Tagged: Southern Folklife Collection

The sound of American Country music owes much of it's success to an unlikely source: the 19th century Hawaiian music scene. Hawaiian music at that time was dominated by the steel guitar. During the instrument's century-long international migration, it influenced the direction of many genres.

Alan Lomax dedicated seven decades of his life to recording and distributing the sound of as much of the globe as he could reach. Beginning as a 17-year-old from Austin, Texas, Alan traveled with his father, John Lomax, to plantations, farms and prisons in the deep South.

Ron Liberti's screen-printed posters for music shows have been integral to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro scene since Liberti moved here in the 1990s. A musician as well as a visual artist, Liberti has performed with seminal '90s band Pipe and The Ghosts of Rock and designed posters for everyone from Southern Culture on the Skids to Tift Merritt. His work has been shown around the world and is collected in the University of North Carolina's Southern Folklife Collection in the Wilson Library.