On a March morning in 1882, in the rolling hills of Madison County, a boy named Bascom Lamar Lunsford was born. He grew up in what he later called “the last stand of the natural people” — a community where ballads were not artifacts but daily bread, sung at corn shuckings, apple peelings, and log rollings.
From the start, music was stitched into his life. He and his brother Blackwell built fiddles out of cigar boxes, stringing them with resin-coated thread and horsehair bows their mother helped prepare. Neighbors laughed that the Lunsford boys must have taken up crow-keeping, so often did they hear the squawk of those early tunes.
By his teenage years, Lunsford had traded the fiddle for a banjo, declaring, “The banjo brings out the balladry in my system.”
A Walking Library of Tradition
What set Lunsford apart wasn’t just performance, but devotion. He carried more than 300 songs, tunes, and tales in memory — later recording them for the Library of Congress. Today, many of those field recordings can be streamed on Spotify, a digital bridge between past and present…