Lexington… - Kentucky Arts Council

2 

On the front cover: 

ART, a digitally enhanced photograph of 

Hart Drycleaners on North Broadway in 

Lexington by Linda Fugate-Blumer, is an 

example of how artists’ creativity and vision 

turn everyday objects into art. 

All artists whose original artwork 

appears in this publication retain full 

copyrights to their work. 

Copyright ©2010� �� The Kentucky ts ArCouncil. 

All rights reser ved. 

Kentucky Arts Council 

500 Mero Street, 21st Floor 

Frankfort, KY 40601 

Local calls: 502.564.3757 

Toll free: 888.833.2787 

Fax: 502.564.2839 

artscouncil@ky.gov 

www.artscouncil.ky.gov

K E N T U C K Y 

C O U N C I L 

The Kentucky Arts Council, 

the state arts agency within 

the Tourism, Arts and Heritage 

Cabinet, creates opportunities 

for Kentuckians to value, 

participate in and benefit from 

the arts. Kentucky Arts Council 

funding is provided by the 

Kentucky General Assembly 

and the National Endowment 

for the Arts. 

Contents 

Arts Across Kentucky 

Western Region 

South Central Region 

Eastern Region 

North Central Region 

Index

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Discover Art in Kentucky is a cultural guidebook of sorts, 

featuring art destinations across Kentucky: galleries, 

museums, independent booksellers and performance 

venues for dance, theater and music. The arts organizations 

and businesses listed are partners with the 

Kentucky Arts Council or promote the work of artists 

associated with Kentucky Arts Council programs. The 

book also includes notes about unique communities 

that have embraced the arts as well as Kentucky art 

traditions. 

Because Kentucky has such a robust literary tradition, 

the book also acknowledges the work of acclaimed 

literary figures with significant ties to the commonwealth. 

Discover Art in Kentucky is by no means an exhaustive 

list of arts venues, programs, activities or celebrated 

artists. We hope you’ll use it as a starting point for discovering 

other art treasures across the state. 

How this book is organized 

This book divides the state into four geographic regions 

and then lists art destinations—alphabetically 

by city—in each. The section “Arts Across Kentucky” 

describes items of interest that are not specific to any 

one region. 

At the end of each regional section, you’ll find an introduction 

to the literary arts in that region. Following 

the introduction is a listing of a few acclaimed literary 

artists who have ties to that region of Kentucky. This, 

again, is not an exhaustive list, and there are many 

other accomplished literary artists we would have 

liked to include, if space permitted. 

In 2012, the information in this book will be available 

electronically on the Kentucky Arts Council website 

(www.artscouncil.ky.gov). The online version will include 

interactive maps and more extensive information. We 

hope you’ll check that site regularly as you plan excursions 

to sample Kentucky’s arts.

What’s this? 

These are bar codes that provide direct links 

to Internet information about the associated art 

venue or artist. If you have a “smart phone” 

with Internet access, download the free mobile 

application at http://gettag.mobi. Open the application 

and then view the colored bar code 

through your phone’s camera viewfinder. Voilà! 

You’ll be linked to a website, video or audio file. 

What’s this? 

At a jam session, musicians come together 

to socialize, learn new licks and, most of all, 

have fun playing music. Whether you prefer to 

participate or just listen, a jam is a great place 

to experience living folk culture. Look for the 

banjo icon identifying venues that sponsor regular 

jam sessions. You’ll find them in all four 

Kentucky regions. 

Note about literary artist information: Sources for information about Kentucky literary artists include The Kentucky 

Encyclopedia, John Kleber, Editor-in Chief, The University Press of Kentucky, 1992; and The Kentucky Anthology: 

Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State, Wade Hall, Editor, The University Press of Kentucky, 2005. 

The information is reprinted with permission. 

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6 

Arts Across 

Kentucky

Although we’ve attempted to organize art venues 

in the state by geographic region, art, of course, 

is not restricted by these artificial borders. There 

are many art forms and cultural traditions that are 

found all across the state, and we highlight just a 

few of them in this section. 

The clean lines of this cherry and maple 

rocker by Mark Whitley Limited Edition 

Furniture in Smiths Grove, Ky., reflect the 

strong influence of Shaker style in many 

designs by contemporary artists today. 

Photo courtesy of Wes Davis Photography, Bowling Green, Ky. 

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8 

Kentucky Quilt Trails 

“Personally, I feel as if each one is 

simultaneously a monument to the rural 

artistic tradition of quilting and a reminder 

that quilting is still alive and well in the hands 

of a whole new generation.” 

—Silas House, 

Kentucky author, on Kentucky’s barn quilts 

As you travel the byways and back roads of 

Kentucky, your eye may be drawn to bright 

colors adorning a well-maintained but otherwise 

nondescript tobacco or horse barn. Communities 

across Kentucky have begun decorating local 

barns with “barn quilts”—large painted quilt 

patterns—to celebrate the tradition of quilting in the 

commonwealth. 

In 2003, Donna Sue Groves of Adams County, Ohio, 

painted a large quilt square on her barn to honor her 

mother. Other people in the area began to do this 

as well, and her inspiration spread throughout the 

Photo courtesy of photographer Ann W. Olson 

eastern United States. Kentucky 

began developing its own quilt trail in 2005. 

Volunteers, with support from the Gateway Resource 

Conservation and Development Council, painted the 

first square in Carter County. Active Kentucky quilt 

trail groups backed by cooperative extensions, local 

arts councils and civic organizations can now be 

found in many Kentucky counties. 

The quilt squares are painted on eight-foot-square 

boards or metal sheets and displayed on barns, 

restaurants, stores, schools and floodwalls. Hanging

Early morning light intensifies the 

color in this Spider Web pattern 

quilt square on a barn near Stark, Ky. 

the painted quilts encourages owners to maintain 

historical barns, while giving tourists an incentive to 

veer off the interstate and take the back roads. 

The large “quilting” projects are about rural pride 

and fellowship and the belief that “many hands 

make light work.” They also bring diverse groups 

together, just as a traditional quilting bee does. 

Young and old, men and women, quilters and 

non-quilters work together to research traditional 

quilt patterns commonly used in their communities 

and paint and hang the quilt squares. In the 

spirit of community cooperation, many local utility 

companies loan bucket trucks and crews to help 

hang the squares. 

Local utility workers install a 

So keep a lookout for this Blazing Star quilt square on 

rural art form as you travel 

a barn in Elliott County. 

Kentucky’s back roads. More 

information about quilt barn projects in Kentucky is 

available from the Kentucky Arts Council’s website at 

http://artscouncil.ky.gov/QTrails/QTrails.htm. t 

Photo courtesy of Elliott County Cooperative Extension 

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The Shakers in Kentucky 

Nestled in the fertile hills of central Kentucky, two 

communities of Shakers committed themselves to a 

simple existence devoted to agriculture, commerce, 

fine crafting of tools and essential furnishings and 

regular religious celebrations. The United Society of 

Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or Shakers, 

is the longest lasting communal society in the United 

States. Although no Shakers remain in Kentucky, 

guests can visit the sites of these two Shaker villages 

and enjoy comfortable accommodations in the 

beautifully restored buildings amid pastoral settings. 

South Union in Logan County opened in 1807 as the 

western-most Shaker settlement in the U.S. and was 

operational until 1922. Shaker Village of Pleasant 

Hill in Mercer County was founded in 1805 and 

flourished until it was irrevocably scarred by the Civil 

War; by 1910, it had closed its doors as an active 

religious society. At its peak, the community owned 

4,500 acres and had 260 structures. The restored 

Shaker village now covers 3,000 acres and features 

a living history museum. 

The Shakers are known for devoting their lives 

to industry for the common good, pacifism and 

promoting equality for all. They also embraced 

artistic expression in the form of high-quality textiles, 

fine, minimalist furniture and mysterious dance and 

song traditions. Visitors to South Union or Pleasant 

Hill can observe performances of Shaker music 

and dances as well as demonstrations of their 

craft traditions. 

Shaker arts and traditions still have a profound effect 

on literary, performing and visual artists across the 

commonwealth. 

• Thomas and Joanne Blanck have been making 

iconic oval Shaker-style boxes for over 

20 years. The boxes are exact copies of an 

original Shaker design. Each set of boxes is 

made of exquisite hardwood, hand-sanded, 

and finished with a high-gloss lacquer or 

antiqued with milk paint. 

http://artistdirectory.ky.gov/craft/

• At his Jennings Creek Tin Shoppe, Randy 

Hulsey uses forming stakes and hand crank 

tools to create historic tin ware items, including 

Shaker-style chandeliers, wall sconces 

and lanterns. http://artistdirectory.ky.gov/craft/ 

• Red Dog & Company’s traditional-style 

“mule ear” chairs, designed by company 

founder Mike Angel, have a clean, 

straightforward design reminiscent of the 

Shakers. www.reddogchairs.com 

• Harriet Giles, founder of The Weavery, designs 

and directs the production of hand-woven rag 

rugs in historically inspired and original styles. 

Her rugs may be found at Shaker Village of 

Pleasant Hill. www.theweavery.com 

• Author, musician, artist and storyteller Thomas 

Freese wrote Shaker Ghost Stories from Pleasant Hill, 

Kentucky. Freese collected these true stories 

from visitors and employees at Shaker Village 

while working as a Pleasant Hill Singer at the 

historic site. www.thomaslfreese.com t 

A classic Shaker 

building at Pleasant 

Hill in Mercer County. 

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Orchestras Across the State 

Kentucky music-lovers benefit from a number of 

orchestras located in major metropolitan areas 

and less populous communities across the state. 

These organizations provide 

a wide range of programs in 

their own facilities, in shared 

arts centers, in schools and 

libraries and at outdoor events. 

All venues offer full access for 

persons with disabilities, and a 

good number of venues offer 

large-print and/or assistedlistening 

accommodations. 

The nearly continuous 

schedule of musical offerings 

provided by these orchestras 

includes concerts, national 

and international visiting artist 

programs, youth and family 

events, musical education 

for school students and 

Photo courtesy of the Louisville Orchestra 

young artists, cooperative programs with local 

government and community organizations, programs 

for underserved audiences and live music to 

accompany the programs of arts organizations in 

other disciplines such as dance, opera and drama. 

As is true of the arts in 

general, these orchestras 

actively seek to build a 

broader audience. Ticketing 

and subscription options are 

creatively designed to market 

programs to the widest 

possible range of budgets 

and time constraints. We 

encourage you to find an 

opportunity to attend a 

performance convenient 

for you. t 

The Louisville Orchestra 

string section.

Bowling Green Western Symphony Orchestra 

500 E. Main St. 

270.745.7681 

www.bgwso.org 

Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra 

161 N. Mill St. 

Lexington, Ky. 

859.254.0796 

www.ckyo.org 

Kentucky Symphony Orchestra 

540 Linden 

Newport, Ky. 

859.431.6216 

www.kyso.org 

Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra 


859.233.4226 

www.lexphil.org 

Louisville Orchestra 

323 W. Broadway, Suite 700 

502.585.9414 

www.louisvilleorchestra.org 

Louisville Youth Orchestra 

502.896.1851 

www.lyo.org 

Orchestra Kentucky 

1046 Elm St. 

Bowling Green, Ky. 

270.846.2426 

www.orchestraky.com 

Owensboro Symphony Orchestra 

211 E. Second St. 

270.684.0661 

www.theoso.org 

Paducah Symphony Orchestra 

201 Broadway 

800.738.3727 

www.paducahsymphony.org 

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Dance in Kentucky 

Dance sometimes has difficulty 

flourishing outside the nation’s cultural 

centers on either coast. However, 

Kentucky has supportive dance 

audiences, particularly in Louisville, 

Lexington and Owensboro. The 

Louisville Ballet, the Lexington Ballet 

Company, Kentucky Ballet Theatre 

and Owensboro Dance Theatre all 

have long histories of providing 

excellent dance education and 

opportunities for participation in 

communities around the state. 

Programs include the commission 

and performance of new works, multi-cultural 

and cross-disciplinary events, artist residencies and 

school performances, cooperative programs with 

government and community-service organizations, 

and extensive studio education for a large number 

of aspiring young dancers who learn from highly 

qualified local and international artists. t 

Kentucky Ballet Theatre 

736 National Ave. 

Lexington, Ky. 

859.252.5245 

www.kyballet.com 

Lexington Ballet Company 


859.233-3925 

www.lexingtonballet.org 

Louisville Ballet 


502.583.3150 

www.louisvilleballet.org 

Owensboro Dance Theatre 

2705 Breckenridge St. 

270.684.9580

Restored Art Deco Theaters 

After World War I, folks across the country were 

eager to shed the restrictive austerity of the war years 

and embrace a more lavish and decadent lifestyle. 

This trend manifested itself in the opulent theaters 

that were built to accommodate both the early silent 

films and the “talkies” that soon replaced them. 

In recent years, grass roots organizations across 

the commonwealth committed to conserving these 

historic arts venues by renovating and readapting 

the Art Deco architecture of the original movie 

houses. The resulting modern arts centers now 

serve as a reminder of our rich heritage, while 

providing special venues for arts education and 

entertainment. The intimate theaters, some with 

fantastical Spanish-themed architectural elements, 

are fascinating places to see plays, movies and 

musical performances. Each has a unique story that 

connects Kentucky to the nation’s desire to escape to 

faraway and exotic places during the era of the Great 

Depression and the dawn of the Second World War. 

More information about each theater is available in 

the regional listings. t 

The Alhambra Theatre 

Hopkinsville 

1928 

The Capitol Arts Center 

Bowling Green 

1930s redesign 

(1890s original) 

The Grand Theatre 

Frankfort 

1911 

The Kentucky Theatre 

Lexington 

1921 

The Leeds Center for 

the Arts 

Winchester 

1925 

The Lyric Theatre 

Lexington 

1948 

The Paramount 

Arts Center 

Ashland 

1931 

The Plaza Theatre 

Glasgow 

1934 

The Historic 

State Theater 

Elizabethtown 

1942 

Art Deco elements add to 

the sumptuous feel of the 

Paramount Arts Center 

in Ashland. 

Photo courtesy of the Paramount Arts Center 

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16 

Photo courtesy of Nikki D. May 

Visual Art Guilds 

Visual art is often created in isolation. That 

doesn’t mean that artists are antisocial, 

however. There are a multitude of art 

and craft guilds and alliances across the 

commonwealth that bring artists together 

into beneficial groups. 

These organizations are vital to the health of 

the arts communities they serve. They offer 

camaraderie, exhibitions and opportunities 

for learning and growth. These are generally 

membership-driven organizations that 

do a lot without much money. Some have 

permanent homes and some hold events 

wherever space is available. They work in the 

public sphere filling the roles of advocates, 

educators, promoters and presenters. 

For emerging artists they provide a safe haven for 

exploring artistic identities and building networks 

of support. For established artists they provide 

renewed inspiration and opportunities to give back 

to the community. t 

ArtWorks: A Visual Arts Coalition 

Bowling Green 

www.artworksinc.org 

Central Kentucky Art Guild 

Elizabethtown 

www.centralkyartguild.com 

Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen 

Berea 

www.kyguild.org 

Louisville Artisans Guild 

Louisville 

www.louisvilleartisans.org 

Murray Art Guild 

Murray 

www.murrayartguild.org 

Paducah Arts Alliance 

Paducah 

www.paducahartsalliance.com 

Sheltowee Artisans 

Somerset 

www.sheltoweeart.com 

Far left: Emily 

Sands works on 

the installation 

of Ubuntu, a 

collaborative 

sculpture 

incorporating 

slices of tree 

trunk conceived 

by Paducah Arts 

Alliance artistin-residence 

Corinne Spielewoy 

of Switzerland. 

Ubuntu means 

“I am what I am 

because of who 

we all are.”

Storytelling 

From the rivers of western Kentucky to the hills of 

Appalachia, the tradition of storytelling has evolved 

into an art form in its own right. 

Kentucky has many professional storytellers who 

specialize in stories for adults as well as children. 

Some are modern story tellers, while others pass on 

the legends and lore of the rivers, the caves and the 

mountains that shape our cultural landscape. 

To find out about storytelling festivals, story swaps, 

broadcasts and open mic events, visit the Kentucky 

Storytelling Association website at www.kystory.org. 

• Mary Hamilton entertains audiences with Kentucky 

tales and world folk and fairy tales, plus 

a few myths, legends and original fiction. 

www.maryhamilton.info 

• Pam Holcomb specializes in mountain folklore, 

including family stories, and stories collected 

from the adventures of interesting people she 

has met. www.storytellerpamholcomb.com 

Octavia Sexton masterfully 

spins her tale. 

• Octavia Sexton performs in Appalachian 

dialect the folk tales, haint tales (ghost 

stories) and Cherokee legends handed down 

to her from her English, Irish and Cherokee 

ancestors. www.octaviasexton.com 

• Mitch Barrett is a story teller and a singer/ 

songwriter. A keen life observer, he deftly 

weaves thought-provoking subject matter with 

a satirist’s sense of wit and irony. 

www.mitchbarrettmusic.com 

• Roadside Theatre conducts community 

residencies designed to honor a community’s 

history and give voice to local stories. 

http://roadside.org/ t 

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Western 

Region

Western Kentucky is home to numerous rivers, vast farming operations and 

sometimes quirky traditions. It’s the birthplace of bluegrass music, the quilt 

capital of the world and the site of an eerily identifiable group of gravesite 

monuments. 

A Rose Garden in a Blue Fence, 

quilt by Keiko Miyauchi of Nagano, Japan. 

Courtesy of the National Quilt Museum, 

Paducah, Ky. 

This region boasts several superb performing arts centers as well as plentiful 

opportunities to take part in bluegrass jams and festivals. And don’t miss the 

regional barbeque when you visit. If you’re looking for a more urban experience, 

make sure you spend some time in the eclectic river towns of Henderson, 

Owensboro and Paducah. 

Some amazing artists have called western Kentucky home, including John 

James Audubon, Robert Penn Warren, Bill Monroe and sculptor Steve Shields. 

While you’re here, enjoy some pickin’ and grinnin’ and then catch an orchestra 

or ballet performance as evening falls. t 

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Photo courtesy of James Monroe 

The Birthplace of Bluegrass Music 

If you’re a fan of bluegrass music, treat yourself to 

a pilgrimage to Ohio County in western Kentucky 

where the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, was born 

and raised. 

Bill Monroe, the father of 

bluegrass music. 

Bluegrass music has roots in a variety of places, 

coming from both Anglo- and African-American 

influences. Folklorist Alan Lomax called bluegrass 

“folk music in overdrive.” It is akin to old-time 

music, with its fiddle styles and ballad singing, but 

it also incorporates jazz “breakdowns,” where one 

musician takes the lead and improvises while others 

accompany. While bluegrass sounds very different 

from what many people think of as old-time music, 

almost all who play bluegrass use old-time songs 

in their repertoires. In the 1940s Bill Monroe and 

his Blue Grass Boys were the only ones playing 

this style, but it caught on and has since reached a 

global audience.

In western Kentucky there are several places 

to experience bluegrass music firsthand, in the 

very hills where the “high lonesome” sound was 

born. Start your trip with a visit to the Bill Monroe 

Homeplace (http://www.visitohiocountyky.org/billmonroe. 

html) where you can tour his childhood home and 

walk along the trails of Jerusalem Ridge. Several 

festivals take place here, the most popular being 

the Jerusalem Ridge Bluegrass Celebration each fall 

(http://www.jerusalemridgefestival.org/). Music happens 

year-round at the Rosine Barn Jamboree (see page 

37). Here, some of the best local bluegrass musicians 

meet to jam for audiences, free of charge. Some of 

the original Blue Grass Boys live and perform in this 

area. Up the street is the Rosine Cemetery where 

you can pay your respects at Bill’s gravesite. 

If you want to learn more about bluegrass, drive 

to Owensboro to visit the International Bluegrass 

Music Museum (see page 32). You can hear the 

music, see the instruments and experience 

the stories of the men and women who are the 

pioneers and current tradition bearers of bluegrass. 

You can also take part in other musical activities, 

like ROMP (the River of Music Party that occurs 

each June), a Monroe-style Mandolin Camp and 

other commemorations and concerts. 2011 is the 

centennial of Bill Monroe’s birth, so there will be lots 

of activities to choose from. t 

Bill Monroe’s birthplace 

on Jerusalem Ridge. 

Photo courtesy of photographer Mike Morbeck 

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22 

Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society archives 

Cadiz 

Janice Mason Art Museum 

71 Main St. 

270.522.9056 

www.jmam.org 

Arts enthusiasts in the city of 

Cadiz converted an old post office 

into a gallery that features multigenre 

art exhibits from local, 

national and international artists. 

An intersection in Drakesboro 

celebrates the community’s 

storied history. 

Drakesboro 

Four Legends Jamboree at the 

Drakesboro City Hall 

212 Mose Rager Blvd. 

270.476.8690 

The Four Legends Jamboree 

(named for guitar legends Mose 

Rager, Ike Everly, Kennedy Jones 

and Merle Travis) is held the 

second Saturday of each month 

in the heart of thumbpicking 

country. Everyone gets a chance 

to join in. 

The Home of 

Thumbpicking 

West of the birthplace of 

bluegrass is Muhlenberg 

County, the home of 

thumbpicking guitar. Like 

bluegrass, thumbpicking 

is an original music style 

that Kentucky has given the 

world. You may have heard 

this style from guitarists such 

as Merle Travis and Chet 

Atkins. A thumbpicking tune 

is often a popular song or 

classic jazz melody played 

by a lone guitarist. The 

guitarist uses a plastic pick 

that loops around the thumb 

to play a bass line, while 

the other fingers play a solid 

rhythm and melody, all at 

the same time. The player is 

a “one-man-band,” with only

Thumbpicker Eddie Pennington and his son Alonzo 

switch left hands mid-song during a performance at the 

2005 Kentucky Folklife Festival. 

one guitar, often a beautiful electric semi-hollowbody 

or custom acoustic. 

Coal miners in Muhlenberg County developed the 

thumbpicking style. Many cite African-American 

guitarist Arnold Schultz, who influenced Bill 

Monroe’s bluegrass picking style, as a thumbpicking 

influence. The story goes that coal miners in the 

1930s got together on Saturday nights to have a 

good time playing music. Thumbpicking evolution 

took its first leap when a miner named Kennedy 

Jones bought an unusual thumbpick at a local 

general store. The pick was made for Hawaiian-style 

steel guitar players, but Jones tried it and liked it. He 

bought more thumbpicks, and the trend caught on. 

Other local guitarists adopted the thumbpick and a 

regional music tradition was born. 

Guitarist Mose Rager hosted weekly jam sessions 

at his home in the 1950s and ‘60s, where many 

new thumbpickers cut their teeth, exploring new 

songs and techniques. Ike Everly, father of the 

continued… 

23

24 

Thumbpicking (cont.) 

Everly Brothers, was a thumbpicker, and Merle Travis 

and Chet Atkins brought Muhlenberg County sounds to 

the world. Today, many living thumbpickers remember 

playing at jam sessions at Mose Rager’s house. These 

include National Thumbpickers Hall of Fame Champions 

Steve Rector, Paul Mosley and Eddie Pennington, who 

received a National Heritage Award for his musical 

excellence and efforts to conserve the tradition. 

More and more guitarists in Muhlenberg County take 

pride in avoiding the straight pick, and teach their sons 

and daughters to use a thumbpick. Today, there is a 

monument outside Mose’s house, and across the street 

at the Drakesboro Fire Station you can still take part in a 

thumbpicking jam. 

Other annual events sponsored by the National 

Thumbpickers Hall of Fame showcase thumbpicking 

culture in Muhlenberg County, including Mose Rager 

Day, the Thumbpickin’ Weekend Bash, and the National 

Thumbpickers Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony at the 

Merle Travis Music Center in Paradise Park, Powderly. 

