cjwit - Posted - 02/19/2026:  06:09:21

As someone interested in the histories of how folks talk about musical styles and practices, and as someone who only came to the banjo in the mid-2000s... are there archives of the internet forums of the past? Things like alt.banjo, alt.bluegrass, alt.fiddle, Cybergrass (banjo.com/bg_home.html), Bluegrass-L (through the University of Kentucky), or similar?



I'm pulling this list from depoyd's thesis, shared in another thread, but I've come across mentions of some of these in the past. Same for things like Bluegrass Unlimited, whose archives on the site appear to only go through 2020 (though the website looks like it's not rendering correctly for me). I'd love to look through and listen to the top-whatever lists of the past. What was popular is not always the same as what has stayed popular or what has been deemed important.



The Cybergrass page forwards to a listing of banjos for sale and a search for Bluegrass-L takes me to an internet service provider in Kentucky. It all demonstrates how fleeting digital sources are. Perhaps it's another conversation, but I worry about some of the amazing sites that collectors and others have put together over a lifetime. It's not an easy problem (though places like archive.org are extraordinary) and it's something I've been talking about with university librarians and digital archivists lately. So, as a secondary question, how are you all handling things like that?

Edited by - cjwit on 02/19/2026 06:10:28

Joel Hooks - Posted - 02/19/2026:  13:45:54

The internet is more ephemeral than paper, with paper at least there might be a copy.

It is a real concern. There is a large volume of info that has just vanished. The Archive "wayback" is pretty clunky and you pretty much need to know what you are looking for to find it.

Even the BHO archive is difficult to find things and with every change photos get moved, detached from discussions, or lost.

cjwit - Posted - 02/20/2026:  11:26:59

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about. I also believe that the internet is in the process of getting far worse about this kind of thing fairly quickly. Between generational change (and website ownership/management) and the dominance of gatekeeping in group management (for those who haven't dealt with these issues, see the nifty neologism "technofeudalism" for relevant critiques), it's becoming a bigger problem. I get really frustrated whenever some community coalesces around Facebook or similar systems for communications.

Edited by - cjwit on 02/20/2026 11:27:50

depoyd - Posted - 02/20/2026:  14:03:22

Can we pivot and consider a different approach and one that interests me and hope that I am a small part of. Consider I know 750+ songs as part of my performance songs, I know another several hundreds of songs that I play on occasion- old fiddle tunes, murder ballads, a lot of bluegrass and popular songs that. Know but just don’t play in public. So the pivot is the songs that have been past down orally and not aurally for many many generations That are families in Elkton, Virginia that date back to the earliest settler in Valley in the 1700s that have an unbroken family history of music making. So those before them had to learn and pass down songs to the next generation and then my generation is charged of carrying on the tradition to the future generations. And hopefully pass their music up to the next generation. Otherwise the culture and the shared values and the music ceases. That lost to a dead history will only happen if we musicians allow it. Do you feel a responsibility to maintain the music cultural identity as a lived identity? Or are you just playing for your lifetime with no nod to the future? Mass media, learning tab, and online lessons fail to capture the experience of playing in a really great late night jam. And never a universal understanding of accepting anyone who want to be in the Circle!.

Bart Veerman - Posted - 02/21/2026:  07:24:54

Yup. Years ago Google figured it was ok to "take possession" of the usenety

groups.google.com/g/alt.banjo

Ira Gitlin - Posted - 02/21/2026:  07:40:17

As you probably know, Chris, BU changed over in 2020 to being published by the International Bluegrass Hall of Fame and Museum in Owensboro, KY. I'm sure they have a complete print run going back to 1966 (I rifled through it at their Virginia offices in early 2020, before the move), but that would be a LOT of digitizing to do, and I don't think they have a huge staff.



