegrass convention last month in Raleigh, NC, ETSU Bluegrass director Dan Boner held s press conference with Carl Goldstein and Howard Parker of Delaware Valley, where they discussed this major donation and its value to the posterity of bluegrass.
The audio may be difficult to hear over the room noise in the exhibit hall so you may need to keep a finger on the volume button.
Great news for ETSU and for everyone interested in the history of our music.