Visit http://www.ntphf.com/ and http://www.eddiepennington.com/ 

for year-round thumbpicking events and jams. t 

Henderson 

Henderson Fine Arts Center 

Henderson Community College 

2660 S. Green St. 

270.826.5916 

www.haaa.org 

www.ohiovalleyart.org 

The Henderson Fine Arts Center 

hosts a performing arts series 

presented by the Henderson 

Arts Alliance, as well as visual art 

exhibits produced and presented 

by the Ohio Valley Art League.

John James Audubon State Park 

and Museum 

3100 U.S. Highway 41 North 

270.826.2247 

www.parks.ky.gov/findparks/recparks/au/ 

Located along the banks 

of the Ohio River just north 

of Henderson, John James 

Audubon State Park houses 

the world’s largest collection of 

Audubon artifacts and interprets 

Audubon’s life through his art and 

personal memorabilia. 

Hopkinsville 

Alhambra Theatre of the 

Pennyroyal Arts Council 

507 S. Main St. 

270.887.4079 

www.pennyroyalarts.org 

The Alhambra Theatre is a 

landmark movie theater that has 

been converted to a stage where 

patrons can enjoy theater, dance 

and music from national and 

international touring acts and 

local groups. 

Early fall leaves cover a trail at 


near Henderson. 

Madisonville 

Glema Mahr Center for the Arts 

Madisonville Community College 

2000 College Drive 

270.824.8652 

www.glemacenter.org 

Glema Mahr produces and 

presents music, dance and arts 

education opportunities for all 

ages and interests. 

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“In my deepest troubles, I frequently 

would wrench myself from the persons 

around me and retire to some secluded 

part of our noble forests.” 

—John James Audubon 

Just north of Henderson lies a mature hardwood 

forest rich with wildflowers and graced by bluffs 

overlooking the Ohio River. It is here that John 

James Audubon ran a general store from 1810 

to 1819. Although the business venture ended in 

bankruptcy, he profited from his time in the area by 

exploring the surrounding wilderness and studying 

the native birds, which eventually led to his work as 

a renowned scientist and artist. 

Born in Haiti, the illegitimate child of a French 

merchant, Audubon was a well-educated gentleman, 

a dedicated naturalist and a rugged frontiersman. In 

many ways he exemplified the America of his age. 

Established in 1934 the John James Audubon State 

Park includes a museum, nature center, cottages, 

campgrounds, hiking trails and other recreational 

facilities. A total of 339 acres of the park are 

dedicated as a bird sanctuary and memorial to the 

distinguished naturalist. 

The Audubon Memorial Museum interprets the 

artist’s life through his paintings and personal 

memorabilia and hosts special exhibits of avianthemed 

art. Among the holdings displayed by the 

museum is the magnificent Double Elephant Folio 

The Birds of America, which measures 27 by 40 inches. 

It was originally printed from 1827 to 1839 in an 

edition of fewer than 200 copies. The four-volume 

set contains 435 hand-colored engravings of the 

birds that Audubon studied so avidly. 

Audubon also inspired future generations of artist 

naturalists. To complete the Audubon experience, 

visit downtown Henderson to see sculptures by 

Louisville artist Raymond Graf. These bronze 

sculptures are inspired by Audubon’s “Birds of 

America” paintings. Walking tour maps are available 

at www.hendersonky.org/SculptureBRO.pdf. t

Photo courtesy of photographer Tom Jake and John James Audubon State Park 

27

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Sculptor Steve Shields 

With little more than a welding torch and pieces 

of scrap metal, sculptor Steve Shields was able 

to create some of the region’s most dramatic and 

poignant memorials to our nation’s warriors and 

heroes. Selective touches of silver solder or molten 

bronze form details that evoke unexpected emotional 

responses from viewers of his artwork. 

Steve Shields was a nationally significant metal 

sculptor who used a rare method of welding copper 

or steel over a frame to create both small and largerthan-life 

pieces. Admirers of his work recognize the 

surprising detail he was able to achieve using this 

technique. 

Although Hopkinsville was his home for more than 

30 years, his work can be viewed throughout the 

United States and Canada, from public parks and 

churches to private homes. Kentucky is fortunate 

to be home to several of Shields’ pieces. At the Trail 

of Tears Commemorative Park in Hopkinsville, a 

sculpture of Chief Whitepath and Chief Fly Smith 

marks the gravesite of two Native Americans 

who died along the Trail of Tears in the winter of 

1838–1839. Peacekeeper is a seven-foot-tall soldier 

looking over Fort Campbell Memorial Park just off 

the Pennyrile Parkway in Hopkinsville. At the foot 

of the soldier are granite markers chiseled with the 

names of the Fort Campbell soldiers who were killed 

on Dec. 12, 1985, while returning to Fort Campbell 

from a peacekeeping mission in the Sinai. 

Coal mines and coal miners have long been a part 

of life in the city of Providence, north of Hopkinsville. 

To honor the town’s occupational traditions, Shields 

sculpted a coal miner, who stands on the corner of 

the Providence Main Street Park. 

Among the sculptures residing outside Kentucky, 

one, The Desert Shield-Desert Storm Monument 

in Evansville, Ind., just across the Ohio River 

from Henderson, is dedicated to Persian Gulf 

War veterans. It may be the first modern war 

memorial depicting a woman in combat. Another 

Shields sculpture is a larger-than-life-size bust of

Bill Monroe, which is in the 

collection of the Grand Ole Opry 

in Nashville. 

Steve Shields not only contributed 

to the artistic legacy of the 

commonwealth but also 

commemorated significant 

moments in the state’s 

history. He died in 1998 at 

the age of 51. t 

A Steve Shields sculpture 

stands in Pioneers Cemetery 

in Hopkinsville. 

A sculpture of Chief Whitepath 

and Chief Fly Smith marks 

the gravesite of two 

Native Americans who died 

along the Trail of Tears in the 

winter of 1838–1839. 

Photos courtesy of Hopkinsville-Christian County 

Convention & Visitors Bureau 

29

30 

Marion 

Fohs Hall Community Arts 

Foundation 

201 N. Walker St. 

270.965.5983 

www.artsatfohshall.org 

Fohs Hall provides a variety of 

exhibits, performances, activities 

and workshops to the people of 

Marion and Crittenden County. 

Mayfield 

Mayfield/Graves County Art Guild 

120 N. Eighth St. 

270.247.6971 

www.icehousearts.org 

Serving the community through 

the arts, the Mayfield/Graves 

County Art Guild operates a 

community arts center and gallery 

housed in a historic ice house. 

Murray 

Playhouse in the Park 

701 Gil Hobson Drive 

270.759.1752 

www.playhouseinthepark.net 

Year-round programming at 

Playhouse in the Park includes 

production and performance of a 

mix of classical and contemporary 

theater and opportunities for 

people of all ages to develop skills 

through participation in plays, 

workshops and other aspects of 

theater.

Wooldridge Monuments 

Just south of Paducah is the town of Mayfield, the 

childhood home of acclaimed writer Bobbie Ann 

Mason. Mayfield is also known across the state as 

the immediate neighbor of Fancy Farm, Ky., where 

fiery political theater takes place each August. 

In contrast to that tradition, Mayfield bears witness 

to a more stoic and somber representation of local 

values. In a corner of the Maplewood cemetery, 

a stone procession of men, women, children and 

animals has silently stood watch over the grave of 

Colonel Henry G. Wooldridge for over 100 years. 

Statues of close family members, favorite hunting 

dogs, a fox, a deer and a prized horse named “Fop” 

make up this unusual memorial. The centerpiece— 

the marble statue of Col. Wooldridge—was made 

by a sculptor in Italy; the others were made of 

sandstone by sculptors from Mayfield and Paducah. 

Since his death in 1899, Wooldridge’s gravesite 

has captured the imaginations of travelers all over 

the world. The monuments appeared on the Ripley’s 

Believe it or Not! television program in 1984 and in the 

travel book Weird Kentucky 

in 2008. 

In January 2009, 

a severe ice storm 

devastated all of western 

and much of central 

Kentucky. During the 

storm, a 300-year-old 

tree fell directly on the 

statues, knocking over 

and destroying many of 

them. Today, restoration 

is underway while the 

monument remains 

open to visitors. Once 

it is restored the 

mysterious site will 

once again endure 

as a symbol of 

southern culture, from 

hunting and horses 

to eccentricity and 

individual expression. t 

The family of Colonel Henry G. 

Wooldridge stands watch 

over his gravesite. 

31

32 

Owensboro 

C’ing Polkadots 

115 W. Second St. 

270.240.4394 

www.c-ingpolkadots.com 

C’ing Polkadots is a new 

contemporary craft gallery in the 

heart of downtown Owensboro 

that features work by regional 

artists. 

International Bluegrass 

Music Museum 

207 E. Second St. 

270.926.7891 

www.bluegrass-museum.org 

The International Bluegrass 

Music Museum celebrates the 

past, present and future of the 

bluegrass sound, a regional 

music with international appeal. 

Come join a jam session on the 

first Thursday evening of each 

month. 

Owensboro Museum of Fine Art 

901 Frederica Street 

270.685.3181 

www.omfa.us 

The Owensboro Museum of Fine 

Art hosts a permanent collection 

of American, European and Asian 

fine and decorative arts dating 

from the 15th century to the 

present, as well as major traveling 

exhibitions, interpretive events 

and educational programs for 

children and adults. 

RiverPark Center 

101 Daviess St. 

270.687.2787 

www.riverparkcenter.org 

This facility on the banks of 

the Ohio River hosts national 

and international touring 

performances as well as 

performances from the resident 

Owensboro Symphony Orchestra 

and Owensboro Dance Theatre. 

During the holiday season, 

RiverPark transforms into a 

Winter Wonderland with sleigh 

rides, holiday movies and the 

tri-state’s largest outdoor ice rink. 

The center also offers a variety 

of arts education experiences 

for children.

Scenes from two popular events at 

RiverPark Center in Owensboro. 

Theatre Workshop of Owensboro 

407 W. Fifth St. 

270.683.5333 

www.theatreworkshop.org 

Known as the “the longest 

running show in town,” the 

Theatre Workshop of Owensboro 

has been producing quality 

community performances 

since 1955. 

Photos courtesy of 

RiverPark Center 

33

34 

Paducah 

Luther F. Carson Four Rivers 

Center 

100 Kentucky Ave. 

270.450.4444 

www.thecarsoncenter.org 

A state-of-the-art modern facility 

located in the arts-rich heart of 

Paducah, the Carson Center 

hosts national and international 

touring groups as well as the 

Paducah Symphony Orchestra 

and other theater, dance and 

music events for families and 

children. 

Market House Theatre 

132 Market House Square 

888.648.7529 

www.mhtplay.com 

A regional theater drawing 

audiences from western 

Kentucky, southern Illinois, 

southeastern Missouri and 

western Tennessee, the Market 

House Theatre provides quality 

theater and hands-on artistic 

experience for people of all ages. 

Paducah 

Known as the Four Rivers 

Region, Paducah benefits 

from the inland waterways 

that have defined its history. 

The Port of Paducah, at the 

foot of Broadway in historic 

downtown, is just downriver 

from the confluence of the 

Ohio and Tennessee Rivers. 

The Cumberland River joins 

the Ohio just east of the 

city, and the Ohio converges 

with the mighty Mississippi 

River less than 50 miles to 

the west. 

A stroll along the riverside 

reveals a wealth of images 

from the past. Over 40 

murals created by Robert 

Dafford and his team of 

muralists decorate the city’s

A gallery at the National Quilt 

Museum featues a dizzying 

array of quilt designs. 

floodwall. They portray Paducah from the time 

when Pre-Columbian Native Americans dwelled 

along the riverbank, through the era of the 

steamboat and on to the present day. Nearby, 

on the grounds of the National Quilt Museum, 

a group of bronze statues by George Lundeen 

commemorate the Lewis and Clark Expedition. 

William Clark, of the famed exploratory journey, 

is credited with establishing Paducah. He platted 

the town in 1827 and named it in honor of a tribe 

indigenous to the region. 

With a thriving arts district, a wide variety of 

cultural activities, urban cuisine and eclectic 

accommodations, Paducah offers an incredible array 

of experiences. 

Enter the National Quilt Museum and you will see 

an impressive array of fiber art. The museum has a 

permanent collection of award-winning quilts ranging 

from non-representational compositions to intricate 

Photo courtesy of the National Quilt Museum 

realistic scenes. The museum also hosts changing 

exhibits of historic and contemporary quilt-making. 

Art spaces abound within walking distance of the 

museum. The Yeiser Art Center has changing 

exhibits of visual art, and Maiden Alley Cinema 

screens independent films and hosts art exhibitions 

in its lobby. The performing arts are well represented 

by the Market House Theatre and the Carson Center, 

which boasts a two-story mural inspired by the rivers 

and the quilt-making traditions that helped form 

Paducah’s character. t 

35

36 

Photo courtesy of the National Quilt Museum 

Paducah (cont.) 

National Quilt Museum 

215 Jefferson St. 

270.442.8856 

www.quiltmuseum.org 

The National Quilt Museum is 

the gateway to the discovery of 

traditonal and non-traditional 

quiltmaking and the quilt artist. 

Mustang Mamas, a quilt from the National Quilt Museum 

by Denise Oyama Miller of Fremont, Calif. 

Yeiser Art Center 

200 Broadway St. 

270.442.2453 

www.theyeiser.org 

The Yeiser Art Center houses 

a permanent collection of 

American, European, African 

and Asian art, including work by 

such artists as Henri Matisse, 

Mary Cassatt, Salvador Dali and 

Francisco Goya. Center galleries 

feature changing art exhibits by 

local, national and international 

artists. 

Powderly 

Pickin’ in the Park 

Paradise Park 

Highway 189 Bypass 

270.338.5961 

Pickin’ in the Park is held 

every Friday evening from 

June through September and 

frequently features thumbpicking 

champions, as well as open-mic 

opportunities and jams.

Rosine 

A band plays at the barn in Rosine. 

Rosine Barn Jamboree 

8225 Highway 62 E. 

Bill Burden, 270.274.7414 

Frances Harvey, 270.274.5552 

This bluegrass jam happens 

every Friday evening at the barn 

in Rosine, near Bill Monroe’s 

home and his resting place at the 

Rosine Cemetery. The Bill Monroe 

Centennial begins in 2011. 

Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society 

37

“That 

ease and 

accessibility 

of travel has 

made western 

Kentucky 

a place of 

convergence 

and 

dispersal…” 

38 

Literary Arts in Western Kentucky 

To its pre-European inhabitants, western Kentucky 

was a sacred place, marked by its confluence of four 

major rivers. And though it isn’t frequently thought of 

in such terms, the region’s culture and history have 

been shaped by its passageways. 

First were its rivers—the area is bordered by the 

Ohio, the Mississippi and the Green; it is bisected 

by the Tennessee and Cumberland. These routes 

brought the first white settlers in the late 18th century 

and provided accessible routes for export of the area’s 

agricultural and mining products. Later, as rivers 

gave way to rails, the region continued to thrive as a 

transportation hub. 

That ease and accessibility of travel has made 

western Kentucky a place of convergence and 

dispersal, of people arriving from other places, settling 

with a fierce attachment to their land and home, and 

then disseminating their culture to the larger world. 

The Ohio River delivered John James Audubon 

(1785–1851) to Henderson from Louisville in 1810. 

Though he lived there only a few years, he is still 

closely associated with the area. He brought western 

Kentucky world-wide attention not only through his art 

Tony Crunk 

but through his writing, in particular his five-volume 

Ornithological Biography (1831–1839). 

Irvin Cobb (1876–1944), a native of Paducah, 

was one of the country’s most popular authors of the 

20th century. Through his journalism, screenwriting 

and humorous fiction, Cobb created a rich panorama 

of western Kentucky characters. 

The railroad town of Guthrie gave the nation one 

of the most important American writers of the 20th 

century, Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989). The 

country’s first poet laureate and the only person to 

win Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry, Warren 

took as his most frequent subject matter the life, 

people and history of his native region. With fellow 

Kentuckian Allen Tate and several other young writers 

at Vanderbilt University, he founded the Southern 

Agrarian movement in literary and social criticism, 

which profoundly shaped the themes, ideals and 

perceptions of southern culture. 

Warren’s family friend Caroline Gordon (1895– 

1981) was also among the most popular American 

writers of her day. Her first novel, Penhally (1931), 

an inter-generational family saga, established her as

another chronicler of the history and culture of the 

region. She later penned nine additional novels and 

three collections of short fiction. 

Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green 

was the adult home of one of Kentucky’s most active 

and loyal writers, Jim Wayne Miller (1936–1996). 

Miller wrote distinctively in poetry, fiction and drama 

and was a folklorist, a scholar of German literature 

and a tireless promoter of Kentucky writers. 

Another major rail center, Hopkinsville, has 

produced a number of significant literary figures, 

including Tony Crunk (b. 1956), the first of three 

Kentuckians in recent years to win the Yale Younger 

Poets Prize. Journalist and fiction writer Ted Poston 

(1906–1974), called the “Dean of Black Journalism,” 

became the first African-American career reporter for 

a major white newspaper, the New York Post, where 

he served for 35 years. He also authored a collection 

of short stories about his home town, The Dark Side of 

Hopkinsville, that was published posthumously in 1991. 

Another Hopkinsville native, bell hooks (b. 1952), is 

an internationally acclaimed cultural and social critic. 

Among her over 30 books is Bone Black: Memories of a 

Girlhood (1996), which chronicles her years growing 

up in Christian County. 

Further west, another major agricultural center, 

Mayfield, is the birthplace of one of America’s most 

respected contemporary fiction writers, Bobbie 

Ann Mason (b. 1940). Her first collection of short 

fiction, Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), offered poignant 

depictions of western Kentucky rural and small town 

life. In addition to numerous short story collections 

and novels, she has also published a number of nonfiction 

works, including a biography of the South’s 

favorite son, Elvis Presley (2002). 

Finally, the creative writing program at Murray 

State University, founded in the late 1970s by 

scholar and author Delbert Wylder (1923–2004), 

has attracted a stellar group of American writers to 

campus, including Charles Wright, James Galvin 

and Mark Jarman. It is currently the professional 

home of fictionist and essayist Squire Babcock and 

poet Ann Neelon, as well as the national literary 

journal New Madrid. Through this program, the 

university continues the region’s legacy of bringing 

new observers, writers and readers to the western 

Kentucky region, then sending them out into the 

world, forever touched by their engagement with 

the rich cultural heritage of a unique and profoundly 

affecting American place. t 

39

40 

Photo courtesy of Tony Crunk 

Poetry 

Selected works: 

Living in the Resurrection 

(1994) 

Stories from Real Life (2008) 

New Covenant Bound (2010) 

Tony Crunk 

(1956 – ) 

Born in Hopkinsville, Ky. 

Tony Crunk is a native of Hopkinsville and a widely published poet and 

children’s author. He attended Centre College in Danville, Ky., and the 

University of Kentucky and received graduate degrees in creative writing 

and literature from the University of Virginia. 

He was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his first collection of 

poetry, Living in the Resurrection. He has since published several additional 

collections of poetry, three books for children and one collection of short 

fiction. He has taught writing and literature at the University of Montana, 

Murray State University, and James Madison University. 

He currently lives in Birmingham, Ala., where he is the writer-in-residence 

in the “Writing Our Stories” project, which provides creative writing 

instruction to residents of the state’s juvenile detention facilities. 

(Source: Tony Crunk, 2010)

Photo courtesy of Department of Rare Books and 

Special Collections, Princeton University Library 

Fiction 


Penhally (1931) 

Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934) 

Caroline Gordon 

(1895 – 1981) 

Born at Merry Mont farm near Trenton, Ky. 

Born at her mother’s ancestral home in southern Todd County, Caroline 

Gordon was educated by her father and attended his classical school for 

boys in Clarksville, Tenn. After graduating from Bethany College in W. Va., 

Gordon taught school until 1920, when she became a book reviewer and 

critic for the Chattanooga News. During this time she became acquainted 

with members of Vanderbilt’s Literary Society and in 1924 married fellow 

Kentuckian, writer and critic Allen Tate. 

Gordon’s first published short story “Summer Dust” appeared in 1929. 

While she and her husband were abroad in Paris, Gordon worked on 

her first novel, Penhally, which portrays the lives of a Kentucky family over 

three generations. In 1932, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and 

returned to Paris, where she worked on her most popular book, Aleck 

Maury, Sportsman. Gordon taught at Columbia University, Emory University 

and the University of Dallas, from which she retired in 1975. 

(Source: The Kentucky Encyclopedia) 

41

42 

Photo courtesy of LaNelle Mason 

Fiction 


Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) 

In Country (1985) 

Spence + Lila (1988) 

Feather Crowns (1993) 

Clear Springs (1999) 

Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail 

(2002) 

Bobbie Ann Mason 

(1940 – ) 

Born in Mayfield, Ky.; currently resides near Lawrenceburg, Ky. 

Bobbie Ann Mason grew up on her family’s dairy farm and attended the 

University of Kentucky, the State University of New York at Binghamton 

and the University of Connecticut, where she received her Ph.D. With the 

appearance of her first short story in The New Yorker in 1980, her fiction 

career took off, and she began publishing in such magazines as the Paris 

Review, Atlantic, Mother Jones and Harper’s. Mason’s fiction frequently 

centers around the working-class people of western Kentucky, and her 

literary style has been labeled “shopping mall realism.” 

Mason has served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Kentucky 

since 2001. Her collection of short stories, Shiloh and Other Stories, received 

the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction. Both Feather Crowns and 

Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail received the Southern Book Critics Award. Her 

memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Widely taught in 

high school and college classrooms, the novel In Country was made into a 

film starring Emily Lloyd and Bruce Willis. 

(Sources: Bobbie Ann Mason, 2010, and The Kentucky Anthology)

Excerpt from Spence + Lila 

He follows the creek line down toward the back fields. In the center 

of one of the middle fields is a rise with a large, brooding old oak tree 

surrounded by a thicket of blackberry briers. From the rise, he looks 

out over his place. This is it. This is all there is in the world—it contains 

everything there is to know or possess, yet everywhere people are 

knocking their brains out trying to find something different, something 

better. His kids all scattered, looking for it. Everyone always wants a way 

out of something like this, but what he has here is the main thing there 

is—just the way things grow and die, the way the sun comes up and 

goes down every day. These are the facts of life. They are so simple they 

are almost impossible to grasp. It’s like looking up at the stars at night, 

seeing them strung out like seed corn, sprinkled randomly across the 

sky. Stars seem simple, even monotonous, because there’s no way to 

understand them. The ocean was like that too, blank and deep and easy. 

—Bobbie Ann Mason 

43

44 

Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Library & Museum 

Fiction, Poetry 


All the King’s Men (1946) 

Promises (1958) 

Now and Then: Poems 

1976–1978 (1979) 

Robert Penn Warren 

(1905 – 1989) 

Born in Guthrie, Ky. 

Robert Penn Warren, one of our nation’s most distinguished scholarwriters, 

attended public schools in Guthrie and graduated summa cum 

laude from Vanderbilt University in 1925. While at Vanderbilt, he joined 

the group know as the Fugitives, participating in literary discussions and 

in founding the journal called The Fugitive, published during 1922–1925. 

He later belonged to the Agrarians, a social-political group that included 

other such literary lights as John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson and 

Allen Tate. Warren (known to his friends as “Red”) continued his studies 

at the University of California, Berkley, earning his M.A. in English there 

in 1927. He subsequently studied at Yale and, for two years, at Oxford as 

a Rhodes Scholar. 

Warren achieved both critical and popular acclaim as a poet, novelist, essayist, 

dramatist, literary critic and editor. The nation’s first poet laureate 

and a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize (the only writer to win for

oth fiction and poetry), Warren also received a National Book Award, the 

Copernicus Award for Poetry, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, The National 

Medal for Literature and a MacArthur Foundation award. He was awarded 

the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute 

of Arts and Letters. 

Western Kentucky University in 1987 established the Center for Warren 

Studies, and a committee in Guthrie completed restoration of Warren’s 

birthplace in 1989. In 1988 Warren received the Milner Award, one of the 

Governor’s Awards in the Arts in Kentucky. 