Several folks unaffiliated with the magazine have complete collections. In my writing the past few years, I've relied on the collection of former Country Gentlemen and Seldom Scene bass player Tom Gray, who lives near me.

cjwit - Posted - 02/24/2026:  04:35:25

Ira Gitlin I didn't know that, thanks. As I dig in so some of these questions, I'll reach out. I made my way down there for the first time two years ago. It's always good to know where these things live, aside from private collections.

Bart Veerman I always wondered whether or not that was a "complete" takeover of all of those Usenet groups. Out of curiosity, I just searched for "banjo" (a common topic among us banjo players) and it looks like results go back to 1993.

> depoyd Do you feel a responsibility to maintain the music cultural identity as a lived identity? Or are you just playing for your lifetime with no nod to the future? Mass media, learning tab, and online lessons fail to capture the experience of playing in a really great late night jam. And never a universal understanding of accepting anyone who want to be in the Circle!.

I don't think you're wrong here to focus on the music making and community. That is the point, for many, at least. It's important to note that there is a tension between maintaining a cultural identity and maintaining [the music's viability as] a lived identity. Once you call something a "tradition," for example, you change the way it works in practice, the way folks think about it, prioritize it, live it, and reproduce it. The balance of values between memory and innovation is going to be different for different folks and all of the options have a great deal to offer the broader community as a whole. One of my concerns with this specific post is exactly what you're describing: as we see some generational shift, I worry that knowledge about this period from the 1950s to 1970s is increasingly going to disappear. Much of the music will be recorded, but much will not. Much knowledge will be written down, but many things won't be.

depoyd - Posted - 02/25/2026:  10:48:34

obviously you don't know me! I am doing a presentation at EMU tomorrow exactly about that maintain the music cultural identity as a lived identity? Or are you just playing for your lifetime with no nod to the future? Hope this helps---
• A beginning February 25, 2026
Music often functions less as mere entertainment rather than a living badge of cultural identity: the plaintive fiddle tunes of Appalachian gatherings and the hard-hitting beats of gangster rap in urban youth scenes both encode histories, values, and group membership. Whether passed down orally at a porch session or blasted from a car stereo, these music forms affirm belonging, signal social norms, and negotiate status—serving similar social purposes despite differences in style, production, or distribution.
• Opening: Who We Are & Why We’re Here
o We are Me & Martha—Donald DePoy and Martha Hills—musicians, educators, and “flame keepers” of Appalachian music and culture in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. We have an activity tune-bag of 750 song and know well more than a thousand songs common to the our music communities.
• Defining “Flame Keepers” in the Appalachian Context
o Being a “flame keeper” is not about nostalgia or preserving museum pieces; it is about tending a living fire. We are the living repository of songs covering centuries of music making that form a cultural ecosystem. Our work is to keep that system healthy by practicing, teaching, and sharing the music as it has been lived here in the Shenandoah Valley, while letting it breathe and adapt in our own time.
• Our Roots: How We Came to This Music
o Each of us carries personal histories that connect us to older generations of music makers—family, neighbors, local players who never became famous but profoundly shaped our ears and hearts.
o By telling a few stories, we show how tradition is passed one person at a time, in ordinary homes and community spaces, not just on big stages.
• The Old Music Makers: Unlikely Culture-Bearers
o The traditional players rarely saw themselves as “culture-bearers.” They “just played music”—for dances, church suppers, weddings, funerals, and family gatherings.
o Yet, from an anthropological perspective, they were key carriers of culture, moving songs, stories, and styles from one generation to the next simply by doing what they loved in community.
• Bridge Between Past and Future: The Unseen Role
o In sociology and anthropology, we talk about individuals as bridges between generations—connecting elders to youth, local to global, memory to innovation.
o Traditional musicians, often without knowing it, perform this bridging work whenever they teach a lick, share a tune, or invite a young person to join a circle. They are living, breathing links in a long historical chain.
• Culture as a Living Continuum, Not a Frozen Artifact
o Culture is best understood as a continuum: a river, not a statue. Appalachian music has always been in motion—absorbing British ballads, African rhythms, Native melodies, gospel harmonies, and later influences from jazz, country, and rock.
o Our job is not to freeze the music in a “golden age,” but to understand its roots, honor its lineages, and carry it forward with integrity so that it remains recognizably of this place and of this people.
• Cultural Maintenance vs. Cultural Erosion
o Cultural maintenance happens when communities continue to practice, teach, and value their own ways—music, stories, rituals—even as the world changes.
o Cultural erosion happens when those practices lose their everyday context, are replaced by imported, mass-produced culture, or are reduced to entertainment only.
o Historically, the Shenandoah Valley’s jams, church singings, house parties, and local dances were the “schools” of Appalachian music. As those spaces shrink, the danger of erosion grows.
• Oral Tradition: Learning by Ear with the Masters
o For generations, this music was learned orally and aurally: by ear, in person, side-by-side with master players. You watched their hands, felt the rhythm in your body, absorbed phrasing, timing, and nuance over long stretches of shared time.
o Anthropology reminds us: in embodied, face-to-face teaching, you don’t just get “the tune”—you receive the attitudes, values, humor, stories, and social meanings that live inside the music. The whole culture is transmitted, not just the notes.
• What Gets Lost with Mechanical Reproduction and Tablature
o Mechanical reproduction—digital access and written aids such as notation and tablature have made the music easier to reach but harder to truly inherit.
o When learning comes mainly from recordings, videos, or tabs, students often capture the outer shell: pitches and rough rhythms. What is easily lost are the micro-timings, pulses, pick patterns, ornaments, vocal inflections, and local accents that define a style.
o Tablature and notation acts as a veneer: a thin surface that gives the illusion of access while actually placing the deeper cultural nuances out of reach. A player may think, “I know this tune,” when they hold only its skeleton.

