The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #7059 Message #42344
Posted By: Bill in Alabama
19-Oct-98 - 08:00 AM
Thread Name: Mudcat (THE WORLD)Let us know where you are.
Subject: RE: Mudcat (THE WORLD)Let us know where you are.
My name is Bill Foster. I am living now in Florence, Alabama, in the extreme northwestern corner of Alabama, on the beautiful Tennessee River at the Muscle Shoals, where I am a Professor of English linguistics and American Folklore at the University of North Alabama. Autumn comes slowly to north Alabama, and lingers long. Today's high will be in the low '80s, and the low tonight in the mid '60s. I play banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle (poorly), Autoharp, and assorted other instruments which cross my path from time to time. Banjo is my primary instrument; I played bluegrass semi-professionally for a good many years, but the clawhammer style which I learned from Uncle Arthur Kuykendall on Sand Mountain is my preferred style. I was born into a family which has lived in the southern Appalachians since the early nineteenth century, and I am a fifth-generation musician, although I can't read music. I grew up submerged in the traditional music of the southern Appalachians, listening to friends and family sing and play music on front porches and in kitchens in and around Big Ridge, Tennessee and Tunnel Hill, Georgia. When the Kingston Trio burst on the scene in 1958, much of their material was already familiar to me, although hardly recognizable. I was a field worker for the Dictionary of American Regional English as well as the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, and I had ample opportunity to collect and swap songs with folk informants. For eighteen years my family traveled widely as The Foster Family String Band; we retired in 1995, and now my wife and I stay busy performing music together. I stumbled across Mudcat a couple of years ago, and I try to visit daily.