Warren died on September 15, 1989, and was buried in the Stratton, Vt., 

cemetery. 


45

46 

South 

Central 

Region

Water defines Kentucky’s south central region. Lakes 

and rivers abound, and ancient underground currents 

formed one of the most extensive cave systems in the 

world, which includes Mammoth Cave National Park. 

Tourists have flocked to this region for decades to enjoy 

water sports and caving. 

Evening on the Cumberland, 

watercolor, by Patricia Ritter of Kettle, Ky. 

Itinerant musicians traveling south to Nashville or north 

to Louisville often stopped here on their way, introducing 

new traditions or modifying the music popular among the locals. Other art forms unique to the area evolved in part because 

of this mix of transient peoples. You’ll find fine oak baskets, Art Deco theaters and custom-polished flint marbles used in 

local games. 

Bowling Green is the cultural and educational center of the region, but the little community of Horse Cave is where you’ll 

find the professional repertory theater. So expect the unexpected when you travel across this expansive region, but make 

sure you join the locals in some of their favorite pastimes. t 

47

48 

Music and Cultural Traditions in 

South Central Kentucky 

With its lakes, rivers and caves, 

south central Kentucky’s natural 

geographical diversity presents 

the perfect environment for 

a rich cultural diversity. For 

generations, the beauty of this 

region has drawn a variety of 

people, all of whom contribute 

to the cultural and artistic 

landscape. 

The mixing of musical 

styles and the proximity to 

Nashville, Tenn., make this 

area a fertile ground for 

new music. Russellville is 

home to founding members 

of the influential 1960s 

activist group The Freedom 

Singers, who still live and 

perform there today. In 


the mid-20th century, Blues and R&B stars toured 

the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” which included a stop at the 

Quonset Auditorium in Bowling Green. “Newgrass” 

music, a departure from traditional bluegrass, 

Photo courtesy of John Edmonds 

(www.southernartistry.org/John_Edmonds)

developed around Bowling Green and the flagship 

band New Grass Revival, with its original members 

Sam Bush and Béla Fleck. Artists like gospel singer 

John Edmonds continue to introduce new audiences 

to traditional music, while venues like the WhaBah 

Steakhouse feature regular performances by stellar 

artists from the area. 

Tune in to the radio program Barren River 

Breakdown to experience some of the music of 

south central Kentucky. Produced in the studios of 

Western Kentucky University Public Radio, each 

edition of Barren River Breakdown features two 

hours of the best of American music, including 

plenty of great Kentucky music. Erika Brady, Dave 

Baxter and Dan Modlin bring their unique insights 

to each show on Saturdays and Sundays starting 

at noon Central time/1:00 p.m. Eastern time 

(WKPB 89.5 Henderson/Owensboro, WKYU 88.9 

Bowling Green/Glasgow, WDCL 89.7 Somerset/ 

Campbellsville, WKUE 90.9 Elizabethtown/ 

Bardstown, or online at www.wkyufm.org). 

Sam Bush (far left) performs at the 2007 Kentucky Folklife Festival. 

Gospel singer John Edmonds (left) always pleases the crowd. 

Recent immigrants include significant numbers 

of Bosnians, who have contributed to the cultural 

landscape with music, dance and unique food 

traditions. The Bowling Green International Festival 

in September showcases artists and traditions 

from Bosnia, Mexico, Vietnam and elsewhere. Visit 

www.bginternationalfest.com for more information. 

Finally, it is impossible to separate the artistic 

heritage of south central Kentucky from cave 

culture. As part of their occupational folk culture, 

cave guides practice to become excellent 

storytellers, sharing lore and history about Kentucky 

karst lands. To learn about these traditions and 

more, visit the American Cave Museum in downtown 

Horse Cave, or the Kentucky Library and Museum 

on the campus of Western Kentucky University, 

home of an expanding folklore archive collection 

established decades ago by folklorist Lynwood 

Montell (www.wku.edu/Library/kylm/). t 

49

50 

Arts Access Gallery 

Since 1974, VSA Kentucky has been 

working to create a society where 

people with disabilities have access to 

opportunities for creative expression. 

Through participatory involvement with 

trained professionals and volunteers, 

adults and children with disabilities 

learn creative and social skills that 

open doors to new opportunities in 

the arts and other areas of life. 

Photo courtesy of VSA Kentucky 

In addition to arts training, VSA Kentucky also provides a gallery 

space for participants to display their work and to view art by 

nationally recognized artists with disabilities. For a listing of 

current exhibits at the gallery and a schedule of Gallery Hop 

dates, visit www.vsartsky.org/artsaccessgallery.php. t 

Abstract Apple by Chris Thompson, 

acrylic on canvas, from the Artist 

Within exhibition. This lively and 

expressive exhibition showcased 

artwork from across the state created 

by adult artists with disabilities who 

participated in the Artist Within 

program. 

Bowling Green 

Arts Access Gallery 

VSA Kentucky 

515 E. Tenth St. 

877.417.9594 

www.vsartsky.org/artsaccessgallery.php 

The Arts Access Gallery is a visual 

arts gallery highlighting the work 

of artists with disabilities and 

emerging artists who take part in 

VSA programs.

Capitol Arts Center 


270.782.2787 

www.capitolarts.com 

Visitors to the Capitol Arts 

Center, originally constructed 

as a vaudeville house in the 

1890s, can browse through its 

spacious art galleries before 

enjoying theatrical or musical 

performances by the Fountain 

Square Players, Orchestra 

Kentucky and Bowling Green 

Western Symphony Orchestra. 

The Capitol Arts Center marquee lights up the evening. 

The Gallery at 916 

916 State St. 

270.843.5511 

www.thegalleryat916.com 

Located in a historic storefront in 

downtown Bowling Green, The 

Gallery at 916 features fine art 

paintings, sculpture, jewelry and 

custom textiles. 

Kentucky Blues Jams at 

WhaBah Steakhouse 

2361 Russellville Road 

270.782.6400 

Contact: Ryan Stiles, 

kybluesjam@gmail.com 

www.kentuckybluessociety.com 

This is a family-friendly blues 

jam for all ages, every Sunday 

evening, 6–10 p.m. 

Photo courtesy of Bowling Green Area Convention & Visitors Bureau 

The Pots Place Co-op Studio 

and Gallery 


270.535.0561 

www.thepotsplace.com 

Pots Place is a ceramic arts co-op 

in beautiful downtown Bowling 

Green featuring the works of 

six artists as well as a variety of 

hands-on art classes. 

51

Photo courtesy of photographer Hunter Wilson and the Daily News 

52 

Bowling Green(cont.) 

Public Theatre of Kentucky 

545 Morris Ave. 

270.781.6233 

www.ptkbg.org 

A sunny day 

brings out 

the audience 

for a concert 

in Fountain 

Square. 

The Public Theatre of Kentucky 

produces a varied season of 

dramas, comedies and musicals, 

as well as a series of productions 

for young audiences. The Gallery 

in the lobby features work from 

regional artists. 

Bowling Green’s Fountain Square 

and the Capitol Arts Center 

Fountain Square marks the original site of Bowling Green’s first log 

and red-brick courthouse, as well as the site of the city’s original 

market house and jail. When a new courthouse was built following 

the Civil War, the site became a park thanks to the vision of John Cox 

Underwood, an architect/engineer and the second mayor of Bowling 

Green. 

The focal point of the park, the fountain originally sculpted by Antonio 

Canova in 1881, features Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth. The 

park also contains two large cast urns and sculptures of Ceres, 

goddess of grain; Pomona, goddess of fruit; Melpomane, goddess of 

tragedy; and Flora, goddess of flowers. The statue mounts and the two 

arched memorial entries are made of locally quarried Bowling Green 

limestone. Throughout the city’s history, Fountain Square has been 

the community’s center for celebrating, parading, protesting and other 

displays of civic pride and duty. 

Also on the square, the Capitol Arts Center is an amazing example of 

adaptive re-use of a historic property. Originally built as a vaudeville 

house in the late 1890s, the stage became a movie theater in the mid- 

1930s. Although the Capitol Theater closed in 1967 and sat vacant for

nearly ten years, it re-opened, following 

a grassroots renovation project, as an 

arts center with a performance venue 

seating approximately 800 patrons. The 

building retains the Art Deco style and 

decor of its 1930s renovation. 

The Capitol Arts Center offers a multifaceted 

arts experience for visitors, with 

two galleries, youth theater productions and 

regular performances from the Fountain 

Square Players, Orchestra Kentucky 

and Bowling Green Western Symphony 

Orchestra. Through the Capitol Arts 

Alliance, the center also hosts educational 

opportunities for young actors. It shares the 

healing power of art by hosting exhibits at 

the Southern Kentucky Cancer Center and 

the Bowling Green Medical Center Health and 

Wellness Classroom. t 

Bowling Green’s Fountain Square 

is beautiful any time of year. 

Photos courtesy of Bowling Green Area 

Convention & Visitors Bureau 

53

54 

Glasgow 

The Plaza Theatre 


270.361.2101 

www.plaza.org 

This ornate Depression-era movie 

palace, which underwent major 

renovations before reopening 

in 2005, now presents an 

entertaining mix of music, theater 

and comedy. 

Community members gather at 

The Bookstore for a Thursday 

evening jam in Horse Cave. 

Horse Cave 

Jammin’ on the Porch at the 

Historic Thomas House 

Contact: Dave Foster 


270.786.1466 

Thursday evening jam sessions 

happen at the historic Thomas 

House during warm weather and 

rotate to The Bookstore, Gallery 

Bakery and Snappy’s Pizza and 

Pasta in cool or rainy weather. 

Music includes bluegrass, 

country, gospel and blues. 

Kentucky Repertory Theatre 

at Horse Cave 


270.786.2177 

www.kentuckyrep.org 

Kentucky Repertory Theatre is 

a professional theater company 

located in scenic cave country, 

producing a series of plays in a 

repertory cycle.

Kentucky Repertory Theatre 

Kentucky Repertory Theatre is downtown Horse 

Cave’s largest employer and one of only three 

Kentucky theaters to operate under agreement with 

Actors Equity, the union of professional actors and 

stage managers. As the owner of five buildings in 

the heart of Horse Cave’s registered historic district 

and the first to restore buildings for adaptive re-use, 

Kentucky Rep has led the way in the revitalization of 

the city’s historic district. 

Amanda Rae Jones appears in 

And Then They Came for Me at 

Kentucky Repertory Theatre. 

The theater’s most important asset, however, is the 

quality of its performances. The New York Times 

once characterized Kentucky Repertory Theatre as 

“a sophisticated theatre with a history of producing 

challenging dramatic works.” The theater’s repertoire 

ranges from Shakespeare to Neil Simon. 

Today the theater continues to thrill audiences with 

a diverse season of classic and contemporary works, 

including programming by and for young people. t 

Photo courtesy of Kentucky Repertory Theatre 

55

56 

Horse Cave 

It’s a sweltering summer evening and you’re 

planning to attend an outdoor concert downtown. 

You pack some cold drinks in a cooler and, at the 

last minute, you grab a sweater on the way out 

the door. 

A sweater? Well, when the concert is in Horse Cave 

and summer heat or threatening thunderstorms 

make the weather a concern, you know there‘s 

a good chance the concert will get moved inside 

Hidden River Cave, right in the middle of town. It’s 

always cool inside the cave, and the acoustics are 

better than you might expect. 

The stairs down to 

Hidden River Cave are 

just steps away from 

Horse Cave’s Main St. 

Horse Cave, just east of Mammoth Cave National 

Park, is one of only two communities in the world 

with a cave entrance in the center of town. (The 

other is in South Korea.) The adjoining American 

Cave Museum includes offices for the American 

Cave Conservation Association. 

Photo courtesy of Horse Cave Development Corporation

The rejuvenated 

downtown 

Horse Cave. 

Horse Cave has an aboveground persona, 

too. The Kentucky Repertory Theatre 

is on the list of the Ten Great Places to 

See the Lights Way Off Broadway and 

received second place in Kentucky Living 

magazine’s Best of 2010 Performing 

Arts list. Nearby, the Heritage Art Gallery 

features fine art, folk art and photography. 

And don’t miss the artistic creations on 

display at the adjoining Gallery Bakery 

and Donuts. Local businesses host weekly 

bluegrass jams, and the annual Horse 

Cave Heritage Festival showcases area folk 

arts and traditions. 

In recent years a nonprofit group made up 

of area businesspeople has worked hard to 

revitalize downtown Horse Cave by purchasing 

and improving decaying commercial buildings. 

Some of these buildings, still awaiting permanent 

tenants, have been put to creative use: for 

Photo courtesy of Horse Cave Development Corporation 

example, one storefront’s large glass windows were 

commandeered to display artwork of local students. 

Some who live in a rural community the size of 

Horse Cave might have a hard time envisioning 

potential vitality during economically challenging 

times. The enlightened residents of Horse Cave, 

however, have found a way to capitalize on all of 

their assets. t 

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58 

Lucas 

Barren River Lake 

State Resort Park Jams 

Contact: Lisa C. Davis, 

Resort Park Manager 

1149 State Park Rd. 

800.325.0057, ext. 2421 

These jam sessions, on the first 

Tuesday evening of each month 

in the lodge restaurant and lobby 

areas, feature all types of music. 

Arrive early for dinner and make a 

night of it. 

Somerset 

Carnegie Community Arts Center 

107 N. Main St. 

606.677.0333 

www.carnegiecac.com 

Known as the “Grand Dame of 

Somerset,” the center is home 

to some of the area’s major arts 

organizations and features live 

performances and educational 

opportunities, as well as a 

French-style market and café. 

The Center for 

Rural Development 

2292 S. Hwy. 27 

606.677.6000 

www.centertech.com 

Lake Cumberland Performing 

Arts offers a season of diverse 

drama, music and dance on the 

Center Stage, as well as visual 

arts exhibits. 

Lake Cumberland Jammers at 

American Legion Post #38 

Contact: Joe LaMay 

500 Enterprise Drive 

606.305.6741 

http://lakecumberlandjammers.com 

Tuesday evenings, take part in 

folk, bluegrass, country, gospel 

and old-time jams.

Basket-making Traditions 

Along Highway 31W 

Part of a long stretch of highway reaching from 

Michigan to Alabama, Kentucky’s U.S. Route 31W, 

or “the Dixie Highway,” is home to a variety of 

traditions. The highway passes through the heart 

of Kentucky cave country and provides access to 

the entrances of Mammoth Cave National Park. 

Travelers can stop at a number of motels, attractions 

and service stations built in the middle of the 20th 

century, including a wigwam village. 

Highway 31W is also home to south central 

Kentucky’s unique split white oak basket-making 

tradition. The style has specific characteristics, from 

the choice of oak to the “burr” or “ear” wrapping 

pattern of ribbed baskets. The baskets are such 

an important part of the area that they are judged 

annually in the Hart County Fair Basket Making 

Contest in early July. If you are traveling through 

the area at other times of the year, consider visiting 

the Family Medical Center in Munfordville, which 

displays a large collection of the work of local basket 

makers. Visit www.mammothcavebasketmakers.com for 

more information. t 

Leona Waddell, one of the 

area’s most accomplished 

basket makers, displays some 

of her white oak baskets. 

Photo courtesy of Leona Waddell 

59

60 

Marble Games for Grown-ups 

East of the cave lands of the south central region, on 

the Tennessee border, is Monroe County, the home 

of folklorist Lynwood Montell. Montell, who began the 

masters program in folk studies at Western Kentucky 

University, is the author of popular and scholarly 

works on ghost stories, race relations, food traditions 

and other regional 

topics. 

One recreational 

tradition documented 

by Montell is marble 

playing. Grown men 

spend hours a day 

engaged in serious 

competitions of 

marble games like 

Rolley Hole, which 

is played on a large, 

groomed dirt surface 

with borders and 

small holes drilled 


at carefully measured intervals. The marbles are 

created out of flint and are works of art. (Glass 

marbles are not used because players shoot so hard 

they would break.) Many innovative ways of making 

flint marbles have emerged—from a makeshift 

tumbler attached to a truck wheel, to power grinders 

and molds that form the pieces of flint into perfect 

spheres. 

Larry and Richard 

Bowman prepare 

for a game of 

Rolley Hole.

Visitors can watch and take part in marble games yearround 

in Tompkinsville at the Marble Club Super Dome 

any day after 4 p.m. and on Sunday mornings after 8:30. 

No marble handy? No worries. “We’ll let anybody play. 

We’ll even loan them a marble,” says Rondal Biggerstaff. 

Friday night is the best night for marbles, though there’s 

sure to be a game or two going on every other night of the 

week as well. 

Or plan to play some marbles at the Watermelon Festival, 

where you can also enjoy the unique, spicy barbecue 

of the region. Contact the Monroe County Chamber of 

Commerce for information at 270-487-1314 or visit them 

at www.monroeky.com. t 

Tompkinsville 

Pickin’ in the Park 

Old Mulkey Meetinghouse State 

Historic Site 

Contact: Sheila Rush 

38 Old Mulkey Park Road 

270.487.8481 

This jam typically features 

bluegrass and gospel music, but 

all genres are welcome. Bring 

a lawn chair and join us on the 

Meetinghouse grounds (or inside 

if it rains) the third Saturday 

evening of each month. Don’t 

miss the marble games and the 

barbecue! 

61

“Survant’s 

poetry reflects 

geography— 

his childhood 

in Owensboro 

on the Ohio 

River and 

his adult life 

lived over [an] 

underground 

river…” 

62 

Literary Arts in South Central Kentucky 

South central Kentucky sprawls westward from 

the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, marked by 

the Pottsville Escarpment and its many waterfalls— 

most notably Cumberland Falls near Burnside, the 

childhood home of novelist Harriette Simpson Arnow 

(1908–1986). 

The author of ten books, Arnow is best known 

for The Dollmaker, her novel of the diaspora from 

southern Appalachia to northern industrial cities 

during the Great Depression and World War II. It is a 

fit companion to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, 

which chronicles a similar displacement from the Great 

Plains. Although Arnow herself followed the path of 

her heroine, Gertie Nevels, to Detroit and remained a 

resident of Michigan for the rest of her life, she, unlike 

Gertie, embraced Detroit, relishing the conveniences 

of big city life. In the novel, however, Arnow embraces 

the Romantic theme of the destructive clash between 

rural and urban cultures. As an intelligent and 

independent-minded woman limited by gender, class 

and economics, Gertie struggles to find a place in her 

Joe Survant 

new world. The Dollmaker is one of the American South’s 

great tragic novels. 

West of Arnow’s Cumberland Valley lies the 

karst area of sinking springs, underground rivers 

and caves. The largest known cave system in the 

world, Mammoth Cave, with over 350 miles of 

charted passages, is the center of this region. One 

of Kentucky’s most promising young poets, Davis 

McCombs (b. 1969), grew up near Munfordville, only 

12 miles from this cave, and worked as a park ranger 

in the national park that bears its name. Commonly, 

the landscapes of writers’ childhoods inform their 

work; McCombs is no exception. The author of two 

collections of poems, he is best known for Ultima Thule, 

winner of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets 

competition. These poems are spoken by Stephen 

Bishop, a slave of Dr. John Croghan, the owner of the 

cave. From 1838 to 1857, Bishop worked as a guide 

in the cave, mapping countless new passages and 

becoming a celebrity himself.

Fifty miles west of Mammoth Cave is the city of 

Bowling Green, where former Kentucky Poet Laureate 

Joe Survant (b. 1942) continues to live after retiring 

from Western Kentucky University. Like the fiction of 

Arnow and the poetry of McCombs, Survant’s poetry 

reflects geography—his childhood in Owensboro 

on the Ohio River and his adult life lived over the 

underground river that runs beneath Bowling Green. 

The author of four collections of poems, including one 

set in Malaysia, Survant’s best-known books form a 

narrative of rural life in Kentucky that spans the presettlement 

explorations to World War I. Anne & Alpheus, 

1842-1882 is spoken by a husband and wife whose 

40-year marriage circles the early death of their only 

child. Rafting Rise, set in the year before America’s 

entrance into WW I, is spoken by people whose lives 

centered around cutting timber and rafting logs down 

small streams to the lumber mills of Evansville, Ind., 

on the Ohio River. t 

Cumberland Falls, on the eastern edge 

of the south central region. 

63

64 

Photo courtesy of Thomas Arnow 

Fiction 


Hunter’s Horn (1949) 

The Dollmaker (1954) 

Kentucky Trace (1974) 

Harriette Arnow 

(1908 – 1986) 

Born in Wayne County; grew up in Burnside, Ky. 

Harriette Simpson Arnow was the author of the celebrated Appalachian 

novels The Dollmaker and Hunter’s Horn and two social histories, Seedtime on the 

Cumberland and Flowering of the Cumberland, which accurately depict frontier 

and colonial life on the Cumberland Plateau. 

Arnow wrote about Kentucky in the way that Welty wrote about Mississippi, 

Cather wrote about Nebraska and O’Connor wrote about Georgia— 

with authentic realism and unsentimental empathy. Her novels tell of the 

effect of roads on rural communities in Appalachia and the effect of World 

War II on mountain people who migrated from Appalachia to northern 

industrial centers. She put faces on those who got left behind: Americans 

who farmed and worked in factories and never left this country during 

wartime but nevertheless were profoundly changed. 

Born in Wayne County, Arnow spent most of her childhood in Burnside. 

She moved to Michigan during World War II. 

(Source: Thomas Arnow, 2010)

Photo courtesy of Davis McCombs 

Poetry 


Ultima Thule (2000) 

Dismal Rock (2007) 

Davis McCombs 

(1969 – ) 

Grew up in Woodsonville, Ky. 

Davis McCombs was born in Louisville and grew up in Hart County. He 

attended Hart County High School, Harvard University, the University of 

Virginia and Stanford University. 

McCombs was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his first book of 

poems, Ultima Thule. He received the Dorset Prize for Dismal Rock. 

In 2002 he left his job at Mammoth Cave National Park and moved to Arkansas 

where he directs the MFA Program at the University of Arkansas. 

He currently lives in Fayetteville with his wife, the poet Carolyn Guinzio, 

and their two children, Warren and Charlotte. 

(Source: Davis McCombs) 

65

66 

Photo courtesy of the Miller family 

Poetry, Fiction 


Newfound (1996) 

The Brier Poems (1997) 

Jim Wayne Miller 

(1936 – 1996) 

Longtime resident of Bowling Green, Ky. 

Jim Wayne Miller, a native of the mountain country of North Carolina, 

graduated from Berea College in Kentucky in 1958 and received his 

Ph.D. in German and American Literature from Vanderbilt University in 

1965. While at Vanderbilt, as an NDEA Fellow, he studied under Fugitive 

poet Donald Davidson and Hawthorne Scholar Randall Stewart. He 

was a Professor of German language and literature at Western Kentucky 

University in Bowling Green for 33 years. He served as a consultant to 

the Appalachian Studies programs in Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio and 

was a visiting Professor in Appalachian Studies at the Berea College Appalachian 

Center. 

Miller was named Kentucky poet laureate by the Kentucky General Assembly 

in 1986. His honors include the Alice Lloyd Memorial Prize for 

Appalachian Poetry in 1967, the 1980 Thomas Wolfe Literary Award and 

the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year Award. 

(Source: The Miller family, www.JimWayneMiller.com)

Poetry 


We Will All Be Changed (1995) 

Anne and Alpheus, 1842–1882 

(1996) 

The Presence of Snow in the 

Tropics (2001) 

Rafting Rise (2002) 

Joe Survant 

(1942 – ) 

Born in Owensboro, Ky.; currently resides in Bowling Green, Ky. 

Joe Survant grew up along the Ohio River, hunting, fishing, camping 

and “contracting a chronic love for rivers [and] woods…” He is the 

author of four books of poetry, two of which won national awards. He 

has said that a year spent teaching at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in 

1983–1984 on a Fulbright Fellowship was pivotal for his writing. In the 

early 1990s, he began writing a “type of epic of rural Kentucky in three 

books, each set in a different century.” Anne & Alpheus represents the 

19th century and Rafting Rise the early 20th century. 