• Oral vs. Aurally Disconnected Learning
o True traditional oral learning is not solitary listening through earbuds; it is listening in community—hearing how a tune stretches to fit a dance, how singers bend time to fit a line of text, how musicians interact across generations and social roles.
o When learning is mostly isolated, mediated by screens and paper, the music becomes detached from the social relationships that have always shaped it. Sociology warns that when cultural forms are stripped of social context, they risk becoming stylized products instead of lived practices.
• The Risk to the Authentic Continuum
o If mechanical reproduction and tablature become the primary—and often the only—means of transmission, the authentic continuum is weakened. Future players may reproduce “the sound” convincingly, but the living chain of ear-to-ear, heart-to-heart teaching is interrupted.
o When that chain breaks, the music loses its function as a community language of memory and belonging, and becomes just another genre in the marketplace. That is the deeper danger: not that the notes disappear, but that the culture inside them does.
• Keeping Ear-to-Ear Teaching at the Center
o We are not anti-technology; we use recordings and written aids as supporting tools. But we insist that the center of the tradition must remain ear-to-ear, person-to-person.
o That means prioritizing in-person jams, apprenticeships, workshops, and lessons where students sit with real master players, feel the groove, hear the stories, and slowly absorb style and attitude.
o Through the Shenandoah Music Trail, we work to preserve and promote this oral/aural method of learning as the core of the authentic continuum, with technology serving as a supplement, not a substitute.
• Mass Media’s Double-Edged Sword
o Mass media has preserved and popularized some traditional music and made it visible far beyond the mountains. At the same time, it has flooded our ears with processed commercial sounds that can overshadow local, lived traditions.
o Many now meet “Appalachian music” through polished, curated performances several steps removed from community life. These versions can be beautiful and inspiring, but they can also mask the fact that there is a living, breathing culture underneath the product.

