Remembering the Reedys: Appalachian Music, Migration, & Memory

Reedy, Timi; Clemons, Tammy; Reedy, Timi; Clemons, Tammy

Sunday, February 24, 2019

KFW Artist Enrichment Grant: Audio Odes to Mamaws

Box of blank cassettes from Ruby's archiving efforts

One of the primary ongoing goals of the Reedy documentary project is to recognize the contributions that Timi's Mamaw Frances Reedy made to Bluegrass music when most of the work that she and her husband John produced was listed under his name. Similarly, Tammy's Mamaw Ruby Clemons created an extensive library of original music, lyrics, and self-recorded cassette tapes before she passed away. We were both extremely fortunate to grow up with families who documented their musical endeavors and with insightful grandmothers who knew enough to keep these treasures. This is why we are committed to honoring them through feminist counter-storytelling and to sharing their stories with more diverse audiences.

We were recently awarded a 2018 Kentucky Foundation for Women Artist Enrichment Grant for professional development to strengthen our audio skills and purchase high-quality equipment to create new audio pieces about our grandmothers’ unsung talents and enduring legacies. This grant also funded a one-year SoundChannel subscription to online audio production training content offered by the Women’s Audio Mission, a non-profit organization that focuses on "advancing women and girls in music production and the recording arts." We will both work on audio productions about each of our Mamaws, and we plan to incorporate material from oral history interviews as well as other archival audio recordings that they produced themselves into these new productions.

Timi plans to produce a spoken-word audio piece to inaugurate a series of related poems that she is developing called, "Mamaw Says..." She has several works-in-progress, and she has one complete piece that she wrote during a spoken-word workshop with the Louisville-based Roots & Wings collective.

Timi and Frances Reedy, ca. 1977-1978

Tammy and Ruby Clemons, March 31, 1978

Tammy plans to produce a short audio piece about her Mamaw as her primary creative inspiration and benefactor, and her cassette tape archive of original gospel songs that she recently rescued. Tammy has a working script and plans to digitize and incorporate some analog audio as well as an excerpt from an interview that was included in an oral history project about quilting.

With this project, we want to develop further in the audio medium that both of our ancestors explored musically, and we also want to use it in new ways in terms of form, content, and technology. In addition to their personal value, our Mamaws’ stories are important to women’s history in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and to the histories of country and Bluegrass music. One goal of this work is to show (aurally) how women have innovated artistically and technologically, even in spite of their own disclaimers or stereotypes about women or the region. We are grateful for the feminist artistic support that KFW has provided for this project as well as for women artists throughout Kentucky.

---------------------
UPDATE:
(11 March 2019 3:00 pm)

We recently posted a couple of one-minute "pitches" for our projects on SoundCloud. We basically used the brief summaries that we included in our KFW proposal (and this post) as our scripts. Then we recorded them and layered the voice-over with fire crackling sounds from our wood stove, which gave them an old vinyl record sound.