Survant is retired from teaching literature and writing at Western Kentucky 

University where he is Professor Emeritus. He served as Kentucky’s 

poet laureate from 2003–2004. His poetry has been published 

abroad in the U.K., Canada, Singapore and Malaysia. 

(Sources: Joe Survant, 2010; bookclub@ket, Joe Survant: A Brief Autobiography, 

2004) 

67

68 

Eastern 

Region

The Appalachian Mountains define Kentucky’s eastern 

region both geographically and culturally. It is an area of 

rugged terrain and beautiful vistas, rocky outcrops, dense 

forests and hardscrabble farms. Communities are typically 

small and sometimes isolated, but there are also vibrant 

cultural and commercial centers that draw people from 

some distance. 

All They Had Was One Banjo Player, 

oil painting on primed glass, 

by John Haywood of Litt Carr, Ky. 

Eastern Kentuckians are fiercely protective of their culture and traditions, and their art has benefited from the faithful 

preservation of techniques passed down through generations. Today young Appalachian artists pay homage to their 

forebears by learning their ancestral music, dance and crafts, at times adding their own touches, and enthusiastically 

sharing the results with the world. 

If you appreciate handmade crafts, folk music you can trace to European traditions and scenic roads twisting through oneof-a-kind 

communities, you’ll want to plan a trip to the eastern part of our state. t 

69

70 

Kentucky’s Traditions along 

the Country Music Highway 

Along the Route 23 corridor, better known as the 

Country Music Highway—dedicated to local country 

music legends including Loretta Lynn, Dwight 

Yoakam, Ricky Skaggs, and the Judds—you’ll find a 

treasure trove of musical traditions. While traveling 

the highway, you may also be interested in some 

of the communities that fostered these traditions. 

The Kentucky Folklife 

Program distilled four 

years of research into 

a handy companion 

book—packaged with 

four CDs narrated by 

Ricky Skaggs—and 

called it More than Music: 

A Heritage Driving Tour 

of Kentucky’s Route 23. 

Following are a few of 

the cultural gems you’ll 

find along the route. 


If you’re a country music fan, you won’t want to miss 

Butcher Hollow, the home of Loretta Lynn. Loretta’s 

brother Herman Webb runs a traditional country 

store near Van Lear. He’ll meet you there and take 

you on a guided tour of the Webb family homestead 

for a small donation. If you ask, he may even share 

some of that Webb family musical talent with you. 

Up a winding mountain road not far from Blackey 

you’ll find a lively community gathering spot 

dedicated to preserving 

mountain culture, 

the Carcassonne 

Community Center. The 

center hosts community 

activities such as a 

quilting group and a 

monthly square dance, 

which is the oldest 

continuously-running 

Ricky Skaggs (left) 

performs at the 2005 

Kentucky Folklife Festival.

community square dance in the commonwealth. 

Visitors are encouraged to participate. The dances 

have included both regionally and nationally known 

musicians, such as banjo master Lee Sexton. 

Dancers from Carcassonne have been featured at 

the Kentucky Folklife Festival and the Smithsonian 

Folklife Festival. 

If you want to do more than just listen to music, stop 

by the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School. Yearround 

music classes, workshops, youth jam sessions 

and square dances are offered for 

folks ages 11 years 

and older. Learn from 

some of the finest 

old-time musicians 

Maggie Duncan-Collum, 

a student at the Cowan 

Creek Mountain Music 

School, plays at the 2007 

Kentucky Folklife Festival. 

Kentucky has to offer, including Carla Gover and 

Roger Cooper. 

To order a copy of More than Music: A Heritage Driving 

Tour of Route 23, visit the 1792 Store at the Thomas 

D. Clark Center for Kentucky History in Frankfort or 

call 502-564-1792. t 

Photo courtesy of Carla Gover 

Musician Carla Gover 

teaches at the Cowan 

Creek Mountain 

Music School. 

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72 


Originally built in 1931, The Paramount Theater 

in Ashland was one of the first built for “talking 

pictures.” It was a model for other theaters 

around the country that exclusively presented 

films produced by Paramount Studios. But as 

time passed, it sat in disrepair. Luckily the people 

of Ashland saw great potential in the beautifully 

designed space and, when remodeling began in 

1972, pains were taken to restore its amazing Art 

Deco architecture. Some unique pieces include 

bent-glass ceiling fixtures and a recessed water 

fountain. The walls of the theater feature carefully 

restored murals of 16th-century commedia dell’arte 

characters. The center exudes opulence right down 

to the solid pewter mirrors in the ladies room. 

The offerings at the Paramount Art Center pay 

homage to the region’s Appalachian heritage while 

presenting a wide selection of performances: from 

nationally touring theater productions to WTCR’s 

Highway 23 Jamboree, which presents artists from 

Kentucky’s famous Country Music Highway in an 

Opry-like atmosphere. 

Photo courtesy of the Paramount Arts Center 

And did we mention the ghost? Like any 

good historic building, an old friend watches over 

the Paramount. Affectionately called Paramount Joe, 

the spirit is rumored to be a laborer who met his end 

during the construction of the building. He is said to 

be a friendly ghost who makes his presence known 

through unexplained noises, missing objects, cold 

spots and the occasional apparitional appearance. 

Paramount Joe’s Rising Star Café is so named in 

honor of the amicable spirit. On Friday nights when 

no performance is scheduled, visitors can listen to 

up-and-coming artists while enjoying coffee shop 

ambience. t

Ashland 


1300 Winchester Ave. 

606.324.3175 

www.paramountartscenter.com 

The Paramount Arts Center’s 

lavish Art Deco design welcomes 

audiences to a diverse slate of 

more than 120 performance 

events each year. 

An artist at Red Bird Mission Crafts 

demonstrates how to make a cornhusk flower. 

Beverly 

Red Bird Mission Crafts 

70 Queendale Center 

606.598.2709 

www.crafts.rbmission.org 

The craft marketing program 

of Red Bird Mission strives to 

provide economic opportunities 

for Appalachian families located 

within a 60-mile radius of the 

mission. The work of over 134 

craft artists is featured in the retail 

outlet. 

Photo courtesy of Red Bird Mission Crafts 

Clay City 

Meadowgreen Park Jams 

Contact: Don Rogers 

303 Bluegrass Lane 

859.351.1146 

This bluegrass jam, held every 

third Sunday afternoon, has 

been ongoing since 1977. It 

is presented by the Kentucky 

Friends of Bluegrass, which has 

members all over the world. 

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74 

Corbin 

Bluegrass and Gospel Jam 

Sessions at Cumberland Falls 

State Resort Park 

Contact: Steve Gilbert 

7351 Highway 90 

606.528.4121 

The jam is held the second and 

last Mondays of the month, 

except in December. Different 

areas throughout the lodge 

feature various types of traditional 

music, including string music, 

gospel and bluegrass. 

David 

David Appalachian Crafts 

6369 Highway 404 

606.886.2377 

www.davidappalachiancrafts.com 

David Appalachian Crafts was 

founded in 1972 to help area 

residents supplement their 

income and raise local pride 

during a time of diminishing coal 

markets and loss of income. 

Showcasing the crafts of 90 

artisans from a seven-county 

area, it is a retail outlet for 

talented quilters, woodworkers, 

basket makers and gourd 

painters and a place for people to 

meet other artisans in the area. 

Hindman 

Appalachian Artisan Center 

16 W. Main St. 

606.785.9855 

www.artisancenter.net 

The Appalachian Artisan Center 

focuses on nurturing and 

developing one of the region’s 

most precious assets—artists. 

Through a unique and innovative 

program, the center helps artists 

make a living through their art 

by selling work from adjudicated 

artists.

Gallery at 

the Kentucky 

School of Craft 

in Hindman. 

Picking and Grinning 

in Hindman 

Opportunity Center 

Contact: Robert Short 

238 Highway 160 S. 

606.785.4404 

All pickers and grinners are 

welcome to join this bluegrass 

jam in beautiful Hindman on the 

Hazard Community and Technical 

College campus. 

Kentucky School of Craft 

The community of Hindman in central 

Appalachia has a history as an educational 

and cultural center. In 1902 the Hindman 

Settlement School opened, and it continues 

to provide the community with cultural and 

educational opportunities that have helped 

residents remain mindful of their heritage. 

Following in that tradition, the Kentucky School of Craft 

opened in 2004 to train local residents in their rich craft heritage 

and help them start or expand craft-related businesses. The 

professional craft school, housed in a 25,000-square-foot historic 

rock building in downtown Hindman, is now a part of the Hazard 

Community and Technical College System and produces skilled 

artisans, knowledgeable in the region’s rich traditions and heritage. 

As part of a regional economic development strategy, the 

Appalachian Artisan Center provides a retail outlet for artists 

associated with the Kentucky School of Craft. The two work 

closely together to build an economically vibrant arts community 

in eastern Kentucky and promote the region as an appealing and 

viable place to live, work and visit. t 

75

76 

Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Folk Art Center 

Louisa 

Painted Cow Gallery 

103 S. Main Cross St. 

606.638.1313 

www.paintedcowgallery.com 

The Painted Cow Gallery features 

craft and artwork by artists from 

the tri-state area: Kentucky, Ohio 

and West Virginia. It is also the 

home studio for the Lawrence 

County Arts Council. 

Morehead 

Coffee Tree Books 

240 Morehead Plaza 

606.784.8364 

www.coffeetreebooks.com 

Coffee Tree Books features 

reading groups, book signings, 

readings, artist workshops, 

children’s events and live music 

by Kentucky artists. 

Far left: A gallery at the Kentucky 

Folk Art Center in Morehead. 

Left: Folk art rooster by Minnie Adkins. 

Kentucky Folk Art Center 

102 W. First St. 

606.783.2204 

www.kyfolkart.org 

Located in the historic Union 

Grocery building in Morehead, 

the Kentucky Folk Art Center 

offers visitors a unique cultural 

experience. From the fun and 

quirky to the fantastical, the folk 

art exhibited and conserved by 

the center is an engaging and 

vital piece of the region’s history 

and contemporary culture.

Mount Vernon 

Kentucky Music Hall of Fame 

and Museum 

2590 Richmond Road 

606.256.1000 

www.kentuckymusicmuseum.com 

The Kentucky Music Hall of 

Fame and Museum honors 

Kentucky musicians, performers, 

songwriters, publishers, 

promoters, managers, 

broadcasters and comedians 

who have made significant 

contributions to the music 

industry. 

Children perform 

The Wizard of Oz at the 

Jenny Wiley Amphitheatre 

in Prestonsburg. 

Mount Sterling 

Gateway Regional Arts Center 


859.498.6264 

www.gatewayartscenter.com 

Originally built as a church in 

1885, the Gateway Regional 

Arts Center is now home to 

art exhibits, drama, musical 

performances and the Art Shop. 

Photos courtesy of the Jenny Wiley Theatre 

Prestonsburg 

Jenny Wiley Theatre 

121 Theatre Court 

877.225.5598 

www.jwtheatre.com 

Jenny Wiley Theatre is a 

professional theater offering 

productions at the Jenny Wiley 

Amphitheatre, located within the 

Jenny Wiley State Resort Park. 

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78 

Prestonsburg (cont.) 

Mountain Arts Center 

50 Hal Rogers Drive 

606.889.9125 

www.macarts.com 

The Mountain Arts Center, 

located within a stone’s throw 

of U.S. 23, the Country Music 

Highway, boasts a 1,054-seat 

theater as well as an art gallery, 

and celebrates the region’s 

remarkable Appalachian arts 

heritage. Come to the center 

to see fine theater and music 

performances and stay for the 

Front Porch Pickin’. 

Whitesburg 

Appalshop 

91 Madison Ave. 

606.633.0108 

www.appalshop.org 

Appalshop is a nonprofit, multidisciplinary 

arts and education 

center in the heart of eastern 

Kentucky producing original 

films, video, theater, music and 

spoken-word recordings, radio, 

photography, multimedia and 

books. 

As you drive through the 

mountains, check out their radio 

station at WMMT FM 88.7, which 

broadcasts the long-running 

Bluegrass Express Live concert 

series. In addition, the Appalshop 

Traditional Music Project hosts 

a monthly old-time music jam at 

1 p.m. on the first Saturday of the 

month from October through May.

Appalshop has 

been a landmark 

in Whitesburg 

since 1969. 

A Saturday jam 

at Appalshop. 

Photos courtesy of Appalshop 

Appalshop 

In 1968, desperate for relief from the 

images of the Vietnam War, the nation 

was riveted by photos of the young 

Bobby Kennedy visiting with residents of 

Kentucky’s Appalachian region on their 

front porches. That same year a VISTA 

volunteer came to Whitesburg as part of 

the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity’s 

War on Poverty to teach local teenagers 

how to operate film and audio equipment for the purpose of 

finding work outside of Appalachia. The program was part of a 

national media training project focused on youth in economically 

impoverished communities, mostly in inner-city neighborhoods. 

But the Whitesburg participants had a different goal. Rather 

than leaving their rural homes for better opportunities, the 

students wanted to document the people and activities 

around their community. When federal funding for the 

project ended, Appalshop was born and grew into the multidisciplinary 

center it is today. t 

79

80 

Whitesburg(cont.) 

Cozy Corner 

127 Main St. 

606.633.9637 

www.cozycornercrafts.com 

Kentucky is well-known for 

quilting traditions, a fact that 

Josephine Richardson recognized 

after moving to eastern Kentucky 

from the northeast in the late 

1960s. “Women made beautiful 

hand-sewn quilts but had 

no place to sell them,” said 

Josephine. To solve the problem, 

she opened the Cozy Corner 

in 1973. 

Josephine Richardson, 

owner of the Cozy Corner 

in Whitesburg, displays a 

book for sale. 

The store offers quilts—the 

main draw—along with crafts, 

recordings, books and food 

products based on eastern 

Kentucky traditions. While there, 

visit the adjoining Courthouse 

Café to enjoy entrées made 

from local produce as well as 

homemade soups and desserts. 

Breaks Interstate Park on 

the Kentucky-Virginia border 

boasts the deepest gorge east 

of the Mississippi River.

“Diverse, 

fierce, richly 

rooted in 

what’s left of 

its old-growth 

heritage…” 

82 

Literary Arts in Eastern Kentucky 

In eastern Kentucky, Cherokee chants, verses 

from the King James, British ballads, folk tunes that 

miners brought from all over the world, labor songs, 

hymns, stories handed down—all combine to form a 

distinctive vein of literature. 

Historically, Appalachia has been defined 

from the outside. Central Kentucky writer James 

Lane Allen called it “the other Kentucky” in 1866. 

John Fox Jr. followed suit, and in works such as 

“Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback” and The 

Trail of the Lonesome Pine, respectively, the two writers 

helped create the stereotype of the ignorant, feuding 

mountaineer, contrasting that image with unspoiled 

nature and the innocent damsel. As poet Jim Wayne 

Miller writes in “The Brier Sermon,” outsiders said, 

“You’re right from the heart of America” and “You’re 

the worst part of America.” 

Coal- and timber-rich, the region was opened 

up when the railroads came in the late 1800s. Soon, 

corporations owned most of the mineral deposits. 

World War I craved coal and accelerated the change 

from subsistence farming to jobs owned by outside 

George Ella Lyon 

industry, tying the region to the rollercoaster of boom 

and bust it has ridden ever since. Mining families’ 

struggle to survive by unionizing is embodied in 

the songs of Aunt Molly Jackson (“Hungry, Ragged 

Blues”) and Florence Reece (“Which Side Are You 

On?”, 1931). 

Non-natives Lucy Furman and Ann Cobb began 

to change the outsiders’ view of Appalachia when 

they wrote about their work at Hindman Settlement 

School. In Furman’s Mothering on Perilous (1913) 

and Cobb’s Kinfolks (1922), mountain people were 

portrayed more accurately. 

The real shift came, however, with the poetry 

and novels of James Still, Jesse Stuart and Harriette 

Arnow, all mountain born. In such work as River 

of Earth, The Thread That Runs So True and The Dollmaker, 

we began, as Miller says, to “send out our own 

dispatches,” depicting the plight of a people caught 

between agrarian and industrial values. Billy C. Clark 

chronicles this conflict in A Long Row to Hoe (1960). 

Ballad-collector and singer-songwriter Jean Ritchie 

also expresses this tension in songs like “Black

Waters” and “The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore” 

and in Singing Family of the Cumberlands (1955). In 1962, 

Harry Caudill examined the long-term results of 

absentee ownership in Night Comes to the Cumberlands. 

Building on the work of Still, Arnow and Stuart 

were Loyal Jones, whose interests include religion, 

humor and music in the mountains, and Gurney 

Norman, the current Kentucky poet laureate. A coal 

miner’s son, Norman brought 1960s psychedelic 

soul-searching and environmental concerns back to 

his homeplace in his novel Divine Right’s Trip, published 

in The Whole Earth Catalog in 1971. Norman has 

remained a spokesman for the survival of his place. 

He has also nurtured new generations of writers and 

been vital to the Appalachian Writers Workshop, 

founded by Al Stewart and held each summer at 

Hindman Settlement School. 

It was Norman who published Frank X Walker’s 

Affrilachia (2000), and Walker who helped found 

the Affrilachian Poets movement, which includes 

important writers Crystal Wilkinson (Water Street) and 

Nikki Finney (Rice). 

Among other writers who have taught at Hindman 

are Kentucky Poets Laureate Jim Wayne Miller (The Brier 

Poems) and Lillie Chaffin (World of Books); Silas House 

(Clay’s Quilt); Chris Offutt (Kentucky Straight) and Chris 

Holbrook (Hell and Ohio); Lee Howard (Harvest of Fire); 

Anne Shelby (Appalachian Studies); Leatha Kendrick 

(Second Opinion); George Ella Lyon (Back); Marie Bradby 

(More Than Anything Else); Paul Brett Johnson (Fearless 

Jack); and Karen McElmurray (Surrendered Child). 

Poets Al Stewart and Quentin Howard 

strengthened the region’s literature by founding 

Appalachian Heritage (1973) and Wind (1971) 

magazines. Appalachian Heritage continues, and 

Wind has become a publishing company whose 

editor, Charlie Hughes, also writes the online Kentucky 

Literary Newsletter. Kate Larken’s MotesBooks is also 

an important force in the region. 

Many anthologies feature eastern Kentucky 

writing, among them Motif (ed. Worthington), We All 

Live Downstream (ed. Howard) and Missing Mountains 

(ed. Mason, Johannsen and Taylor-Hall). The latter 

two present writers and photographers speaking 

out against the devastation caused by mountaintop 

removal coal mining. 

Diverse, fierce, richly rooted in what’s left of its 

old-growth heritage, the literary culture of eastern 

Kentucky continues to flourish. t 

83

84 

© Guy Mendes. Courtesy of Institute 193 

Creative Nonfiction 

Selected work: 

Night Comes to the 

Cumberlands: A Biography of a 

Depressed Area (1962) 

The Mountain, the Miner and 

the Lord and Other Tales from a 

Country Law Office (1980) 

Harry Caudill 

(1922 – 1990) 

Born in Whitesburg, Ky. 

Appalachian historian and social critic Harry Caudill’s 

Night Comes to the Cumberlands is generally credited with 

sparking the creation in 1964 of the Appalachian Regional 

Commission, a federal agency to assist Kentucky 

and 12 other states in the Appalachian Mountains. 

Caudill went on to write nine books, 50 magazine articles and over 

80 newspaper articles. Kentucky Historian Thomas D. Clark spoke of 

Caudill’s voice as being one of the most important in Kentucky’s history. 

(Source: The Kentucky Encyclopedia)

Photo by Curt Richter 

Fiction 


Clay’s Quilt (2001) 

A Parchment of Leaves (2002) 

The Coal Tattoo (2004) 

Something’s Rising (2009) 

Eli the Good (2009) 

Silas House 

(1971 – ) 

Born in Corbin, Ky.; lived much of his life in Lily, Ky.; currently resides 

in Berea, Ky. 

Silas House is the nationally bestselling author of four novels, a book 

of nonfiction and two plays. His lyrical prose typically focuses on the 

interaction among family members and their relationship with the nature 

that surrounds them. His work has twice been named a finalist for the 

Southern Book Critics Circle Prize and has won the Fiction Prize from 

the National Society of Arts and Letters. He has also been awarded the 

Appalachian Book of the Year and is a two-time winner of the Kentucky 

Novel of the Year. For his environmental activism, he was awarded the 

2008 Helen Lewis Award for Commmunity Service. 

A musician, House is one of Nashville’s most in-demand press kit writers, 

having penned the bios of Kris Kristofferson, Lucinda Williams, Tim 

O’Brien, LeAnn Womack, Marshall Chapman and many others. He has 

spent his entire life in eastern Kentucky and currently lives in Berea 

where he is the Chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College. 

(Source: Pines PR, 2010; “A Country Boy Can Surmise,” a blog by Silas House) 

85

86 

Photo courtesy of photographer Ann W. Olson 



Father Time and the Day Boxes 

(1985) 

Catalpa (1993) 

Mother to TIgers (2003) 

Borrowed Children (1999) 

Don’t You Remember? (2007) 

With a Hammer for My Heart 

(2008) 

Back: Poems (2010) 

George Ella Lyon 

(1949 – ) 

Born in Harlan, Ky.; currently resides in Lexington, Ky. 

George Ella Lyon has long been an authentic and eloquent voice of the 

southern Appalachian Mountains. She has published books of poetry 

and short stories, a memoir and numerous books for children and young 

adults. She credits her mountain background and a childhood home full 

of music and words for making her a natural writer and storyteller. 

Lyon received degrees from Centre College in Danville, Ky., the University 

of Arkansas and Indiana University, where she wrote her dissertation on 

Virginia Woolf. She has taught at Centre College, Transylvania University 

and Indiana University, among others. She travels extensively as a 

teacher and promoter of writing. 

Lyon is also a musician and activist who lends her talents to various efforts 

focused on preserving the beauty and culture of her eastern Kentucky 

homeland and promoting justice and peace around the world. She lives in 

Lexington with her husband, musician and composer Steve Lyon. 

(Source: The Kentucky Anthology)

Daddy called the Walkman 

his play-pretty and he loved it 

like he loved the radio 

that sang him to sleep. 

(Mother listened to talk 

shows. They had 

pillow speakers.) He loved 

the radio like he loved 

the hi-fi with Mario Lanza’s 

heart breaking in his voice 

or the Beatles looping “Let 

It Be” on the eight-track 

like he loved my brother 

always at the spinet and later 

WITH A SONG IN HIS HEART 

the grand piano striking 

heart-sparks from Rachmaninoff 

or “Rock of Ages” or giving us 

cascading “Autumn Leaves” 

the way he loved to drive 

around just him and me 

Sunday afternoons singing 

“Barbara Allen.” In that 

scarlet town where I was 

born music was our dwelling. 

O Daddy, I am leaning 

on those everlasting arms. 

—George Ella Lyon 

87

88 

Fiction 


Divine Right’s Trip (1972) 

Kinfolks (1977) 

Gurney Norman 

(1937 – ) 

Grew up in many small towns in eastern Kentucky, but 

primarily in Allais near Hazard, Ky. 

Kentucky poet laureate (2009–2010) Gurney Norman earned 

a degree at the University of Kentucky before attending Stanford 

University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow along with three 

other Kentuckians—Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall and Ed 

McClanahan. In the mid-1960s he edited the Hazard Herald and began 

writing short stories that would eventually be published as Kinfolks. 

One of the major influences on Norman’s fiction has been the skilled 

craftsmanship of Appalachian author James Still. By 1968 Norman was 

back in California working on the Whole Earth Catalog. His first and most 

famous novel, Divine Right’s Trip, was originally published in the margins of 

the catalog. 

