Randy Lanham and Wayne Morris recently spent a day touring western Kentucky and teaching different towns about their local history of famed musicians. They stopped in Rosine, Morgantown, Paradise, Drakesboro, and Central City to spotlight the greats such as Bill Monroe, Arnold Shultz, John Prine, Merle Travis and the Everly Brothers.
During their trip, the duo went to locations special to artists’ careers — such as the Bill Monroe home and museum. The decision to make the day trip came after doing some research on the artists and thinking about how best to teach the area about the history of Bluegrass.
“I got to research in some of these other artists to find out that a lot of them had memorials and been buried around here locally,” said Lanham, who is the Education Director at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “And so we decided we were going to kind of look into that and find some local historians that could share some of the educational and the historical part of it.”
The nearly 100-mile trip took the whole day to ensure they were able to learn and teach all they could.
When they stopped in Monroe’s hometown of Rosine, they performed Blue Moon of Kentucky at a restored version of his home. At their Morgantown stop, they performed some of Shultz’ hits at his gravesite after having researchers tell the story of his life.
“It was so much fun for us to be able to do that and play in those places and learn even more about these local legends and music,” Lanham said. “I used to not care anything about any kind of history at all, but the older I get the more I get interested in history — and being a musician, even more so about music history.”
While on the road, they were able to film each stop and record a documentary about the trip highlighting the different places. Click here to watch the video.
Lanham said that this was so successful that he would be open to doing a second part highlighting other artists throughout the area. He included featuring Grandpa Jones and WC Handy, both from the Henderson area.
“I wouldn’t mind at some point to maybe give tours to people and be able to load up a big bus and do some of their music between stops and share their stories and allow people to get out and see these places,” he said.
