Celebrating West Tennessee’s Folk Music Roots in Stanton

Ted Maclin is a farmer, an anthropology professor, a folk musician, and the owner of the antebellum home Oak Hill at Keeling, between Mason and Stanton, Tennessee, so when he recently announced on social media that he would be holding an Old Time Music Festival in Stanton, I decided it was a must-see event. Of course, being the first year of the event, there was no certainty as to how many musicians would come out to perform, and as it turned out, only a handful appeared, including one of my fellow musicology students from the University of Memphis, Jeffrey Taylor. But it was a beautiful sunny day with blue skies, even if a little hot, and a small farmers’ market was going on in downtown Stanton. The assembled musicians played a number of traditional tunes, some from the bluegrass tradition, some from the blues, and even a Leonard Cohen tune “Bird On A Wire” to close things out. While we don’t generally speak of a Tennessee Delta, if we did, Stanton and Mason would be the apex of it, and it is good to see efforts to organize events in these old and somewhat forgotten towns.