Norman is currently Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University 

of Kentucky. 

(Sources: Gurney Norman, 2010, and The Kentucky Anthology)

VISION 

Face down in dark water, I see ancient ferns, tall as 

tipples a million years ago, beneath the sea. As the water 

lightens, I see a firmament arise, a lovely wilderness of 

plains and valleys and mountains, with creeks flowing 

in the valleys, past woods and meadows, past bottom 

land where willows grow, and sycamore, and muskrats 

in their holes and turtles in the mud and kingfishers 

swooping low across the water as the sun goes down, 

filling the sky with orange and purple light. 

The water is amber-colored now. I see minnows in it. 

I see a perch swim by. I see brilliant pebbles on the 

bottom, and green waving grass beneath the water. I 

see a sandbar reaching out from the shore. My feet sink 

into it. Planted there, I rise from the water like a tree, 

a flowering shrub with gnarled branches, thick with 

leaves, adorned by blossoms, white as clouds, moist 

with the dew of a brand new April evening. 

—Gurney Norman 

89

90 

Photo courtesy of Chris Offutt 

Fiction, screenwriting 


Kentucky Straight (1992) 

The Same River Twice (1993) 

The Good Brother (1997) 

Out of the Woods (1999) 

No Heroes (2002) 

Chris Offutt 

(1958 – ) 

Born in Haldeman, Ky. 

Chris Offutt grew up in Haldeman in eastern Kentucky and graduated from 

Morehead State University. Although he has lived all over the country, all 

of his work is either set in Kentucky or is about people from Kentucky. He 

is the author of two short story collections, a novel and two memoirs. His 

stories are included in many textbooks and anthologies and his books are 

taught at universities and high schools throughout the country. 

A recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts and Lannan 

Foundation fellowships, Offutt has also received awards from the American 

Academy of Arts and Letters and the Whiting Foundation, as well as 

a fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. He was named one of the 

best young American fiction writers by Granta magazine. 

Offutt is an executive story editor for HBO’s True Blood and co-producer and 

writer for Showtime’s Weeds, as well as executive producer and creator of 

Tough Trade, a television show for Epix. 

(Source: Chris Offutt, 2010)

Photo courtesy of the Hindman 

Settlement School Archives 



River of Earth (1940) 

The Wolfpen Poems (1986) 

Pattern of Man (1986) 

James Still 

(1906 – 2001) 

Spent most of his life in Litt Carr, Ky. 

Still’s work is part of the literary flowering in the American 

South during the late 1920s and early 1930s 

that included Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner and 

Kentuckians Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Jesse Stuart, 

Harriette Simpson Arnow, Caroline Gordon, Allen 

Tate, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. 

Though born in Alabama, Still came to Kentucky in 1930 to work as a librarian 

at the Hindman Settlement School near the forks of Troublesome 

Creek in Knott County, and remained in Kentucky for the rest of his life. 

Still draws on everyday experiences and observations for his poems, stories 

and novels. Even when writing stories and novels, Still is primarily a 

poet. His novel, River of Earth, is considered an American Classic. James 

Still served as Kentucky poet laureate from 1995–1996. 


91

92 

Photo courtesy of the Jesse Stuart Foundation 

Fiction, Poetry, 



Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow 

(1934) 

The Thread That Runs So True 

(1949) 

Jesse Stuart 

(1906 – 1984) 

Born near Greenup, Ky. 

Stuart began writing stories and poems about people of Kentucky 

while still a college student. His published stories—in magazines 

and in book form—number more than 500. Stuart also published 

more than a dozen novels and autobiographical works. 

By the end of the 1930s Stuart had served as a teacher in Greenup County’s 

one-room schools and as high school principal and county school 

superintendent. These experiences served as the basis for his autobiographical 

book The Thread that Runs So True, called by the president of the 

National Education Association “the best book on education written in the 

last 50 years.” 

Stuart was designated poet laureate of Kentucky in 1954 and was made 

a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1961. He was nominated 

for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1977. 


Excerpt from The Thread That Runs So True 

Seldom if ever did one of my Lonesome Valley 

pupils stay out of school because he wanted to. He 

stayed out of school usually for one of three reasons: 

he was sick; he had to help harvest the crops; he 

didn’t have sufficient clothes, shoes, or books. In 

September the tobacco ripened and many of my 

pupils had to stay home and help with tobacco 

cutting and hauling to the barn. The cane ripened, 

too, in September and it had to be stripped, topped, 

cut, hauled to the mill, and the juice pressed from it 

and boiled into sorghum molasses.… Potatoes had 

to be dug. Corn had to be cut. September was a 

busy time in Lonesome Valley, where the men of this 

rugged American earth eked a bare subsistence for 

themselves and their families. 

My attendance was down considerably in 

September. There wasn’t an attendance officer to 

see why they didn’t come to school. If the pupil 

went, it was all right. If he didn’t, it was all right too. 

It was a land of freedom and work.… 

In October my attendance grew. And to show you 

that my pupils loved to come to school, many came 

thinly clad and barefooted, after the white frosts had 

fallen and had blanketed the frozen land. For the 

farmers hadn’t sold their tobacco crops yet.… Many 

times I saw the red spots on the white frost from the 

bleeding little bare feet of those who came to school 

regardless of shoes. I couldn’t buy shoes for them. 

Not on my salary and in my circumstances. 

But for one little boy and girl, whose father was 

serving a sentence in the federal penitentiary for 

converting his corn into moonshine whiskey, I did 

buy shoes. No one knew I bought them. Their 

mother, with another child on the way, was fighting a 

brave battle to keep her children and home together. 

I had lived all my life in a community where these 

things happened. When I saw blood on the snow 

from this moonshiner’s children coming to my 

school, it did something to me. I wanted to fight for 

them harder than I had ever fought Guy Hawkins. 

—Jesse Stuart 

93

94 

North 

Central 

Region

North central Kentucky is the bustling commercial heart of the state 

and includes the densely populated “Golden Triangle” that reaches 

from Covington to Lexington to Louisville. It is also home to the beautiful 

Bluegrass region and its iconic horse farms, rolling green pastures and 

miles of white and black horse fences. Outlying areas, typically rural, 

are marked by picturesque towns with historic homes and striking 

architecture. A number of communities that originally blossomed as 

trading posts and transportation centers dot the Ohio River on the 

northern border of the region. 

Mother of God, 

acrylic on canvas, 

by Mike Maydak 

of Covington, Ky. 

The region’s cities have benefited from immigrant populations that 

wove their unique heritages into the cultural fabric. Today, the arts 

thrive in these dynamic environments where curiosity breeds creativity, 

and you’ll find ample opportunities to indulge in a variety of arts 

experiences. t 

95

96 

Fiddle Traditions in 

Northeastern Kentucky 

Geography has a strong influence on culture. 

Traveling east from Covington along the Ohio 

River, you’ll come to the Appalachian foothills, an 

area home to a distinct style of fiddle music. Early 

German and French settlers brought 

with them European instruments 

and music, which evolved over time. 

Scholars have collected hundreds 

of tunes from old-time northeastern 

Kentucky fiddle masters, including 

Bob Prater, Raymond Meadows, 

Gorden Whitley, Joe Stamper, Charley 

Kinney and Buddy Thomas. 

Roger Cooper made it his mission to learn 

all he could from the traditional fiddlers in 

his native Lewis County. In the late 1970s, 

he began winning fiddle contests all over 

the region, and is considered by most to be 

the best representative of this musical form. 

In addition to Cooper, members of the string 

band Kentucky Wild Horse— Paul David Smith, 

John Harrod and Jesse Wells—have become 

living resources for the fiddle traditions of earlier 

generations from this region. t 

Photo courtesy of Kentucky Wild Horse 

The music of 

Kentucky Wild 

Horse (left) 

and Roger 

Cooper (below) 

represents 

Kentucky fiddle 

traditions at their 

best. 

Photo courtesy of Roger Cooper

What’s a Luthier? 

Music traditions and musical communities in 

Kentucky are often built around stringed instruments 

such as guitars, banjos, fiddles, dulcimers and 

mandolins. These instruments are made and kept in 

top shape by specialty artists known as luthiers. 

Travelers can meet many of these artists and 

examine their craftsmanship firsthand, especially in 

the north central region. Among the area’s wellknown 

shops are Warren A. May Woodworker in 

Berea, the Mize Violin Shop in Lexington, Currier’s 

Music World in Richmond and RS Guitarworks in 

Winchester. 

The Kentucky Folklife Program conducted a 

statewide study of luthiers that resulted in a traveling 

exhibit, “Made to be Played: Traditional Art of 

Kentucky Luthiers.” 

To find out where you can see this exhibit, visit 

http://artscouncil.ky.gov/Luthier/Luthier_Schedule.htm. t 

Donna and 

Lewis Lamb, 

award-winning 

luthiers from 

central Kentucky. 

Photo courtesy of Donna and Lewis Lamb 

97

98 

Berea 

Appalachian Fireside Gallery 

126 Main St. 

859.986.9013 

www.berea.com/where-to-shop 

Located in the former Berea Bank 

& Trust Building, Appalachian 

Fireside Gallery offers traditional 

Appalachian crafts made by 

members of the Appalachian 

Fireside Industries. This mountain 

co-operative began in the 1960s 

as part of the Save The Children 

organization. 

Berea Arts Council 

116 Main St. 

859.985.9317 

www.bereaartscouncil.org 

The Berea Arts Council’s goal is to 

connect the community through 

all forms of art. Programming 

includes visual art competitions 

and exhibits, workshops, literary 

readings, garden tours, public art 

projects and summer camps. 

Berea College Bookstore 

108 Main St. 

859.985.3197 

www.berea.bkstr.com 

Ken Gastineau casts a pewter 

item at his studio in Berea. 

The bookstore offers author 

readings and discussions as well 

as book signings. 

Gastineau Jewelers 

135 N. Broadway St. 

859.986.9158 

www.gastineaustudio.com 

Photo courtesy of Ken Gastineau 

Ken and Sallie Gastineau offer 

a full line of hand-cast, leadfree 

pewter jewelry and small 

decorative household items made 

exclusively in their open studio in 

the heart of Old Town Berea.

Jamming on the Porch at the 

Berea Train Station 

908 N. Broadway 

859.986.2540 

This weekly Thursday night jam 

is hosted by Governor’s Awardwinning 

folk artists Lewis and 

Donna Lamb. Participants sit in 

a circle, and everyone gets the 

opportunity to lead a song. 

Kentucky Artisan Center 

at Berea 

200 Artisan Way 

859.985.5448 

www.kentuckyartisancenter.ky.gov 

The Kentucky Artisan Center at 

Berea is a state-run facility that 

promotes and sells the largest 

selection of handmade products 

Kristal Kokinda 

works with clay at 

the Kentucky Artisan 

Center at Berea. 

from Kentucky’s most talented 

residents, as well as books, 

music and Kentucky Proud food 

products. The Kentucky Artisan 

Center Café and Grill offers local 

favorites cooked up daily. 

Photo courtesy of Kristal Kokinda 

99

100 

Berea 

Being labeled the “Folk Arts and Crafts Capital of 

Kentucky” is not exactly an easy title to live up to. 

But the small town of Berea, approximately an hour 

south of Lexington, wears it well. 

The cornerstone of this 

community is, without a doubt, 

Berea College, founded in 

1855 by an abolitionist minister 

as a model for educating 

men and women of all races 

from the Appalachian region. 

In the late 1800s, growing 

national interest in the culture 

and traditions of Appalachia by 

writers, academics, missionaries 

and teachers led Berea College 

President William Frost to take 

traditional coverlets—offered by 

students in exchange for tuition— 

on a fundraising trip north. 

Frost saw, in the handcrafted coverlets, the potential 

for preserving an artistic tradition and—at the same 

time—developing a new market for Appalachian 

crafts. “Fireside Industries,” Berea’s student craft 

business, began in 1883. Today over 200 students 

and craft professionals in the community 

Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Artisan Center at Berea 

A special exhibit of 

kiln-formed glass 

is displayed at the 

Kentucky Artisan 

Center at Berea.

produce weaving, woodcraft, needlecraft, ceramics, 

broomcraft and wrought iron that is marketed on 

an international level. Campus walking tours of the 

student craft industries are available through the 

Berea College Visitors Center in College Square. 

With its graceful white columns and airy verandas, 

stately Boone Tavern sits at the end of College 

Square. This landmark recently underwent extensive 

renovations to become the first Leadership in Energy 

and Environmental Design (LEED) certified hotel 

in Kentucky. The award-winning restaurant within 

the hotel continues to serve traditional favorites and 

exciting reinterpretations of Southern cuisine. 

As a testament to the interwoven relationship 

between town and college, in 1961 Berea College 

helped form the Kentucky Guild of Artists and 

Craftsmen. The guild is Kentucky’s oldest statewide 

visual art and craft organization and continues 

to attract thousands of visitors annually to Indian 

Fort Theatre for its Guild Fall Fair during the first 

weekend in October. 

Conveniently accessible to I-75, the Kentucky 

Artisan Center at Berea has a 25,000-square-foot 

retail and exhibition gallery featuring only Kentuckymade 

products. The center has welcomed over 

1.5 million visitors since opening in 2003. Whether 

in an exhibit or in the shop, the finely-crafted works 

on display are accompanied by information about 

the artisans and the materials they use to create 

their work. Regional cuisine at reasonable prices is 

available at the center’s café. 

Today, artists and businesspeople operate over 

40 shops and studios in the town, and Berea has 

become a thriving community of artists, students, 

and progressive-minded individuals committed 

to community, creativity, social justice and 

environmental responsibility. Fittingly the city has 

adopted the slogan, “Where art’s alive every day.” t 

101

102 

Berea (cont.) 

Log House Craft Gallery 

200 Estill St. 

859.985.3220 

www.berea.edu/studentcrafts/lhcg 

Log House Craft Gallery is the 

premier showplace for Berea 

College Student Craft Industries 

as well as fine craft from other 

regional artists. The gallery’s 

name comes from its original 

log structure, which adjoins the 

original Weaver’s Cottage, built in 

1893. 

Robie Books 

307 Chestnut St. 

859.228.0499 

www.berea.com/where-to-shop 

Top Drawer Gallery 


859.985.2907 

www.topdrawergallery.com/Default.htm 

Top Drawer Gallery is owned and 

operated by Terry Fields, the 

former director of woodworking 

for the Berea College Student 

Craft Industries. His gallery 

features handmade furniture and 

fine crafts from the region. 

Warren A. May Woodworker 

110 Center St. 

859.986.9293 

http://www.warrenamay.com/ 

Warren has made over 15,000 

dulcimers since 1972. 

Covington 

Behringer-Crawford Museum 

1600 Montague Road 

Devou Park 

859.491.4003 

www.bcmuseum.org 

Opened in 1950, the Behringer- 

Crawford Museum serves as a 

regional cultural center for the 

northern Kentucky area. The 

museum’s collection contains 

thousands of objects, artifacts, 

documents, photographs, 

textiles, paintings and sculpture 

representing 450 million years 

of history, art and culture as 

viewed through the lens of 

transportation. Visitors enjoy 

hands-on, interactive exhibits and

activities in a newly expanded 

and renovated 20,000-squarefoot 

facility. 

Carnegie Visual & 

Performing Arts Center 

1028 Scott Blvd. 

859.491.2030 

www.thecarnegie.com 

The largest performing arts 

center in northern Kentucky, the 

Carnegie offers a year-round slate 

of local and touring presentations. 

In addition, for over 30 years 

the Carnegie Galleries have 

been dedicated to showcasing 

the best of local and regional 

artists, featuring cutting-edge 

contemporary art and primitive 

folk art. 

103

104 

Experience Covington 

Covington is home to a thriving arts 

community, one-of-a kind architecture, 

tight-knit neighborhoods, wonderful food 

traditions and some truly fascinating stories. 

When the city of Covington was awarded a 

Preserve America grant to create walking 

and driving tours, the residents took an 

innovative approach based on the unique 

character of their city. Collaborating with 

the public history program at Northern 

Kentucky University (NKU), the Center for 

Great Neighborhoods of Covington and the 

Kentucky Folklife Program of the Kentucky 

Arts Council and the Kentucky Historical 

Society, they asked local people to identify 

points of interest (historic, modern, kitschy 

and otherwise). They then enlisted Kentucky 

community scholars and NKU students to 

conduct oral history interviews with people 

who owned businesses, lived in interesting 

homes and frequented the historic and 

cultural sites, with the idea that the

esidents’ stories are as amazing as the sites where 

they occurred. 

The result was Experience Covington, an interactive, 

web-based tour of historical landmarks and places 

of interest in Covington. Visitors can choose from 

six themed tours to experience the rich heritage 

of Covington. They include the Faith Tour, Arts 

and Culture Tour, Historic Tour, Architecture Tour, 

Neighborhood Tour and Unexpected Covington Tour. 

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also design 

your own tour by picking individual sites. The 

website also features a full calendar of events and 

a comment page to share your own Covington 

experience with future users. 

There are many ways to enjoy Experience Covington. 

If you have an mp3 player, you can print out driving/ 

walking directions and upload tours or individual 

You can’t miss the clock tower 

on Covington’s MainStrasse. 

sites to your device from the website: 

http://www.experiencecovington.com. You can also buy 

a pre-programmed device at the interactive kiosk at 

the Kenton County Public Library in Covington. 

Try the goetta (a traditional food) or visit the 

spaceship house (a not-so-traditional house). 

Whatever you do, don’t leave Covington without 

hearing from the people who call Covington home. t 

Children romp along 

the mural at the 

Frank Duveneck Arts 

and Cultural Center 

in Covington. 

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Frank Duveneck 

Frank Duveneck, a world renowned realist painter known for his 

dark palette and slashing brushwork, was born in Covington in 

1848 and trained in Munich, Germany, for many years. Duveneck, 

and such protégés as Willis Seaver Adams and William Merritt 

Chase, departed from the traditions of the Hudson River School, 

where romantic landscapes were 

the standard. These young artists 

began to paint more freely, with 

bolder strokes and colors, than 

fellow Americans who stringently 

followed the Hudson River 

traditions. 

The Whistling Boy (1872), 

oil on canvas, 

by Frank Duveneck 

Duveneck’s paintings can be seen 

in the Metropolitan Museum of 

Art in New York City, the National 

Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., 

and the Kenton County Library in 

Covington. t 

Courtesy of the Cincinnati Art Museum 

(gift of the artist) 

Covington (cont.) 

The Frank Duveneck Arts and 

Cultural Center 

1232 Greenup St. 

859.491.3942 

www.duveneckcenter.org 

The Duveneck Center is at the 

center of Covington’s thriving 

cultural district, offering yearround 

programming highlighting 

cultural diversity and works by 

established as well as aspiring 

artists. The community arts 

center occupies the former 

Klingenberg Hardware Store built 

on the site of Squire Duveneck’s 

late 19th-century summer beer 

garden. The nearby house and 

studio showcase his life and his 

contributions as a founder of the 

Cincinnati Art Academy.

The Northern Kentucky 

Brotherhood Singers 

For many Kentuckians, singing in church begins 

in childhood and continues through life as an 

expression of their spiritual beliefs. Black and white 

congregations practice very different gospel styles 

but, over time, each has influenced the other. 

In the urban neighborhoods of northern Kentucky, 

jubilee-style a cappella gospel music was 

initially associated with such groups as the Dixie 

Hummingbirds, the Golden Gate Quartet and 

the Soul Stirrers. Today, the Northern Kentucky 

Brotherhood Singers are among the best-known 

practitioners of this intricate and emotional four-part 

harmony style. 

The Brotherhood began in the Ninth Street Baptist 

Church in Covington, one of the buildings along the 

experiencecovington.com Faith Tour, but the group 

now performs its spiritual and secular songs at 

venues around the world. The singers have appeared 

in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Switzerland, and at 

the 2008 National Folk Festival in Butte, Mont. In 

2009, they performed in Washington, 

D.C., at the Kennedy Center and 

the Library of Congress as part 

of the American Folklife Center’s 

Homegrown concert series. 

In 2009, the 

Northern Kentucky 

Brotherhood Singers 

performed at the 

Library of Congress in 

Washington, D.C. 

The Northern Kentucky 

Brotherhood’s songs include 

elements of jazz, rock and 

doo-wop. In songs like 

“Mary Don’t You Weep” 

and “Wade in the Water,” 

the singers replace words 

with sounds, effectively 

turning their voices into 

instruments. Visit 

www.nkybrotherhood.com for more information, 

audio and upcoming shows. t 


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Danville 

Community Arts Center 


859.236.4054 

www.communityartscenter.net 

The Community Arts Center is a 

non-profit arts education facility 

for dance, drama, music and 

visual arts. 

Ex Astris, the 14-foot brass sculpture by Louisville 

artist Tom Lear, greets visitors to the 

Norton Center for the Arts in Danville. 

Norton Center for the Arts 

Centre College 

600 W. Walnut St. 

877.448.7469 

www.nortoncenter.com 

Located on the campus of Centre 

College, the Norton Center is 

an internationally recognized 

performing arts center that 

hosts a series of outstanding 

guest artists as well as touring 

productions and symphony 

orchestras each year.

Elizabethtown 

Historic State Theater Complex 

209 Dixie Highway W. 

270.982.3400 

www.historicstatetheater.org 

Originally built as a movie theater 

in 1942, the Historic State 

Theater Complex now includes 

the original movie house, a black 

box theater and a gallery. The 

complex hosts movies, concerts, 

plays, recitals, lectures and more. 

Falmouth 

Kincaid Regional 

Theatre Company 

500 Chapel St. 

859.654.2636 or 800.647.7469 

www.krtshow.com 

Kincaid Regional Theatre 

presents a spirited summer 

season of musicals and comedies 

alongside performance and 

educational opportunities for 

young people. 

Fort Thomas 

The Blue Marble 

1356 S. Fort Thomas Ave. 

859.781.0602 

http://site.booksite.com/5792 

The Blue Marble bookstore offers 

author readings and discussions 

as well as book signings. 

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Frankfort 

Capital Gallery of 

Contemporary Art 

314 Lewis St. 

502.223.2649 

www.ellenglasgow.com 

As the owner and director of 

Capital Gallery of Contemporary 

Art, Ellen Glasgow offers a 

sampling of her own paintings 

as well as the work of other 

significant Kentucky artists. 

Completely Kentucky 

237 W. Broadway St. 

502.223.5240 

www.completelykentucky.com 

Everything in Completely 

Kentucky is made by the 

An unusual bowl made by Kentucky Fusion 

found at Completely Kentucky in Frankfort. 

commonwealth’s finest artisans. 

All is available for purchase in a 

carefully restored 150-year-old 

building in the heart of downtown 

Frankfort. 

The Grand Theatre 

308 St. Claire St. 

502.352.7469 

www.grandtheatrefrankfort.org 

The historic Grand Theatre was 

built in 1911 as a vaudeville 

house, converted into a 

“modern” movie theater in 1941 

and re-opened its doors as a 

performance venue in 2009. The 

Grand hosts nationally acclaimed 

films, dance, music and theater. 

Stewart Home School 

1792 Store 

Kentucky Historical Society 

100 West Broadway St. 

502.564.1792 

Poor Richard’s Books 

233 West Broadway St. 

502.223.8018 

Poor Richard’s, owned by Lizz 

Taylor and former Kentucky Poet 

Laureate Richard Taylor, offers 


as well as book signings.

Glendale 

True Kentucky 


270.369.7850 

www.truekentucky.com 

True Kentucky offers creations 

from over 300 of Kentucky’s finest 

artists, along with books, music 

and specialty food products. 

Browsers will find racks of books to entertain 

their imaginations at Poor Richard’s in Frankfort, 

the shop of former Kentucky Poet Laureate Richard Taylor. 

Harrodsburg 

Ragged Edge 

Community Theatre 

111 S. Main St. 

859.734.2389 

www.raggededgetheatre.org 

Ragged Edge is dedicated 

to providing quality theater 

performances for and by the 

people of Mercer County and 

central Kentucky. 

Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill 

3501 Lexington Road 

800.734.5611 

www.shakervillageky.org 

The craft store at Shaker Village 

features fine handmade crafts 

demonstrating Shaker simplicity 

and high-quality craftsmanship. 

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Photo courtesy of Lewis Lamb 

Hodgenville 

Lincoln’s Loft 

25 Lincoln Square 

270.358.0124 

http://lincolnsloft.com 

Lincoln’s Loft offers author 

readings and signings, as well as 

art and craft programs for kids. 

Lewis Lamb proudly displays a 

resonator dulcimer he made. 

LaGrange 

Karen’s Book Barn and 

Java Stop 


502.222.0918 

http://karensbookbarn.com 

The bookstore sponsors a book 

club, author readings, book 

signings and writers’ seminars. 

Lancaster 

Lewis and Donna Lamb 

445 Lamb Road 

859.339.1522 

ldlamb@wildblue.net. 

Like many luthiers, this fatherand-daughter 

team works 

privately in their home shop. 

They were the recipients of the 

Kentucky Governor’s Award in the 

Arts for Folk Heritage in 2006.

Lexington Art League 

The Lexington Art League (LAL) intends to 

challenge our conventions and take us out 

of our comfort zones. It actively pursues 

that goal through thought-provoking and 

culturally significant exhibitions from local, 

regional and national artists. 

Its best known exhibition is the annual 

show entitled “Nude,” which typically 

features about 100 works celebrating 

the human form. The LAL began staging 

“Nude” more than two decades ago; now 

artists from the U.S. and abroad regularly 

submit more than 1,000 works in hopes of 

being represented. 

The organization also presents or sponsors 

other exhibits including the “LAL Open” and the 

AFB Art Fair at Woodland Park. This August fair, 

popular for more than 35 years, has been voted 

a Top 40 Fine Art & Design Show in the nation by 

Sunshine Artist magazine, a Top 20 Event by the 

Southeast Tourism Society and a Top 10 Festival 

by the Kentucky Tourism Council. 

The Loudoun 

House looks 

even more 

dramatic 

against 

a stormy 

backdrop. 

Photo courtesy of the Lexington Art League 

The LAL’s headquarters is a historic dwelling known 

as the Loudoun House, a castellated Gothic Revival 

villa containing six galleries. Its design includes 

turrets, towers and pointed window and door arches. 

It was the first such structure built in Kentucky and 

is one of only five in the American South. t 

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Lexington 

Ann Tower Gallery 

141 E. Main St., Suite 100 

859.425.1188 

www.anntowergallery.com 

The Ann Tower Gallery specializes 

in the exhibition and sale of 

contemporary fine art and folk art. 

Artique 

410 W. Vine St. 

859.233.1774 

161 Lexington Green Circle 

859.272.8802 

www.artiquegallery.com 

Representing over 1,000 

artists, Artique has offered fine 

contemporary American craft for 

sale for over 30 years. 

ArtsPlace 


859.255.2951 

www.lexarts.org 

For over 35 years, LexArts has 

promoted the arts in Central 

Kentucky by offering a variety 

of programs, services and 

grants to local artists and arts 

organizations. Through its 

management of ArtsPlace, 

LexArts provides space for 

artists and arts organizations to 

rehearse, perform and exhibit 

their work. 

Black Swan Books 

505 E. Maxwell St. 

859.252.7255 

www.blackswanbooks.net 

Black Swan Books offers author 


as book signings. 

Carnegie Center for 

Literacy & Learning 

251 W. Second St. 

859.254.4175 

www.carnegieliteracy.org 

Located in a historic Carnegie 

library building, the Carnegie 

Center for Literacy and Learning 

offers workshops for adults in 

world languages, computers, 

and writing; youth and family 

programs; after-school tutoring;

gallery exhibits; music and 

theatrical performances; and 

literary readings. The center is 

an active supporter of the literary 

arts, especially Kentucky authors. 

Downtown Arts Center 


859.225.0370 

www.lexarts.org 

The Downtown Arts Center, 

owned by the Lexington-Fayette 

Urban County Government, is 

home to a black box theater, Stoll 

Keenon Ogden City Gallery and 

the Ann Tower Gallery. 

Explorium of Lexington 

440 W. Short St. 

859.258.3253 

www.explorium.com 

The Explorium’s mission is 

to create a fun and dynamic 

hands-on learning environment 

that stirs the imagination and 

develops curiosity, with a focus 

on educating young people 

about cultural diversity and 

inspiring creativity through the 

arts. The Explorium supports an 

open art studio, Lexington’s only 

children’s art gallery, an art fair 

for young artists and cooperative 

educational programming for 

schools and their art clubs. 

Headley-Whitney Museum 

4435 Old Frankfort Pike 

859.255.6653 

www.headley-whitney.org 

The Headley-Whitney Museum 

is a decorative arts museum 

founded by prominent 20thcentury 

jewelry designer, George 

W. Headley, and nestled in the 

beautiful horse farm countryside 

just outside Lexington. The 

museum offers a permanent 

collection featuring jewelry, 

bibelots and mounted semiprecious 

stones. Don’t miss the 

whimsical shell grotto, a separate 

building whose interior is covered 

in thousands of shells, polished 

stones and coral. 

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Lexington (cont.) 

International Museum 

of the Horse 

Kentucky Horse Park 

4089 Iron Works Pkwy 

859.259.4232 

www.imh.org 

Showcasing the relationship 

between man and the horse 

throughout history, the museum 

offers contemporary art 

exhibitions featuring equine 

artists, permanent exhibitions 

about horse breeds and culture, 

and international exhibits. The 

new two-story Al-Marah wing 

showcases the Arabian, the 

world’s oldest breed of horse, 

and includes technologically 

enhanced interactive exhibits 

geared toward young visitors. 

The Black Stallion Experience is 

an area dedicated to the literary 

and cinematic magic of the 

most famous fictional horse ever 

created—Walter Farley’s 

The Black Stallion. 

Joseph-Beth Booksellers 

161 Lexington Green Circle 

859.273.2911 

www.josephbeth.com 

Lexington’s largest bookstore 

offers author readings and kids 

activities, as well as a delightful 

café (Brontë Bistro) with indoor 

and outdoor seating. 

Kentucky Theatre 


859.231.6997 

www.kentuckytheater.com 

Although the Kentucky Theatre 

operates as a full-time cinema, it 

also hosts a variety of live-stage 

performances. The nationally 

syndicated Woodsongs Old-Time 

Radio Hour is broadcast live 

weekly from the Kentucky Theatre 

stage.

Loudoun House 

Lexington Art League 

209 Castlewood Drive 

800.914.7990 

www.lexingtonartleague.org 

The Lexington Art League (LAL) 

envisions visual art as the lens 

through which central Kentucky 

will distinguish itself as a 

progressive, inclusive and vibrant 

region. Its most popular programs 

include exhibits at the historic 

Loudoun House and the annual 

Art Fair at Woodland Park. 

When the Lexington Children’s Theatre 

presented Go Dog Go, the dogs were 

energetic and highly entertaining. 

Lexington Children’s Theatre 


859.254.4546 

www.lctonstage.org 

Lexington Children’s Theatre, 

founded in 1939, is a 

professional, nonprofit company 

dedicated to providing quality 

plays for children. It offers a 

full season of productions and 

classes on three stages: The 

Theatre Mainstage, the Lexington 

Theatre Learning Stage and the 

historic Lexington Opera House. 

Touring productions and two 

satellite locations in eastern 

Kentucky allow families across 

the commonwealth to enjoy 

quality entertainment. 

Photo courtesy of 

photographer Larry 

Snipes and the Lexington 

Children’s Theatre 

Photo courtesy of photographer Eric Abele and 

the Lexington Children’s Theatre 

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Lexington Opera House 


859.233.4567 

www.lexingtonoperahouse.com 

With its plush velvet curtains, 

crystal chandeliers, grand 

stairway and queen’s boxes, the 

Lexington Opera House, listed on 

the National Register of Historic 

Places, transports visitors back 

to the time when Lexington 

was known as “the Athens of 

the West.” It hosts a number 

of national premieres of new 

plays and playwrights, supports 

many of the area’s finest ballet, 

opera and philharmonic artists, 

and presents touring Broadway 

shows, all enveloped in the grand 

elegance of the past. 

The elegance of the 

Lexington Opera 

House transcends 

all performances. 

Photos courtesy of Lexington Opera House

Living Arts & Science Center 

362 N. Martin Luther King Blvd. 

859.252.5222 

www.lasclex.org 

The Living Arts & Science Center 

is a family-friendly place to 

explore the relationship between 

art and science through exhibits 

and programs. 

Living Arts and Science Center 

Introduce the left side of your brain to the right side of your brain, 

and let them have a conversation. 

That’s what you can do at the Living Arts & Science Center 

(LASC), where children and families can explore these two 

disciplines—often thought to be at odds—in unique and 

innovative ways. 

The center maintains a gallery where professional artists present 

pieces that reveal art and science acting in harmony. The gallery 

also displays the work of student-artists. 

At Discovery Night on the first Thursday of the month, local 

artists or scientists lead visitors through hands-on activities. 

Past presentations include “Dogs on Patrol!,” which described a 

night with the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Division of Police 

Canine Unit, and “100% Earth Friendly Art!,” in which Anthony 

Roccanova, associate professor of architecture from the University 

of Kentucky, explored the subject of sustainable housing. For 

more information about LASC events and year-round classes, visit 

www.lasclex.org. t 

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Lyric Theatre 

300 E. 3rd St. 

Scheduled to reopen in 

September 2010 after extensive 

renovation, the Art Deco movie 

theater built in 1948 was a 

popular gathering spot for 

Lexington’s African-American 

community until 1963. In the 

1960s, it hosted live acts, 

including Count Basie, Sarah 

Vaughan and the Ink Spots. As 

a cultural center, the restored 

building will have a museum for 

sharing local African-American 

history, a 20-foot wall featuring 

local art with a theme of 

rebirth, and events that feature 

local artists. Members of the 

communities around the theater, 

in collaboration with professional 

artists, are creating a quilt with 

everyday fabric donated from 

area families. The quilt, which 

will be displayed in the lobby, 

will commemorate the theater’s 

history and cultural significance 

to the community. 

Mize Violin Shop 


859.253.9639 

Art Mize studied lutherie under 

the late J.B. Miller, a well-known 

violin specialist of the region. 

The Morris Book Shop 

408 Southland Drive 

859.276.0494 

www.morrisbookshop.com 

The Morris Book Shop offers 



New Editions Gallery 

807 Euclid Ave. 

859.266.2766 

www.neweditionsgallery.com 

Founded in 1988, New Editions 

Gallery is one of Lexington’s 

oldest fine art galleries, featuring 

contemporary artwork, jewelry 

and crafts.

The audience files out 

after a popular event at 

the Lyric Theatre in the 

early 1950s. 

Photo courtesy of the Lexington Herald-Leader 

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Singletary Center for the Arts 

405 Rose St. 

859.257.5030 

www.uky.edu/SCFA/ 

The Otis A. Singletary Center 

for the Arts is located on the 

University of Kentucky campus. 

The center hosts nearly 400 

events annually, including 

performances by the Lexington 

Philharmonic, and provides 

artistic space for international, 

national, regional, university and 

student performers, artists and 

speakers. 

University of Kentucky 

Art Museum 

405 Rose St. 

859.257.5716 

www.uky.edu/artmuseum 

The University of Kentucky Art 

Museum owns over 4,000 art 

treasures in all media. Selections 

from the museum’s holdings of 

works on paper and photographs 

are displayed on a rotating 

schedule. 

Louisville 

Actors Theatre of Louisville 


502.584.1205 

www.actorstheatre.org 

For over 40 seasons, Actors 

Theatre has produced 

internationally acclaimed 

performances, including the 

annual Humana Festival of New 

American Plays.

Actors Theatre of Louisville 

Actors Theatre of Louisville, the State Theatre of 

Kentucky, is a significant force in the history and 

future of the American stage. Each spring it hosts 

the Humana Festival of New American Plays, one 

of the premiere launching grounds for new work by 

American playwrights and a destination for theaterlovers 

and industry insiders alike. 

More than 400 plays have premiered at the Humana 

Festival, including Pulitzer Prize winners Crimes of 

the Heart, The Gin Game and Dinner with Friends. During 

its regular season, Actors offers an exciting mix of 

comedies, dramas, musicals, late-night and holiday 

fare alongside a robust education program. 

Actors, which was founded in 1964, resides in a 

National Historic Landmark located at the gateway to 

Louisville’s West Main Street corridor, and has been 

an anchor for revitalization in the city’s downtown 

area. One of the most prolific theaters in the nation, 

Actors offers more than 20 productions each year 

across its three performance spaces, and has 

received some of the highest 

awards bestowed on nonprofit 

producers, including a special 

Tony Award for Outstanding 

Regional Theatre. 

Mitchell Fain towers 

over the audience 

in Actors Theatre’s 

performance of 

Lookingglass Alice. 

Visitors can enjoy fine dining 

at Intermezzo, an on-site 

restaurant, or share a drink 

and light snacks in the lobbies 

and tour the theater’s art 

gallery. t 

Photo courtesy of photographer 

Harlan Taylor and Actors Theatre 

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Louisville (cont.) 

B. Deemer Gallery 

2650 Frankfort Ave. 

502.896.6687 

www.bdeemer.com 

The B. Deemer Gallery features 

original paintings on canvas and 

paper, watercolors, various types 

of hand-pulled artists’ prints, soft 

pastels, oil pastels and mixed 

media pieces. 

Carmichael’s Bookstore 

1295 Bardstown Road 

502.456.6950 


502.896.6950 

www.carmichaelsbookstore.com 

Carmichael’s Bookstore offers 



Glassworks 

815 W. Market St. 

502.584.4510 

www.louisvilleglassworks.com 

Glassworks is a multi-use 

facility in the heart of downtown 

Louisville dedicated to the art of 

glass. The facility includes three 

working glass studios, two glass 

galleries and a walk-in workshop 

and offers daily tours. 

Kaviar Forge and Gallery 


502.561.0377 

www.KaviarGallery.com 

Kaviar Forge and Gallery is a 

combination formal exhibition 

area and functional sculptural 

studio owned and operated by 

sculptor Craig Kaviar. A window in 

the gallery looks over the forging 

area of the studio, where visitors 

can often watch the artwork 

being made. Surrounding the 

studio and gallery is an outdoor 

sculpture garden.

Photos courtesy of Craig Kaviar 

Craig Kaviar of Kaviar Forge 

and Gallery works on a new 

piece of artwork. 

Stair railing by 

Kaviar Forge. 

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Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts 

In addition to drawing more than 400,000 people to hundreds of 

performances each year, the Kentucky Center for the Performing 

Arts in Louisville is a leader in promoting arts education and 

accessibility throughout the commonwealth. Each summer the 

Center hosts the Governor’s 

School for the Arts, which provides 

more than 200 students with an 

intensive three-week educational 

experience in nine disciplines, 

ranging from architecture to the 

literary and performing arts. 

Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Center 

for the Performing Arts 

The Center, dedicated in 1983 

as a public-private partnership, 

has been honored three times 

in recent years for its efforts to 

ensure that arts experiences are 

available and accessible to people 

with disabilities. It partners with 

the Kentucky Arts Council to 

share access techniques and best 

practices with arts venues across 

the state. t 


Kentucky Center for the 

Performing Arts 


502.562.0100 

www.kentuckycenter.org 

The Kentucky Center is 

Kentucky’s premier performing 

arts venue, with four performance 

spaces and a full calendar of 

touring shows and productions 

by some of the region’s leading 

companies, including the 

Louisville Orchestra, the Louisville 

Ballet, Kentucky Opera and 

Stage One Children’s Theatre. 

The upstairs black box theater 

presents a continuous schedule 

of productions by Louisville 

community and semi-professional 

performers.

Contemporary glass pieces 

from a recent exhibit in the 

Mary and Al Shands Gallery of the 

Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft 

in Louisville. 

Kentucky Museum of Art & Craft 


502.589.0102 

www.kentuckyarts.org 

The Kentucky Museum of Art & 

Craft celebrates traditional and 

functional art. Several exhibition 

galleries display handmade 

items—from folk art to furniture— 

that are available for purchase, 

and visitors can browse the 

award-winning gallery shop, 

which features the work of more 

than 200 regional artists. 

Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Museum of Art & Craft 

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Louisville Visual Art Association 

3005 River Road 

502.896.2146 

www.louisvillevisualart.org 

Chartered with the mission to 

“enhance the cultural life of the 

city,” the Louisville Visual Art 

Association has been a valuable 

resource to the area’s visual arts 

community since 1909. The 

association’s galleries feature 

Louisville-centric arts exhibitions 

and programming with hands-on 

learning opportunities for children 

of all ages. 

Open Blues/Jazz Band Jam 

Stevie Ray’s Blues Bar 


502.582.9945 

http://stevieraysbluesbar.com/ 

Visit Stevie Ray’s to hear great 

blues any night; take part in the 

jams on Tuesday nights. 

Pyro Gallery 


502.587.0106 

www.pyrogallery.com 

A cooperative gallery in the heart 

of downtown Louisville, Pyro 

features group and solo shows by 

its multi-disciplinarian members. 

A Reader’s Corner 

138 Breckenridge Lane 

502.897.5578 

www.areaderscorner.com 

A Reader’s Corner offers book 

signings and story time for 

children. 

Speed Art Museum 

2035 S. Third St. 

502.634.2729 

www.speedmuseum.org 

Established in 1927, the Speed 

Art Museum is Kentucky’s oldest 

and largest art museum with over 

13,000 pieces in its permanent 

collection. Its extensive holdings 

span 6,000 years from ancient 

Egyptian to contemporary art.

Originally consisting of a grand foyer, 

flower court and four galleries in the 

Beaux-Arts style, the Speed Art Museum 

has been expanded several times and 

now has more than 150,000 square feet 

of floor space. 

Swanson Reed Contemporary 

678 E. Market St. 

502.589.5466 

www.swansonreedgallery.com 

Swanson Reed Contemporary 

showcases contemporary 

national and regional artists 

with an emphasis on energetic 

and challenging works in video, 

conceptual art, performance and 

sculpture as well as installations, 

photographs and paintings. 

The Speed Art Museum 

The Speed Art Museum is Kentucky’s largest and 

oldest art museum with collections from around 

the world and across 6,000 years of history. 

Founded by Hattie Bishop Speed in honor of 

her late husband, Louisville businessman and 

philanthropist James Breckenridge Speed, the 

museum has always had a diverse scope, giving 

it both regional and international importance. 

Photo courtesy of the 

Speed Art Museum 

The museum houses distinguished collections of 

17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting, 18th-century French 

art, Renaissance and Baroque tapestries, significant pieces of 

contemporary American painting and sculpture, and African and 

Native American works. Among the many artists represented are 

Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Audubon, Whistler, Monet, Cezanne, 

Neel, Picasso, Warhol and Chagall. The Speed also displays 

paintings, sculpture, furniture and decorative arts by Kentucky 

artists. 

The museum, situated on the University of Louisville’s Belknap 

campus, offers a full calendar of family activities, adult lectures, 

concerts and public tours. t 

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Bernheim Forest 

In 1929, Isaac W. Bernheim, a German immigrant 

who became a famed whiskey distiller, established 

Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest as a 

haven for nature lovers, art lovers and those who 

appreciate both. 

Bernheim viewed the forest as an ideal venue for 

displaying high-quality art inspired by the natural 

world. As a result of a long-standing artist-inresidence 

program, Bernheim today is home to a 

permanent collection of sculptures and paintings 

placed around the grounds and adorning its public 

buildings. 

Environmental art pieces are nestled in the natural 

landscape, encouraging visitors to “hunt” for the 

treasures among the muses that inspired them. 

Bernheim’s diverse programs include classes and 

workshops, allowing visitors to have a hands-on arts 

experience emphasizing eco-education. 

Bernheim Forest, located in Clermont just south 

of Louisville, also offers picnic areas, year-round 

hiking and biking trails, geocaching and letterboxing 

adventures, fishing at scenic Lake Nevin, and a gift 

shop and Isaac’s Café located in the LEED Platinum 

Visitor Center. t 

Photo courtesy of Bernheim 

Arboretum and Research Forest 

© David Modica 

Top: Water management was carefully considered during the design of the 

LEED Platinum Visitor Center. Bottom: A sculpture by Paul Fields graces 

the park property. 

Photo courtesy of Bernheim 

Arboretum and Research Forest


21c Museum 


502.638.4923 

www.21cmuseum.org 

21c is North America’s first 

museum dedicated solely to 

the collecting and exhibiting of 

contemporary art from the 21st 

century. 

Contemporary architecture complements 

the contemporary art at 21c Museum 

in Louisville. 

Walden Theatre 

1123 Payne St. 

502.589.0084 

www.waldentheatre.org 

Founded in 1976, Walden 

Theatre produces a broad 

selection of plays both comedic 

and dramatic, classical and 

contemporary, performed by 

the young artists of its revered 

conservatory program. 

Photo courtesy of photographer Kenneth Hayden and 21c Museum 

Zephyr Gallery 

610 E. Market St. 

502.585.5646 

www.zephyrgallery.org 

Zephyr Gallery is the oldest 

cooperative, contemporary fine 

arts gallery in the region with 

a member base comprised of 

23 artists, who are frequently 

available to meet visitors. 

131

132 

The Washington Opera House 

is a hub of community activity 

in Maysville. 

Maysville 

Washington Opera House 

116 W. 2nd St. 

606.564.3666 

www.maysvilleplayers.net 

Home of the Maysville Players, 

the oldest continuously-running 

theater company in Kentucky, the 

Washington Opera House was 

built in 1898 on a site where two 

previous opera houses had stood. 

It was used as a movie theater 

from 1931–1960 and was bought 

by the Maysville Players in 1964. 

Photo courtesy of the city of Maysville and the 

Maysville-Mason County Convention & Visitors Bureau 

In 2003 it closed for a $4 million 

renovation and reopened in 

2006. In addition to regular 

dramatic performances, it is also 

used as a community gathering 

spot for meetings, community 

celebrations, weddings and 

even funerals. 

Maysville 

Strolling the streets of downtown 

Maysville, the architecture 

transports you to the golden era 

of this historic river community— 

the late 1800s. You’ll pass the 

Washington Opera House and 

the imposing Cox Building, a 

former Masonic lodge soon 

to become a thriving cultural 

center. But it’s the residential 

areas—handsome row houses 

climbing up the hill away from 

the river and stately homes 

along the tree-lined streets—that 

make you stop and wonder if 

you’re not somehwere else, 

perhaps along the delta of the 

Mississippi. 

Maysville has depended on the 

river since its earliest days— 

then known as the town of

Limestone—when it was a significant port on the 

Ohio River and an entry to the unexplored west. The 

engaging murals gracing the city’s floodwall relay 

its history, from buffalo trace 

to regional commercial center. 

Today the utility companies that 

generate power from the river 

are the foundation of Maysville’s 

economy. 

Ken Swinson captured Maysville 

perfectly in his painting, which 

is now used as a logo for the 

Maysville Cultural District. 

In recent years, various civic 

and arts leaders have worked 

tirelessly to refurbish and 

promote the city’s architectural 

heritage and strengthen the arts community. Just 

after the Washington Opera House’s extensive 

renovation, the Kentucky Gateway Museum Center 

opened in another historic downtown building. 

Photo courtesy of the city of Maysville and Maysville- 

Mason County Convention & Visitors Bureau 

The museum offers displays recounting regional 

history as well as the work of contemporary artists. 

Its collection of miniatures—elaborate multi-story, 

period-perfect miniature 

buildings with rooms precisely 

decorated with intricately 

rendered 1 /12-scale artwork 

and furnishings—is worldclass. 

The revitalized Second 

Street Mall has become a 

popular destination for outdoor 

concerts. Colorful banners, 

created by local artist Ken 

Swinson and representing 

various aspects of the 

Maysville community, beautify 

one of the brick commercial 

buildings edging the park. 

