Building an Old-Time Herald Archive

For more than 35 years, The Old-Time Herald magazine was a leading voice of the old-time music community around the world. Old-time music is a genre that encompasses the traditional string band and related music from Appalachia and the wider South, as well as similar traditions in other regions.

 

The Old-Time Herald was founded in 1987 by music legend Alice Gerrard, who was then living in Galax, Virginia, a nucleus of Appalachian musical heritage. It was later published for many years from Durham, North Carolina, edited by Alice, then by Gail Gillespie, and then by WSHW Director Sarah Bryan.

 

Like many small publications, The Old-Time Herald was unable to ride out the pandemic and its economic aftereffects. Though a new entity may bring The OTH back into print, for now it remains in a long-term hiatus.

 

The more than 100 issues that were published between 1987 and 2023 contain a vast wealth of information that can’t be found anywhere else. The OTH published hundreds of articles about contemporary and historical old-time music, interviews with musicians, rare photographs, reviews, news, and interesting, long-running controversies that were argued in the letters to the editor.

 

WSHW is fortunate to have access to digitized copies of every single issue of The Old-Time Herald. We are working in partnership with the Southern Music Research Center to put all of these issues online, in a freely accessible, easily searchable format, so that rising and future generations can also enjoy and learn from this incomparable resource.