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Apr. 28--Owensboro's International Bluegrass Music Museum won a $10,000 grant last week from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The grant was part of $63 million that went to 1,505 arts organizations across the country. Ten of the grants -- totaling $852,400 -- went to projects in Kentucky.
But the bluegrass museum was the only arts organization west of Louisville on the list.
The NEA grant brought the amount of money raised since December for the museum's Video Oral History Project to more than $80,000, Gabrielle Gray, the museum's executive director, said Tuesday.
But even more important, the NEA money gives the museum more credibility when it seeks other national grants, she said.
"The NEA has the highest credibility," Gray said. "Being recognized by them is very important."
She said the museum also has received donations for the Video Oral History Project from as far away as Japan and Europe.
A recent fundraiser at Nashville's Station Inn raised $1,464, she said.
Other fundraisers are being sponsored by the California Bluegrass Association, Boston Bluegrass Union, North Florida Bluegrass Association and others, Gray said.
And, she said, the director of exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa has offered to come to Owensboro and help out.
The video project is an ambitious effort to produce documentaries on 232 musicians who were performing bluegrass on at least a regional level before 1954.
So far, Gray said, 68 of the interviews have been recorded along with 18 performances.
Forty-two more are scheduled for this year and 2007, she said. And the museum is trying to locate 36 more, so interviews can be scheduled.
Gray said the video oral histories each cost about $2,500 to produce, just for the raw footage.
And that's with the film crew working for one-third of its normal daily rate and the interviewers donating their services.
Most of the musicians from that era are in their 80s or older. And the museum is rushing to film interviews with as many as they can before they die.
"During these interviews, the stories pour out, one tumbling on top of another, rich with the history and events that before we could only imagine," Gray said. "Stories that are emotional, engaging, riveting, suspenseful or side-splitting roll-on-the-floor hilarious."
The artists, she said, "tell of lifelong friendships; lives and loves and fortunes made or broken; musicianship that became virtuosic and astoundingly popular; the shared incredulity of being integral, founding partners of what became an internationally acclaimed, original American art form whose practitioners and fans today number in the tens of millions worldwide."
Sunday at 2 p.m., the museum will host the world premiere of The Goins Brothers' documentary in Woodward's theater. Tickets are $15 and include a rare performance by West Virginia natives Melvin and Ray Goins.
For information, call the museum at 926-7891.
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Major Recent Donations
Major donations to the International Bluegrass Music Museum's Video Oral History Project since December:
-- $16,000: Terry & Jennifer Woodward, Owensboro
-- $15,000: International Bluegrass Music Association, Nashville
-- $12,500: Marilyn & William Young Charitable Foundation, Owensboro
-- $10,037: Peter & Kitsy Kuykendall, Warrenton, Va.
-- $10,000: National Endowment for the Arts
-- $8,000: Kentucky Humanities Council
-- $5,000: Martha Marcom, Raleigh, N.C.
Source: International Bluegrass Music Museum
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Copyright (c) 2006, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.
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