The most famous daughter 

of Maysville is Rosemary Clooney, acclaimed singer 

and actress of the mid-20th century and aunt 

of actor George Clooney. The Rosemary Clooney 

Festival in late September brings hundreds to 

continued… 

133

Courtesy of the city of Maysville and the Maysville-Mason County Convention & Visitors Bureau 

134 

Maysville (cont.) 

Maysville to enjoy concerts by national artists and 

celebrate the local culture. Many arts groups, 

including the Maysville Players, the Downing 

Performing Arts Academy and Rescue the Russell 

Theatre—the 1930s-era fanciful and ornate 

atmospheric movie theater where the world premiere 

of Rosemary Clooney’s first movie was shown— 

benefit from the proceeds of the festival. In honor 

of his aunt, George Clooney held the premiere of 

his 2008 film Leatherheads at the Washington Opera 

House in Maysville. 

History and literary buffs should take the short drive 

“over the hill” to the community of Washington to 

see the Harriett Beecher Stowe house. Washington 

also offers artisan shops and the annual Chocolate 

Festival. 

For a lighter side of Maysville’s history, don’t miss the 

coming-of-age stories of Ed McClanahan, who grew 

up in Maysville and nearby Brooksville. His stories 

Above: One of the banners that artist Ken Swinson 

created for Maysville’s Second Street Mall. 

capture the pride of the residents in their town and 

the personal vicissitudes of his hapless protagonist. t

McQuady 

Breckinridge Bluegrass Music 

Association Jam 

McQuady Volunteer Fire 

Department 

Contact: Frank McCollum 

Highway 105 

270.580.4796 

These Sunday afternoon jams 

at the McQuady Fire Station are 

open to musicians of all skill 

levels. 

Damselfly Gallery in Midway 

advertises its Kentucky-made items. 

Midway 

Damselfly Gallery 


859.494.8759 

www.damselflybeads.com 

Damselfly Gallery features fine 

art and craft from over 200 local 

artists in a variety of mediums. 

Historic Midway Museum Store 


859.846.4214 

http://midwaymuseumstore.com 

The store offers author readings 

and discussions as well as 

book signings and frequently 

showcases local artists. 

The Historic Midway Museum Store 

faces the railroad tracks that run 

down the middle of Main St. 

135

136 

Mount Olivet 

Bluegrass, Country & Western, 

Mountain, Appalachian 

Music Jams 

Blue Licks Battlefield State 

Resort Park, Worthington Lodge 

Contact: Paul Tierney, 

ptierney@qx.net 

Highway 68 

859.289.5507 

http://parks.ky.gov/findparks/resortparks/bl/ 

Open-mic-style jams take place 

on the first Monday of every 

month. 

Newport 

Kentucky Haus Artisan Center 

411 E. Tenth St. 

859.261.4287 

www.kentuckyhaus.com 

The Kentucky Haus Artisan 

Center specializes in handmade 

Kentucky crafts and Kentucky 

specialty food products. 

Paris 

Akemon’s Barber Shop Jams 

601 Main Street 

859.987.3875 

Tuesday and Friday night jams 

feature a variety of country, 

bluegrass, Irish and string band 

music. The host and barber, Joe 

Akemon, is nephew of the late, 

great banjo player and country 

comedian David “Stringbean” 

Akemon.

Radcliff 

The Bookstore 

301 West Lincoln Trail Blvd. 

270.351.1801 

http://store.radcliffbookstore.com 

The Bookstore offers author 


as book signings and occasionally 

showcases local artists. 

You may feel you’re being watched as 

you approach Currier’s Music World 

in Richmond. 

Richmond 

Currier’s Music World 


859.623.6010 

www.curriersmusicworld.com 

Luthier Cathy Currier can make 

essential adjustments and repairs 

of most stringed instruments, 

often while you wait and browse 

her store. 

Richmond Area Arts Council 

399 W. Water St. 

859.624.4242, ext. 222 

www.artsinrichmond.org 

The Richmond Area Arts 

Council partners with others 

in the community to present 

performances and exhibits and 

offers a comprehensive afterschool 

arts education program 

in partnership with the Madison 

County School District. 

137

138 

Versailles 

Heike Pickett Gallery 

110 Morgan St. 

859.233.1263 

www.heikepickettgallery.com 

Located in the historic Carter 

House, Heike Pickett gallery 

contains several exhibit spaces 

and houses a large inventory of 

artwork. The gallery represents 

contemporary emerging and 

established artists who work in a 

broad range of styles and media. 

Fine art consulting and appraisal 

services are also available. 

Woodford Theatre 

275 Beasley Drive 

859.873.0648 

www.woodfordcountytheater.com 

Woodford Theatre is proud 

to present “something for 

everyone.” This community 

theater, sponsored by the 

Woodford County Theatrical 

Arts Association, produces at 

least four plays a year and offers 

theater classes and workshops 

to all ages, as well as free 

demonstrations, lectures and 

consultations through volunteer 

efforts. 

Vine Grove 

Vine Grove Bluegrass Jams 

Contact: Bobby Smith 


270.300.1316 

Musicians of all levels are 

welcome to join the jams on 

Monday evenings. Jams are held 

May though September at the 

Optimist Club Park, and October 

through April inside the Vine 

Grove City Hall. Both locations 

are fully accessible to those with 

disabilities.

Winchester 

Leeds Center for the Arts 

37 N. Main St. 

859.744.6437 

www.leedscenter.com 

Built as a movie house in 1931, 

the Leeds Center still provides 

performing arts entertainment. 

The Center hosts the Clark 

County Jamboree several 

times annually, which features 

great country music along with 

clogging, comedy and the best in 

local and regional entertainment. 

One of the murals along the 

floodwall in Maysville focuses on 

the importance of the Ohio River in 

the city’s economy. 

RS Guitarworks 

24 Winn Ave. 

859.737.5300 

http://www.rsguitarworks.net/ 

cms2/index.php 

Roy Bowen and Scott Leedy 

started this electric guitar shop, 

which serves clients all over the 

world. 

Photo courtesy of the city of Maysville and the 

Maysville-Mason County Convention & Visitors Bureau 

139

“Lexington… 

exerts a 

particular 

force on native 

Kentucky 

writers, many 

of whom, 

sooner or 

later, take up 

residence, 

briefly or for 

good, in central 

Kentucky…” 

140 

Literary Arts in North Central Kentucky 

I think of north central Kentucky as the literary 

crossroads of our state. Writers from other parts of 

the state, usually without abandoning their native 

places in their work, often move to Lexington and its 

environs attracted by its centrality and the resources 

of the universities and colleges in the region. Bobbie 

Ann Mason, writer in residence at the University of 

Kentucky, who often sets her stories in her native 

western Kentucky, has lived and worked in the 

Bluegrass for 20 years. Wendell Berry, from northern 

Kentucky, got his undergraduate degree at UK and, 

after stints in California and in New York City, came 

back to teach at the university for 14 years, before 

returning to Henry Country to farm and write. UK 

professor and current poet laureate Gurney Norman 

is native to eastern Kentucky, from which his bestknown 

fiction and films draw their characters and 

their settings. And Ed McClanahan, memoirist and 

fiction writer from northern Kentucky, has lived in 

Lexington for many years. While Kentucky’s largest 

city, Louisville, attracts many writers “from away,” 

Lexington, the second largest, exerts a particular 

force on native Kentucky writers, many of whom, 

Jane Gentry 

sooner or later, take up residence, briefly or for good, 

in central Kentucky. 

Early in our history, 18th- and 19th-century 

writers such as John Filson promoted Kentucky as a 

place of heroes and heroic deeds as well as an Edenic 

landscape, the vestiges of which we now struggle to 

preserve. A less well-known early writer documented 

a darker aspect of the state’s culture: William Wells 

Brown (c. 1815–1884), born a slave in Fayette 

County, became the first African-American novelist 

after escaping from Kentucky via the Underground 

Railroad in 1834. Self-educated, he also wrote 

essays, histories and plays and was a national force 

in the abolitionist movement. 

After the Civil War, two native central Kentuckians, 

James Lane Allen (1849–1925) and John Fox Jr. 

(1862–1919) wrote Romantic novels that idealized 

Kentucky, its history and its manners. Allen’s The 

Choir Invisible (1897) became a national best-seller, 

as did John Fox Jr.’s The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, 

probably the first American novel to sell more than a 

million copies.

In the 20th century, Allen Tate, a Vanderbilt 

Fugitive, born in Winchester; Elizabeth Hardwick, 

critic, novelist and a co-founder of The New York 

Review of Books, a native of Lexington; Gayl Jones, 

author of the novels Corregidora and Eva’s Man, also 

born in Lexington; James Baker Hall, a Lexingtonian, 

poet, novelist and photographer; Richard Taylor, 

a Louisville native and longtime Frankfort-based 

professor, poet and narrative writer; George Ella 

Lyon, a Harlan County native and writer of fiction, 

poetry and children’s books; and Barbara Kingsolver, 

nationally acclaimed novelist and ecological writer, a 

native of Carlisle, all have heightened the energy that 

enlivens this area. 

Non-native writers who chose to live and work 

in central Kentucky have added to its literary luster: 

song-writer and ballad collector John Jacob Niles; 

Kentucky historian Thomas D. Clark; Guy Davenport, 

translator, fiction-writer, critic and recipient of a 

MacArthur Fellowship; Walter Tevis, author of The 

Hustler and The Color of Money; Gwyn Rubio, whose novel 

Icy Sparks was an Oprah Book Club selection; Sue 

Grafton whose “alphabet mysteries” have reached 

an international audience; Nikki Finney, poet of the 

South Carolina lowlands as well as of Kentucky; and 

Kim Edwards, whose national best-seller, The Memory 

Keeper’s Daughter, is set in Lexington. 

Danville, too, has been home for many writers. 

The first poem by a Kentuckian published in Kentucky, 

Thomas Johnson’s satiric “Kentucky,” appeared 

in the Danville Messenger in 1796. And Theodore 

O’Hara, who wrote “The Bivouac of the Dead” to 

commemorate the deaths of his fellow soldiers in 

the Mexican-American War, was from Danville. Both 

Maurice Manning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets 

Award (2001) for the first of his three acclaimed 

books, and Frank X Walker, who, in his volume Buffalo 

Dance: The Journey of York, brought to life the voice of York, 

William Clark’s slave, a crucial member of the 1803 

Lewis and Clark Expedition, are natives of Danville. 

Centre College has long attracted writers with national 

reputations to its faculty, including Lisa Williams, a 

Tennessean and prize-winning poet, whose latest 

collection, Woman Reading to the Sea, won the Barnard 

Women Poets Prize in 2007. 

The ancient crossroads just east of Lexington, 

formerly a buffalo trace, still lures many writers who 

come to find nourishment for their imaginations and 

sustenance for their shape-making amid a land rich 

in promise and possibility. t 

141

142 

© Guy Mendes. Courtesy of Ann Tower Gallery 

Creative Nonfiction, 



Nathan Coulter: A Novel 

(Port William) (1960) 

A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath 

Poems 1979-1997 (1999) 

Bringing it to the Table: 

On Farming and Food (2009) 

Leavings (2010) 

Wendell Berry 

(1934 – ) 

Born in Henry County; currently resides in Port Royal, Ky. 

Wendell Berry earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from 

the University of Kentucky. In 1958, he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship 

from Stanford University. He has taught at Georgetown College, 

Stanford University, New York University and the University of Kentucky. 

His works, which include novels, essays and poems, address themes 

such as agrarian dignity, the importance of community and the healing 

power of nature. Wendell Berry has been the recipient of numerous 

awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship 

(1962), the Vachel Lindsay Prize from Poetry magazine (1962), a Lannan 

Foundation Award for Nonfiction (1989), the Ingersoll Foundation’s T. S. 

Eliot Award (1994), the John Hay Award (1997) and the Lyndhurst Prize 

(1997). He currently lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their 

farm in Port Royal. 

(Source: Counterpoint Press)

The Peace of Wild Things 

When despair for the world grows in me 

and I wake in the night at the least sound 

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, 

I go and lie down where the wood drake 

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 

I come into the peace of wild things 

who do not tax their lives with forethought 

of grief. I come into the presence of still water. 

And I feel above me the day-blind stars 

waiting with their light. For a time 

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. 

—Wendell Berry 

143

144 

Photo courtesy of the Kentucky Department 

of Libraries and Archives 

Poetry 


Never Less Than Love (1972) 

The Storm’s Eye: A Narrative 

in Verse Celebrating Cassius 

Marcellus Clay, Man of Freedom 

1810–1903 (1974) 

Joy Bale Boone 

(1912 – 2002) 

Spent much of her life in Elizabethtown, Ky., and Glasgow, Ky. 

Born in Illinois, Boone moved to Elizabethtown after her marriage to 

a local physician and began her career as a reviewer for the Louisville 

Courier-Journal in 1945. Throughout her life she was active in health and 

women’s issues as well as in education, and she served several years as 

the president of the Friends of Kentucky Libraries. 

Boone edited two anthologies of contemporary Kentucky poetry and was 

the founder of the literary magazine Approaches (now called Kentucky 

Poetry Review). She was the Kentucky poet laureate from 1997–1998. 

(Sources: Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives and The Kentucky Anthology)

Fiction, Playwriting 


The Narrative of William W. 

Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847) 

Clotelle, or the President’s 

Daughter (1853) 

William Wells Brown 

(1815 – 1884) 

Born a slave on a plantation just north of Lexington, Ky. 

William Wells Brown, an escaped slave who became the first known African-American 

novelist, was born on the Kentucky plantation of Dr. John 

Young. In 1834, he escaped from his master and was befriended by a 

Quaker, Wells Brown. William adopted the man’s name, settled in Cleveland 

and started a family. 

Brown, who learned public speaking in the temperance movement, 

moved to Boston in 1847 to become a lecturer for the Massachusetts 

Anti-Slavery Society. That same year he published his autobiography. In 

all he wrote more than a dozen books, pamphlets and plays, including the 

first travel narrative and the first known drama by an African-American. 

(Source: Cambridge Historical Commission/Cambridge African American Heritage 

Alliance, copyright 2000) 

145

146 

Photo courtesy of photographer Charlotte Strode 

(www.charlottestrode.com) 

Poetry 


A Garden in Kentucky (1995) 

Portrait of the Artist as a 

White Pig (2006) 

A Year in Kentucky (2008) 

Jane Gentry 

(1941 – ) 

Born in Lexington, Ky.; grew up in Athens, Ky.; currently resides in 

Versailles, Ky. 

Jane Gentry, Kentucky poet laureate from 2007–2009, grew up on a farm 

at Athens in Fayette County and now lives in Versailles. Her two full-length 

collections of poems, A Garden in Kentucky and Portrait of the Artist as a White 

Pig, were published by LSU Press in 1995 and 2006 respectively. Her 

poems have appeared widely in anthologies and literary journals. She is 

an English professor at the University of Kentucky where she has won the 

Great Teacher Award. 

(Source: Jane Gentry, 2010)

Photo courtesy of Laurie Roberts 

Fiction 


“A” Is for Alibi 

“B” is for Burglar 

“S” is for Silence 

“T” is for Trespass 

“U” is for Undertow 

(1983–2009) 

Sue Grafton 

(1940 – ) 

Currently resides in Louisville, Ky. 

Sue Grafton entered the mystery field in 1982 with the publication of 

“A’” is for Alibi, which introduced female hard-boiled private investigator 

Kinsey Millhone operating out of the fictional town of Santa Teresa (a.k.a. 

Santa Barbara), California. “B” is for Burglar followed in 1985, and since 

then Grafton has added 19 novels to the series, now referred to as “the 

alphabet” mysteries. 

(Source: Sue Grafton, 2010) 

147

148 

Photo by Gary Miller, courtesy of Mary Ann Taylor-Hall 



Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, 

His Tootings (2002) 

Praeder’s Letters: A Novel in 

Verse (2002) 

The Total Light Process: New 

and Selected Poems (2004) 

James Baker Hall 

(1935 – 2009) 

Born in Lexington, Ky.; spent the last 27 years of his life on a farm 

on the Harrison-Scott County line northeast of Lexington 

James Baker Hall published two novels, eight volumes of poetry 

and four collections of his photographic work. He graduated from 

the University of Kentucky in 1957 and then earned an M.A. from 

Stanford, where he joined three other Kentuckians—Wendell Berry, 

Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman—as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. After 

teaching at New York University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 

he returned to the University of Kentucky, where he headed the Creative 

Writing Program for 40 years. 

Hall served as Kentucky poet laureate from 2001–2002. He was the recipient 

of many awards, including a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize. 

His work appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Saturday Evening 

Post and the Paris Review. 

(Sources: Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, 2010, and The Kentucky Anthology)

Photo courtesy of Barbara Kingsolver 

Fiction, 



The Bean Trees (1988) 

The Poisonwood Bible (1998) 

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle 

(2007) 

The Lacuna (2009) 

Barbara Kingsolver 

(1955 – ) 

Grew up in Carlisle, Ky. 

Barbara Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky. Her books have 

been translated into more than two dozen languages and have 

been adopted into the core literature curriculum in high schools 

and colleges throughout the nation. Kingsolver was named one of 

the most important writers of the 20th century by Writer’s Digest. 

Critical acclaim for her books includes multiple awards from the American 

Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, 

among many others. Lacuna won the Orange Prize in 2010. The Poisonwood 

Bible was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Orange Prize and won 

the national book award of South Africa, before being named an Oprah 

Book Club selection. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle won numerous prizes including 

the James Beard award. In 2000 Kingsolver received the National 

Humanities Medal, awarded for deepening our nation’s understanding of 

the humanities. 

(Source: Barbara Kingsolver, www.kingsolver.com) 

149

150 

Photo courtesy of Maurice Manning 

Poetry 


Lawrence Booth’s Book of 

Visions (2001) 

A Companion for Owls (2004) 

Bucolics (2007) 

The Common Man (2010) 

Maurice Manning 

(1966 – ) 

Born in Lexington, Ky.; grew up in Danville, Ky. 

Maurice Manning is a professor of English at Indiana University and lives 

part of the year on his farm near Perryville in Washington County. For him, 

Kentucky will always be home. 

He has published four books of poetry and has published widely in magazines 

and journals. In 2001 he received the Yale Younger Poets Prize for 

Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, and in 2009 he was awarded The Hanes 

Prize for Poetry from The Fellowship of Southern Writers. 

(Source: Maurice Manning, 2010)

Photo courtesy of Ed McClanahan 

Fiction 


The Natural Man (1983) 

Famous People I Have Known 

(1985) 

O the Clear Moment (2008) 

Ed McClanahan 

(1932 – ) 

Born in Brooksville, Ky.; currently resides in Lexington, Ky. 

Ed McClanahan was born in Brooksville, in northeastern Kentucky, 

and grew up there and in nearby Maysville. A novella from 

which his first novel, The Natural Man, evolved won him a Wallace 

Stegner Fellowship to Stanford University, where he joined three 

other Kentuckians—Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall and Gurney 

Norman. While there he became good friends with author Ken Kesey 

and later joined Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters. 

The Natural Man was a critical and popular success, and critics compared 

the raunchy, comic growing-up saga of a bookish adolescent in Needmore, 

Ky., to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. 

McClanahan has taught writing at Oregon State University and the 

University of Kentucky. He and his wife Hilda live in Lexington. 

(Sources: Ed McClanahan, 2010, and The Kentucky Anthology) 

151

152 

Photo by John Howard Griffin and used with 

permission of the Merton Legacy Trust and the 

Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University 

Creative Nonfiction, 

Poetry 


A Man in the Divided Sea 

(1946) 

The Seven Storey Mountain 

(1948) 

New Seeds of Contemplation 

(1961) 

Zen and the Birds of Appetite 

(1968) 

Thomas Merton 

(1915 – 1968) 

Entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in Trappist, Ky., in 1945, where he 

lived the rest of his life 

Thomas Merton is arguably the most influential American Catholic author 

of the 20th century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold 

over one million copies and has been translated into over 15 languages. 

He wrote over 60 other books and hundreds of poems and articles on 

topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence and 

the nuclear arms race. 

After a rambunctious youth and adolescence, Merton converted to Roman 

Catholicism and entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky. 

The 27 years he spent in Gethsemani brought about profound changes in 

his self-understanding. 

During his last years, he became deeply interested in Asian religions, 

particularly Zen Buddhism, and in promoting East-West dialogue. 

(Source: Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University, 2010)

Photo courtesy of Marion Ettlinger 

Fiction 


Four Spirits (2003) 

Ahab’s Wife (2005) 

Abundance, a Novel of Marie 

Antoinette (2006) 

Adam & Eve (2010) 

Sena Jeter Naslund 

(1942 – ) 

Currently resides in Louisville, Ky. 

Kentucky poet laureate for 2005–2006, Sena Jeter Naslund is the author 

of such New York Times critically acclaimed, best-selling novels as Sherlock 

in Love, Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits and Abundance and the short story collection 

The Disobedience of Water. Her newest novel, Adam & Eve, is scheduled for 

release in fall 2010. 

She is the co-founder and Program Director of Kentucky’s first MFA in 

Writing—the brief-residency program at Spalding University for fiction, poetry, 

creative nonfiction, writing for youth, screenwriting and playwriting— 

and she is Distinguished Teaching Professor and Writer in Residence at 

the University of Louisville. 

(Source: Sena Jeter Naslund, 2010) 

153

154 

Photo courtesy of Rebecca Roberts Owens 



Under the Tree (1922) 

Time of Man (1926) 

Great Meadow (1930) 

Elizabeth Madox Roberts 

(1881 – 1941) 

Born in Perryville, Ky.; lived and wrote in Springfield, Ky., where she 

is buried 

Elizabeth Madox Roberts, one of America’s most original novelists and 

poets, set her work in the area around her home town of Springfield— 

what she called her Little Country—in the rolling hills at the southern edge 

of the Bluegrass. Her distinctive voice came clear in her first book, Under 

the Tree (1922), a never-out-of-print collection of poems for children. Roberts 

liberated the genre from didactic sentimentalism and instead portrayed 

a child’s sense of wonder and often comic absurdity. In her best 

known novels—The Time of Man (1926) and The Great Meadow (1930), both 

short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize—she developed a highly idiosyncratic 

language to explore the inner lives of women as they make sense of their 

places in the sometimes hostile but vividly rendered world. 

Roberts attended local schools in Springfield, then high school in Covington. 

Elizabeth’s frail health kept her from college until 1917 when at 

age 36 she enrolled at the University of Chicago. There, she discovered a

lively literary scene and forged friendships with a group of writers and artists, 

including Glenway Wescott, Janet Lewis, Yvor Winters, and Monroe 

Wheeler. Her colleagues recognized her 

original genius and helped her launch 

a late-blooming but productive career: 

seven novels, three volumes of poems 

and two collections of stories. Her work 

received critical acclaim from Carl and 

Mark Van Doren, Robert Penn Warren, 

Ford Madox Ford, Sherwood Anderson, 

Sylvia Townsend Warner and many others, 

as well as a wide readership and 

many awards, including the O. Henry 

Prize. 

She was buried in Springfield, on a hill 

Photo courtesy of Rebecca Roberts Owens 

overlooking the Little Country, whose 

rhythms and ways she conveyed with the attentiveness of an anthropologist, 

the sensibility of a modernist and the sensuality of a poet. 

(Source: Jane Eblen Keller) 

Elenores, 

Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ 

home in Springfield, Ky. 

155

156 

Photo courtesy of the Department of Rare Books and 

Special Collections, Princeton University Library 



Mr.. Pope and Other Poems 

(1928) 

Stonewall Jackson: 

The Good Soldier (1928) 

Jefferson Davis: 

His Rise and Fall (1929) 

The Fathers (1938) 

Collected Poems (1970) 

Allen Tate 

(1899 – 1979) 

Born in Winchester, Ky. 