• The Problem of “Copied” Tradition in the Media Age
o Today, many musicians and teachers learn “Appalachian style” from recordings, internet videos, or festival workshops, far removed and without a living tie to local elders or communities.
o They may copy the surface—notes, accent, clothing, stage persona—without seeing themselves as participants in a historical continuum. The risk is that “tradition” becomes a costume or a brand rather than a relationship and a responsibility.
• Why Authentic, Lived Context Matters
o Anthropologists stress that you cannot fully separate a cultural form—like a fiddle tune or a ballad or rap—from its context: who plays it, for whom, where, when, and why.
o A ballad sung at a funeral, a hymn in a mountain church, a dance tune in a crowded community hall—these carry emotional, spiritual, and social meanings that do not show up on a chord chart.
o When repertoire is taken out of those contexts and used only as entertainment, it loses layers of meaning and becomes easier to commodify and distort.
• Our Task “In Our Time”: Conscious Flame Keeping
o In earlier generations, no one had to talk about “cultural preservation”; people simply lived their culture. In our media-saturated, globally connected era, we need to name and embrace this task intentionally.
o As Me & Martha, we see ourselves as conscious links in a chain—accepting that what we play, teach, and promote will either strengthen or weaken the connection between past and future Appalachian music-makers in the Shenandoah Valley.
• The Shenandoah Music Trail: A Living Framework
o The Shenandoah Music Trail is our way of weaving this work into the fabric of the region. It’s both a map and a metaphor—a path that connects musicians, venues, teachers, and communities across the Valley.
o Through the Trail, we aim to root the music back in its natural habitat: small towns, churches, community centers, schools, and gathering places where people can experience the tradition in person.
• Concerts: Showcasing the Living Tradition
o Our concerts along the Trail are designed to entertain and educate. Between tunes, we share where the songs came from, who we learned them from, and how they fit into local life.
o Audiences hear not just “a set list,” but a story about people, places, and times—so they can feel themselves stepping into a larger stream rather than watching something distant and finished.
• Workshops: Passing on Tools and Values
o In workshops, we teach techniques, tunes, harmonies, and repertoire—but we also teach values: listening deeply, respecting local variations, naming and honoring your sources, understanding context.
o We frame each participant not as a consumer of a style, but as a potential culture-bearer. When someone leaves with a tune and its story, they are better prepared to pass both along.
• Lessons: One-to-One Cultural Transmission
o Individual lessons recreate, in modern life, the old apprenticeship model. A student may come wanting banjo or guitar skills, but they also receive lineage: “This came from this player, from this community, for this purpose.”
o In that way, each student becomes a new link in the chain, not just another player of generic “old-time” or “bluegrass.”
• Promotion and Storytelling: Making the Invisible Visible
o Through Shenandoah Music Trail promotion—posters, programs, websites, local radio—we tell the story behind the sound: naming local elders, highlighting communities, and explaining why this culture matters.
o This builds what sociologists call cultural capital: convincing the community that its own music is valuable, worthy of attention and support, not a second-class cousin to mass-produced popular entertainment.
• Helping Traditional Musicians See Their Own Importance
o Many older local players still say, “I’m not special; I just play a little.” We work to change that self-image.
o By calling them “tradition bearers” and “bridges,” by inviting them to teach and be recorded, we help them recognize their role in the continuum. This recognition often encourages them to share more generously, which in turn strengthens the chain.
• Inviting Non-Musicians Into the Continuum
o Culture doesn’t survive on musicians alone. Non-musicians—listeners, dancers, organizers, pastors, teachers, cooks, and drivers—are essential.
o We emphasize that by attending local events, bringing children and grandchildren, hosting home concerts, volunteering at festivals, and choosing local music over passive media, non-musicians, too, become flame keepers.
• Welcoming Newcomers from Outside the Culture
o Many new residents and visitors come to the Shenandoah Valley with affection for “Appalachia” but without deep roots. We invite them into the tradition with humility, curiosity, and respect.
o Their task is not to pretend to be old-timers, but to listen, learn local stories, support local players, and understand themselves as guests who can gradually become trusted participants in the continuum.
• Helping New Musicians Recognize Their Place in the Chain
o New players often see themselves as individuals chasing a sound. We encourage them to see themselves as part of a historical process: “Who did you learn this from? Who will you teach it to?”
o Even that simple question shifts the mindset from “I’m learning a cool style” to “I’m joining a chain, and I have responsibilities on both ends.”
• Authenticity vs. Imitation: A Gentle Challenge
o We gently challenge musicians and teachers whose only link to the music is media or festivals to seek deeper connection: find local elders, attend small community jams, learn regional versions, hear how the music fits into everyday life.
o Authenticity here is not about rigid purity; it is about real relationships, crediting your sources, and understanding that you are standing on someone else’s shoulders.
• Media Literacy: Hearing Through the Noise
o We encourage everyone—musicians and listeners alike—to practice media literacy: asking, “Where did this version come from? Who is represented? Who is missing?”
o This awareness helps people distinguish between commercial appropriation and community-rooted tradition, and to choose to support efforts like the Shenandoah Music Trail that keep the focus on living culture, not just polished products.
• Culture as Co-Creation: Everyone Has a Role
o Sociologists remind us that culture is co-created every day in small decisions: picking up an instrument instead of a remote, hosting a jam instead of another meeting, taking a child to a concert instead of handing them a screen.
o Each of these choices either feeds or starves the flame of tradition. No act is too small when added to the weight of a whole community’s choices.

