RSS Feed
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Bullfrog Jumped Tour bringing folk songs to local elementary The Bullfrog Jumped Tour will soon have elementary students in Grove Hill singing folk songs that were collected in Alabama in 1947 by a "song catcher." Byron Arnold, a music professor at the University of Alabama, traveled the state in the summers of 1945 through 1947 recording hundreds of folk songs. In South Alabama he found a bounty of songs, many which were sung by children before the Civil War. There has been little opportunity for the public to hear these recordings until 2006 when the Alabama Folklife Association released 42 of them on a CD of children's folksongs entitled "Bullfrog Jumped." Now storyteller Wanda Johnson and CD producer Joyce Cauthen are bringing the songs to children in the cities where they were first recorded. The Bullfrog Jumped Tour will stop at Grove Hill Elementary School in Grove Hill on Jan. 17. In Grove Hill Byron Arnold found many great songs, especially those shared by the Carleton family. Laurie Cater Carleton, a long-time teacher at Clarke County High School and wife of the publisher of The Clarke County Democrat, sang songs she learned from older relatives who had sung them in Civil War days. Her young daughter Annie Laurie Carleton contributed a song as well as their babysitter, Mary Chapman Courinton. Laurie Carleton Bailey, now of Mobile, will be a featured artist at the program. She will sing a song and talk about making the recordings in 1947. "We are thrilled that Mrs. Bailey will perform with us and are excited about taking these songs and the stories of their singers back to the places where they were recorded. Each of the women who sang for Byron Arnold did so because they loved the old songs and wanted children to keep singing them. So here we are, 60 years later, trying to make sure that happens," says Ms. Cauthen. The programs are made possible by funds from the sales of "Support the Arts" car tags and were produced by the Alabama Folklife Association.
For information about Bullfrog Jumped, visit www.alabamafolklife.org or call Joyce Cauthen, 1-205-822-0505.
|
for larger version       |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
