Andrew Rowan Summers

Andrew Rowan Summers was a indigenous Virginian, a graduate from the School of Virginia, where he took a laws degree but made a decision to pursue a profession in music in his free time through the 1940s and 1950s. Infatuated using the music of Appalachia and their roots, he became a significant folk melody collector and finished up spending a great deal of period searching for veteran older performers, aswell as music that he attempted to preserve within their oldest forms, and genuine instruments. It had been while participating in the White Best Folk Celebration that he initial heard the original hill dulcimer– which is normally to state, the plucked dulcimer, as distinctive in the hammered dulcimer — performed by a guy in his eighties who was simply too frail to really take part in the proceedings. Summers surely got to understand the man, so when he passed away two years afterwards, he willed Summers his device. The attorney-turned-musicologist proceeded to master a geniune antiquated playing design as he previously heard from the person who bequeathed him the device; his style finished up echoing the traditional method of the device that was used before the 1950s and 1960s folk revivals, which provided a more available and well-known approach. Among many other shows, Summers was element of a 1946 display arranged by Alan Lomax at Columbia School in NY, where he performed with Tx Gladden, Hobart Smith, and Jean Ritchie on the university’s McMillan Movie theater. In 1940, Summers released his initial album, Old Globe Ballads in the us, on Columbia. It could consider 11 years before his association with Folkways Information found fruition, including not merely traditional folk music but an recording of Xmas music aswell. His debut recording for Folkways, Unquiet Grave (1951), was accompanied by Seed products of Love. Later on releases included Woman Gay and Xmas Carols, and an recording basically entitled Andrew Rowan Summers in 1957. Along with Mellinger Henry, Maurice Matteson, as well as the renowned John Jacob Niles, he was in charge of presenting and popularizing the device among contemporary listeners in the 1950s and early ’60s, specifically with that group of recordings aswell as his shows.