• The Shenandoah Valley as Cultural Home, Not Just Scenery
o The Shenandoah Valley is more than a pretty backdrop; it is a cultural home whose landscape, economy, and history have shaped a distinctive sound and way of life.
o The mountains, hollers, farms, and small towns have influenced how people played, gathered, worshiped, and celebrated. When we talk about Appalachian music here, we are talking about the voice of this particular place.
• Bringing It Back to Our Shared Responsibility
o As Me & Martha, we have chosen to accept our role as intentional flame keepers: performing, teaching, and organizing through the Shenandoah Music Trail so that the authentic continuum remains unbroken.
o But this is not a job two people can do alone. Every person in this room occupies a unique point between past and future; every person has a choice about whether this music will be living or merely remembered.
• Closing Invitation: Become a Flame Keeper
o As we close with a few more tunes, we invite you to ask: What is my role in this continuum? Am I a listener, a learner, a teacher, a supporter, a host, a storyteller?
o The old masters did their part, often without knowing it. Now it is our time. If we learn by ear, share in person, support local culture, and pass the music and its stories to the next generation, the flame of Appalachian tradition in the Shenandoah Valley will not only survive—it will shine brighter in our time and beyond.
Notes by Donald DePoy & Martha Hills with Ai support to be used freely for decimation to anyone who may gain a greater understanding of a music maker’s role as a Flame Keeper – Keep the light bright…

cjwit - Posted - 02/26/2026:  07:55:28

depoyd Bummer. I got excited that you were talking about Eastern Michigan University, up my way, and I was going to say that you should stop in at our old time jam in NW Ohio this weekend! But I bet you're talking about the Virginia EMU.

This looks like a great presentation. I appreciate the focus on learning by ear and the "gentle" encouragement to dig in a bit on these questions and modes of participation. You're right, I don't know you, but hopefully we'll cross paths at some point. This kind of work is important and I think what you're describing here fits into other discussions of how traditions shift over time, how practitioners grapple with conflicting goals, and so on.

So please don't read my earlier responses as being dismissive, it's just that this particular question that I posted about digital archival sources is to the side of the kinds of work you're pushing for. I think that it supports the more important interpersonal interactions that you're describing. I also fear that as the personal knowledge and experience falls away (time does that), then there's a huge risk of these kinds of discussions suffering as a result.

Archives are fraught places. Preservation does so much, most of which is a good thing. In some hands, though, archives can become problematic for what they misrepresent, leave out, and so on. I don't think that enough attention goes to the discussions that folks have around these questions and since the 1990s especially, many of those discussions have happened on digital platforms. Not as many as in face to face jams, though! So it's an all-of-the-above.