Library of Congress
Local Legacy Award

= = = Press Release = = =
= = = April 10, 2000 = = =

Ole Time Fiddlers & Bluegrass Festival Named Local Legacy by Library of Congress

Union Grove, NC ---- Musicians who play traditional American music know the Ole Time Fiddlers & Bluegrass Festival in Union Grove, North Carolina, has been a legendary meeting place for aficionados of the genre for more than 75 years. Soon, the rest of the world will know as well.

This May, the Festival receives a Local Legacy award from the Library of Congress at a huge celebratory event in Washington D.C. The Local Legacy honor is part of a project commemorating the bicentennial of the Library of Congress in which cultural traditions, events, and individuals who capture the spirit of grassroots community life in American were selected to represent the nation's heritage.

Senator Jesse Helms nominated the Ole Time Fiddlers and Bluegrass Festival while the Festival's owners provided the exhaustive documentation required by the Library.

"We sent photographs, newspaper clippings, a written history, musical tapes and CDs, a video, and lots of letters from important visitors over the years," says Harper VanHoy, the Festival's second-generation owner. "We'd been working with other folklorists over the years, so we pretty much had all the information together," he says.

The documentation provided by VanHoy will become part of the collections in the archives of the American Folklife Center to be preserved by the Library of Congress for generations to come.

"We count it a high privilege to be nominated by Senator Helms and to have been chosen by the Library of Congress for a Local Legacy," says VanHoy. "This truly is an honor, not only for ourselves, but for our County, State, and Nation."

A selected portion of all the Local Legacies can be seen at http://lcweb.loc.gov/bicentennial/propage/NC/nc_s_helms5.html.