Ola Belle Reed: An Enduring Legacy

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

20130104signal.mp3

WYPR, in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and The Maryland State Arts Council, presents a special broadcast of The Signal: “Ola Belle Reed: An Enduring Legacy”… It’s a chilly Saturday afternoon at a little old post-office-turned-antique-shop in Elkton, Maryland. Inside, five musicians sit in a circle on wooden benches. They’re the friends and family of a late great American legend, and they’ve gathered together this day to pay tribute to a life fondly remembered… Her name was Ola Belle Reed. Born in the mountains of North Carolina back in 1915, she and her family packed up and headed to northeastern Maryland during the Great Depression, looking for new horizons and a better way to make a living. Ola Belle couldn’t know it at the time, but she was destined to become a legend. Ola Belle passed away in 2002, but not before writing more than two hundred original songs, founding a renowned outdoor music park called The New River Ranch, and being honored with a National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. This matriarch of mountain music may be gone now, but her spirit lives on… This week, The Signal’s Aaron Henkin teams up with Maryland State Arts Council folklorist Cliff Murphy to present an hour of original recordings made recently on-site in Elkton, Maryland, with the family and friends of Ola Belle: Her son Dave Reed, her nephews Zane and Hugh Campbell, and her friends Burton Debusk and Linda Weaver. One of Ola Belle’s old signature songs was called I’ve Endured, and the music and testimonials shared during this broadcast prove those words to be prophetically true…

(Special thanks this week to Shane Carpenter for his multimedia companion piece.  Check out Shane's other work at: www.thesharer.com or www.readyluck.com)