Creative License-Boogertown Gap.mpg

What Keith Watson and his wife, Ruth Barber, have done - and are doing - is performing and preserving America's ancestral music. It's called old time music - the traditional folk tunes of our country from the early settlers to the 1920s, before radio and the recording industry came along to change it. From the porch of their Smoky Mountain home on the river, Keith and Ruth are keeping mountain folk music alive.

One of the things about old time music is that it's inclusive. It was never meant to be a stage musician and an audience. It was intended for the back porch, and everybody participated. If you didn't have an instrument you could play and you could get some spoons and some knitting needles...tap out a rhythm. It was to include everybody. - a whole family, a community.
-- Ruth Barber

Whether the tunes are played around the quiet of their farm, or on the busy streets of nearby Gatlinburg, Keith and Ruth use their banjo, guitar, and voices to keep the artistry of old time music alive. Songs like "Cripple Creek", "West Fork Gals", "Black Jack Davey", "Shady Grove", and "Waynesboro", reflect a musical history as unique as the mountain community that inspired the name of their band - Boogertown Gap.

We're doing what we want to do... We can come home and be with our families in these mountains and play the music that we love to play and do it how we want to.
-- Keith Watson

For more information on Boogertown Gap, to view their performance schedule, or purchase their music, just visit www.boogertowngap.com.

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• old
• time
• music
• banjo
• mountain
• art