Allen Tate was born in Winchester and moved to Ashland when he was 

three years old. He attended Cross School for Boys in Louisville and Ashland 

High School. He entered Vanderbilt University in 1918 and quickly 

became associated with such well-known literary figures as John Crowe 

Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle and Donald Davidson. 

In 1924 Tate moved to New York City, where he gained recognition as a 

poet, literary critic and biographer for whom the Civil War was a central 

theme. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 and spent most of that 

year and the next in England and France. While in Europe his associates 

were among the most widely known authors and poets of the day, including 

T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings and Gertrude Stein. 

Tate was a writer in residence at Princeton University and lectured at 

Oxford University. He married Caroline Gordon of Todd County in 1924. 


During the summer of 1924, Robert 

Penn Warren introduced writer Caroline 

Gordon to fellow Kentuckian Allen Tate. 

Within a year they were married and 

living in New York City, where she gave 

birth to their daughter. For a number 

of years, they enjoyed a life abroad, 

devoted to writing. 

In 1930 they returned to the United 

States and settled in Clarksville, Tenn. 

After a period of prolific writing and 

academic appointments, they were 

divorced in 1959. 

(Source: The Tennessee Encyclopedia 

of History and Culture, The University of 

Tennessee Press, 2002) 

Photo courtesy of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, 

Princeton University Library 

157

158 

Photo courtesy of Richard Taylor 



Bluegrass (1975) 

Earthbones (1979) 

Stone Eye (2001) 

Sue Mundy: A Novel of the 

Civil War (2006) 

Girty (2006) 

Richard Taylor 

(1941 – ) 

Born in Louisville, Ky.; currently resides in Frankfort, Ky. 

Richard Taylor, former state poet laureate (1999–2000) and author of two 

novels and several nonfiction books as well as six collections of poetry, 

lives outside Frankfort. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky 

and a law degree from the University of Louisville. 

Retired from Kentucky State University where he was a professor of 

English, Taylor now teaches as Kenan Visiting Writer at Transylvania University 

in Lexington and operates Poor Richard’s Books in Frankfort. 

(Sources: Richard Taylor, 2010, and The Kentucky Anthology)

Photo by Pam Spaulding (1996); 

© The Courier-Journal 



Hell’s Angels: A Strange and 

Terrible Saga (1966) 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 

(1971) 

The Great Shark Hunt: Strange 

Tales from a Strange Time 

(The Gonzo Papers, Volume 1) 

(1979) 

Hunter S. Thompson 

(1937 – 2005) 

Born in Louisville, Ky. 

Hunter S. Thompson began his journalistic career as a sportswriter while 

serving in the U.S. Air Force from 1956 to 1958. In the mid-1960s, 

Thompson’s occasional free-lance writing assignments included a piece 

for The Nation magazine about the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, which 

led to many book offers. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga 

was based on conversations with members of the gang with whom Hunter 

had ridden. This kind of involvement marks Thompson’s “Gonzo journalism,” 

which combines nonfiction with the emotional impact of a novel or 

short story. 


159

160 

Poetry 


Affrilachia (2000) 

Buffalo Dance: the Journey 

of York (2003) 

Black Box: Poems (2005) 

When Winter Come: the 

Ascension of York (2008) 

Frank X Walker 

(1961 - ) 

Born in Danville, Ky.; currently resides in Lexington, Ky. 

Poet, professor, playwright, Frank X Walker is a founding 

member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem Fellow. 

A Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry winner, he is 

the author of five collections of poems and the editor of 

two anthologies. His first book of poetry, Affrilachia, addressed family and 

social issues and was received with much acclaim. Through his work, 

Walker reinforces that “people and artists of color are part of the past and 

present of the multi-state Appalachian region….” 

Walker originally enrolled at the University of Kentucky to study engineering, 

but, after taking several courses with writer Gurney Norman, switched 

to English. Norman has called Walker “a modern bard” with “a marvelous 

literary voice, one of clarity, honesty and naturalness.” 

Walker is the founding publisher and editor of Pluck! The Journal of 

Affrilachian Arts & Culture and an Associate Professor of English at UK. 

(Sources: Frank X Walker, 2010, and The Kentucky Anthology)

Anniversary 

Ten thousand pages later 

this herd of buffalo 

still gathers 

on Affrilachian shores 

to taste each other’s ink 

be warmed 

by smoldering embers 

of coal 

black voices 

Navigating by pencil, at night 

we plot course 

through Seattles 

Chicagos and New Yorks 

but we are anchored here 

in this cast iron skillet 

called Kentucky 

our lives sewn 

together, hand stiched 

by old fingers 

knowing eyes 

who saw the all-cotton 

quilt 

in us 

when we were only 

thread 

—Frank X Walker, 

from Black Box: Poems 

161

162 

Index 

21c Museum 131 

A 

Abbey of Gethsemani 152 

accessibility to the arts 

Arts Access Gallery 50 

Kentucky Center for the Performing 

Arts education programs 126 

Actors Theatre of Louisville 122, 123 

Affrilachian Poets 83, 160 

Akemon’s Barber Shop Jams 136 

Alhambra Theatre 15, 25 

Allen, James Lane 82, 140 

American Cave Museum 49, 56 

Angel, Mike 11 

Ann Tower Gallery 114, 115 

Appalachia 69, 82 

Appalachian Artisan Center 74 

Appalachian Fireside Gallery 98 

Appalshop 78, 79 

Roadside Theatre 17 

A Reader’s Corner 128 

Arnow, Harriette 62, 64, 82, 91 

art guilds 16 

Artique 114 

artists 

Angel, Mike 11 

Audubon, John James 25, 26 

Barrett, Mitch 17 

Blanck, Thomas and Joanne 10 

Bowen, Roy 139 

Bush, Sam 49 

Cooper, Roger 71, 96 

Dafford, Robert 34 

Edmonds, John 49 

Everly, Ike 22, 23 

Fields, Paul 130 

Fleck, Béla 49 

Freedom Singers 48 

Freese, Thomas 11 

Gastineau, Ken 98 

Giles, Harriet 11 

Gover, Carla 71 

Graf, Raymond 26 

Hamilton, Mary 17 

Haywood, John 69 

Holcomb, Pam 17 

Hulsey, Randy 11 

Kaviar, Craig 124, 125 

Kentucky Wild Horse 96 

Kokinda, Kristal 99 

Lamb, Lewis and Donna 97, 99, 112 

Lear, Tom 108 

Leedy, Scott 139 

Lundeen, George 35 

Lynn, Loretta 70 

Maydak, Mike 95 

May, Warren A. 102 

Monroe, Bill 20, 23, 37 

Mosley, Paul 24 

New Grass Revival 49 

Niles, John Jacob 141 

Northern Kentucky Brotherhood 

Singers 107 

Pennington, Eddie 24 

Rager, Mose 22, 23 

Rector, Steve 24 

Ritchie, Jean 82

Ritter, Patricia 47 

Sexton, Octavia 17 

Shields, Steve 28 

Skaggs, Ricky 70 

Swinson, Ken 133, 134 

Thompson, Chris 50 

Travis, Merle 22 

Waddell, Leona 59 

Yoakam, Dwight 70 


ArtsPlace 114 

ArtWorks: A Visual Arts Coalition 16 

Ashland 73 

Audubon, John James 25, 26, 38 

authors. See literary artists 

B 

ballet. See dance 

Barren River Breakdown radio program 

49 

Barren River Lake State Resort Park Jams 

58 


basket making 59 

B. Deemer Gallery 124 

Behringer-Crawford Museum 102 

Berea 98, 100 

Berea Arts Council 98 

Berea College Bookstore 98 

Bernheim Forest 130 

Berry, Wendell 140, 142, 148, 151 

Beverly 73 

Black Swan Books 114 

Blanck, Thomas and Joanne 10 

Bluegrass and Gospel Jam Sessions at 

Cumberland Falls State Resort 

Park 74 

Blue Grass Boys 20 

Bluegrass, Country & Western, Mountain, 

Appalachian Music Jams 136 

Bluegrass Express Live concert series 78 

bluegrass music 

birthplace 19, 20 

Bluegrass and Gospel Jam Sessions 

at Cumberland Falls State Resort 

Park 74 

Blue Grass Boys 20 


Mountain, Appalachian Music 

Jams 136 

Bluegrass Express Live concert series 

78 


Association Jam 135 

International Bluegrass Music Museum 

21, 32 

Jammin’ on the Porch at the Historic 

Thomas House 54 

Jerusalem Ridge Bluegrass Celebration 

21 

Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and 

Museum 77 


American Legion Post #38 58 

Meadowgreen Park Jams 73 

Pickin’ in the Park 61 

River of Music Party (ROMP) 21 

Rosine Barn Jamboree 21, 37 

Vine Grove Bluegrass Jams 138 

Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park 

136 

163

164 

Blue Marble 109 

blues music 

Chitlin’ Circuit 48 




WhaBah Steakhouse 51 

Open Blues/Jazz Band Jam 128 

Stevie Ray’s Blues Bar 128 

bookstores 

A Reader’s Corner 128 

Berea College Bookstore 98 

Black Swan Books 114 

Blue Marble 109 

Carmichael’s Bookstore 124 

Coffee Tree Books 76 

Cozy Corner 80 

Historic Midway Museum Store 135 

Joseph-Beth Booksellers 116 

Karen’s Book Barn and Java Stop 112 

Lincoln’s Loft 112 

Morris Book Shop 120 

Poor Richard’s Books 110 

Robie Books 102 

Stewart Home School 1792 Store 110 

The Bookstore 137 

Boone, Joy Bale 144 

Boone Tavern 101 


Bowling Green 47, 50 

Bowling Green International Festival 49 

Bowling Green Western Symphony 

Orchestra 13, 51, 53 

Bradby, Marie 83 

Breckinridge Bluegrass Music Association 

Jam 135 

Brown, William Wells 140, 145 

Bush, Sam 49 

C 

Cadiz 22 

Capital Gallery of Contemporary Art 110 

Capitol Arts Alliance, 53 

Capitol Arts Center 15, 51, 52 

Carcassonne Community Center 70 

Carmichael’s Bookstore 124 

Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning 

114 

Carnegie Community Arts Center 58 

Carnegie Visual & Performing Arts Center 

103 

Carson Center 34 

Caudill, Harry 83, 84 

cave region 47, 62 

Center for Rural Development 58 

Central Kentucky Art Guild 16 

Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra 13 

Chaffin, Lillie 83 

children’s activities 

Cowan Creek Mountain Music School 

71 

Explorium of Lexington 115 

International Museum of the Horse 

116 


Lexington Children’s Theatre 117 

Living Arts & Science Center 119 

Louisville Visual Art Association 128 

Owensboro Museum of Fine Art 32 

RiverPark Center 32

Stage One Children’s Theatre 126 

Walden Theatre 131 

Chitlin’ Circuit 48 

C’ing Polkadots 32 

cities 

Ashland 73 

Berea 98, 100 

Beverly 73 

Bowling Green 47, 50 

Cadiz 22 

Clay City 73 

Corbin 74 

Covington 95, 102 

Danville 108 

David 74 

Drakesboro 22 

Elizabethtown 109 

Falmouth 109 

Fort Thomas 109 

Frankfort 110 

Glasgow 54 

Glendale 111 

Harrodsburg 111 

Henderson 24 

Hindman 74 

Hodgenville 112 

Hopkinsville 25 

Horse Cave 47, 54, 56 

LaGrange 112 

Lancaster 112 

Lexington 114 

Louisa 76 

Louisville 122 

Lucas 58 

Madisonville 25 

Marion 30 

Mayfield 30 

Maysville 132 

McQuady 135 

Midway 135 

Morehead 76 

Mount Olivet 136 

Mount Sterling 77 

Mount Vernon 77 

Murray 30 

Newport 136 

Owensboro 32 

Paducah 34, 36 

Paris 136 

Powderly 36 

Prestonsburg 77 

Radcliff 137 

Richmond 137 

Rosine 37 

Somerset 58 

Tompkinsville 61 

Versailles 138 

Vine Grove 138 

Whitesburg 78 

Winchester 139 

Clark, Billy C. 82 

Clark County Jamboree 139 

Clark, Thomas D. 141 

Clay City 73 

Clooney, Rosemary 133 

coal mining traditions 23, 28 

Cobb, Ann 82 

Cobb, Irvin 38 

Coffee Tree Books 76 

165

166 

Community Arts Center 108 

community arts centers 

Appalshop 78 

ArtsPlace 114 

Carcassonne Community Center 70 

Carnegie Center for 

Literacy & Learning 114 

Carnegie Community Arts Center 58 

Community Arts Center 108 

Downtown Arts Center 115 

Fohs Hall Community Arts Foundation 

30 

Frank Duveneck Arts and Cultural 

Center 106 

Gateway Regional Arts Center 77 

Mayfield/Graves County Art Guild 30 

Richmond Area Arts Council 137 

Completely Kentucky 110 

Cooper, Roger 71, 96 

Corbin 74 

country music 

Clark County Jamboree 139 

Country Music Highway 70 




Museum 77 



legends 70 

Country Music Highway 70, 72 

Covington 95, 102 

Cowan Creek Mountain Music School 71 


crafts. See Kentucky crafts 

Crunk, Tony 38, 39, 40 

Cumberland Falls 62 

Cumberland Falls State Resort Park 74 

Currier, Cathy 137 

Currier’s Music World 137 

D 

Dafford, Robert 34 

Damselfly Gallery 135 

dance 14 

Kentucky Ballet Theatre 14 

Lexington Ballet Company 14 

Louisville Ballet 14, 126 

Owensboro Dance Theatre 14, 32 

square dance 70, 71 

Danville 108 

Davenport, Guy 141 

David 74 

David Appalachian Crafts 74 

Downtown Arts Center 115 

Drakesboro 22 

drama. See performing arts 

E 

eastern region 68 


Edwards, Kim 141 

Elizabethtown 109 

Everly, Ike 22, 23 

Experience Covington 104 

Explorium of Lexington 115

F 

Falmouth 109 

fiddle traditions 

bluegrass music 20 

northeastern Kentucky 96 


film production 

Appalshop 78, 79 

Filson, John 140 

Finney, Nikki 83, 141 

Fleck, Béla 49 

Fohs Hall Community Arts Foundation 30 

folk art 

Kentucky Folk Art Center 76 

Fort Thomas 109 

Fountain Square in Bowling Green 52 

Fountain Square Players 51, 53 

Four Legends Jamboree at the Drakesboro 

City Hall 22 

Fox Jr., John 82, 140 

Frank Duveneck Arts and Cultural Center 

105, 106 

Frankfort 110 

Freedom Singers 48 

Freese, Thomas 11 

Furman, Lucy 82 

G 

galleries 

Ann Tower Gallery 114 



B. Deemer Gallery 124 

Capital Gallery of Contemporary Art 

110 

Capitol Arts Center 51, 53 

Carnegie Visual & Performing Arts 

Center 103 

C’ing Polkadots 32 

Damselfly Gallery 135 

Gallery at 916 51 

Glassworks 124 

Heike Pickett Gallery 138 

Heritage Art Gallery 57 

Log House Craft Gallery 102 


Mountain Arts Center 78 

New Editions Gallery 120 

Painted Cow Gallery 76 

Pots Place Co-op Studio and Gallery 

51 

Public Theatre of Kentucky 52 

Pyro Gallery 128 

Swanson Reed Contemporary 129 

Top Drawer Gallery 102 

Yeiser Art Center 36 

Zephyr Gallery 131 

Gallery at 916 51 

Gastineau Jewelers 98 

Gateway Regional Arts Center 77 

Gateway Resource Conservation and 

Development Council 8 

Gentry, Jane 140, 146 

Giles, Harriet 11 

Glasgow 54 


Glema Mahr Center for the Arts 25 

Glendale 111 

Gordon, Caroline 38, 41, 91, 156 

167

168 

gospel music 



Park 74 






Northern Kentucky Brotherhood 

Singers 107 


Gover, Carla 71 

Governor’s School for the Arts 126 


Grafton, Sue 141, 147 

Grand Theatre 15, 110 

guilds 16 

H 

Hall, James Baker 141, 148 


Hardwick, Elizabeth 141 

Harrodsburg 111 

Haywood, John 69 

Headley-Whitney Museum 115 

Heike Pickett Gallery 138 

Henderson 24 

Henderson Arts Alliance 24 

Henderson Fine Arts Center 24 

Heritage Art Gallery 57 

Hidden River Cave 56 

Hindman 74 

Hindman Settlement School 75, 82, 83, 

91 

Historic Midway Museum Store 135 

Historic State Theatre Complex 15, 109 

Hodgenville 112 

Holbrook, Chris 83 


hooks, bell 39 

Hopkinsville 25 

Horse Cave 47, 54, 56 

Horse Cave Heritage Festival 57 

House, Silas 8, 83, 85 

Howard, Lee 83 

Howard, Quentin 83 

Hulsey, Randy 11 

Humana Festival of New American Plays 

122 

I 


21, 32 

International Museum of the Horse 116 

J 

Jamming on the Porch at the Berea Train 

Station 99 



jam sessions 

Akemon’s Barber Shop Jams 136 

Appalshop Traditional Music Project 

78 

Barren River Lake State Resort Park 

Jams 58 



Park 74


Mountain, Appalachian 

Music Jams 136 


Association Jam 135 


Drakesboro City Hall 22 


32 

Jamming on the Porch at the Berea 

Train Station 99 









Pickin’ in the Park 36, 61 



Janice Mason Art Museum 22 

jazz music 

connections to bluegrass 20 


Jennings Creek Tin Shoppe 11 

Jenny Wiley State Resort Park 77 

Jenny Wiley Theatre 77 

Jerusalem Ridge Bluegrass Celebration 

21 

John James Audubon State Park and 

Museum 25, 26 

Johnson, Paul Brett 83 

Jones, Gayl 141 


K 

Karen’s Book Barn and Java Stop 112 

Kaviar, Craig 124, 125 

Kaviar Forge and Gallery 124 

Kendrick, Leatha 83 

Kentucky Artisan Center at Berea 99, 101 

Kentucky Arts Council 3, 4 

Kentucky Ballet Theatre 14 



Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts 

126 

Kentucky crafts 

Appalachian Artisan Center 74 


Completely Kentucky 110 


David Appalachian Crafts 74 

Kentucky Artisan Center at Berea 99, 

101 


Kentucky Haus Artisan Center 136 

Kentucky School of Craft 75 



Red Bird Mission Crafts 73 

True Kentucky 111 


Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen 

16, 101 

Kentucky Haus Artisan Center 136 

Kentucky Horse Park 116 

Kentucky Library and Museum 49 

169

170 

Kentucky Museum of Art & Craft 127 


Museum 77 

Kentucky Opera 126 

Kentucky Repertory Theatre at Horse Cave 

54, 55, 57 

Kentucky School of Craft 75 

Kentucky state parks. See state parks 

Kentucky Symphony Orchestra 13 

Kentucky Theatre 15, 116 

Kentucky Wild Horse 96 

Kincaid Regional Theatre Company 109 

Kingsolver, Barbara 141, 149 

Kokinda, Kristal 99 

L 

LaGrange 112 

Lake Cumberland Jammers at American 

Legion Post #38 58 

Lake Cumberland Performing Arts 58 

Lamb, Lewis and Donna 112 

Lancaster 112 

Lawrence County Arts Council 76 

Lear, Tom 108 

LEED certified buildings 


Boone Tavern 101 

Leeds Center for the Arts 15, 139 


LexArts 115 

Lexington 114 

Lexington Art League 113, 117 

Lexington Ballet Company 14 


Lexington Opera House 117, 118 

Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra 13, 

122 

Lincoln’s Loft 112 

literary artists 

Allen, James Lane 82, 140 

Arnow, Harriette 62, 64, 82, 91 

Audubon, John James 38 

Berry, Wendell 140, 142, 148, 151 


Bradby, Marie 83 

Brown, William Wells 140, 145 

Caudill, Harry 83, 84 

Chaffin, Lillie 83 

Clark, Billy C. 82 

Cobb, Ann 82 

Cobb, Irvin 38 

Crunk, Tony 38, 39, 40 

Davenport, Guy 141 

Edwards, Kim 141 

Filson, John 140 

Finney, Nikki 83, 141 

Fox Jr., John 82, 140 

Furman, Lucy 82 

Gentry, Jane 140, 146 

Gordon, Caroline 38, 41, 91, 156 

Grafton, Sue 141, 147 

Hall, James Baker 141, 148 

Hardwick, Elizabeth 141 

Holbrook, Chris 83 

hooks, bell 39 

House, Silas 8, 83, 85 

Howard, Lee 83 

Howard, Quentin 83 

Johnson, Paul Brett 83

Jones, Gayl 141 

Kendrick, Leatha 83 

Kingsolver, Barbara 141, 149 

Lyon, George Ella 82, 83, 86, 141 

Manning, Maurice 141, 150 

Mason, Bobbie Ann 31, 39, 42, 140 

McClanahan, Ed 134, 140, 148, 151 

McCombs, Davis 62, 65 

McElmurray, Karen 83 

Merton, Thomas 152 

Miller, Jim Wayne 39, 66, 82 

Naslund, Sena Jeter 153 

Norman, Gurney 83, 88, 140, 148, 

151, 160 

Offutt, Chris 83, 90 

O’Hara, Theodore 141 

Poston, Ted 39 

Roberts, Elizabeth Madox 91, 154 

Rubio, Gwyn 141 

Shelby, Anne 83 

sources for biographical information 5 

Stewart, Al 83 

Still, James 82, 88, 91 

Stuart, Jesse 82, 91, 92 

Survant, Joe 62, 63, 67 

Tate, Allen 38, 41, 44, 91, 141, 156 

Taylor, Richard 141, 158 

Tevis, Walter 141 

Thompson, Hunter S. 159 

Walker, Frank X 83, 141, 160 

Warren, Robert Penn 38, 44, 91, 155, 

156 

Wilkinson, Crystal 83 

Williams, Lisa 141 

Living Arts & Science Center 119 


Loudoun House 113, 117 

Louisa 76 

Louisville 122 

Louisville Artisans Guild 16 

Louisville Ballet 14, 126 

Louisville Orchestra 13, 126 


Louisville Youth Orchestra 13 

Lucas 58 


Luther F. Carson Four Rivers Center 34 

luthiers 97 


Currier, Cathy 137 

Currier’s Music World 137 

Lamb, Lewis and Donna 97, 112 



Mize, Art 120 

Mize Violin Shop 120 

RS Guitarworks 139 

Lynn, Loretta 70 

Lyon, George Ella 82, 83, 86, 141 

Lyric Theatre 15, 120 

M 

Madisonville 25 

Mammoth Cave National Park 47, 56, 

62, 65 

Manning, Maurice 141, 150 

Marble Club Super Dome 61 

marble games 60 

Marion 30 

171

172 

Market House Theatre 34 

Mason, Bobbie Ann 31, 39, 42, 140 

Maydak, Mike 95 

Mayfield 30 


Maysville 132 


McClanahan, Ed 134, 140, 148, 151 

McCombs, Davis 62, 65 

McElmurray, Karen 83 

McQuady 135 


Merton, Thomas 152 

Midway 135 

Miller, Jim Wayne 39, 66, 82 

Mize, Art 120 

Mize Violin Shop 120 

Monroe, Bill 20, 23, 37 

Morehead 76 

Morris Book Shop 120 

Mosley, Paul 24 


Mount Olivet 136 

Mount Sterling 77 

Mount Vernon 77 

murals 

Maysville 133, 139 


Murray 30 

Murray Art Guild 16 

museums 

21c Museum 131 

American Cave Museum 49, 56 

Behringer-Crawford Museum 102 

Explorium of Lexington 115 

Headley-Whitney Museum 115 


21, 32 

International Museum of the Horse 

116 

Janice Mason Art Museum 22 

John James Audobon State Park and 

Museum 25 

Kentucky Library and Museum 49 

Kentucky Museum of Art & Craft 127 

Living Arts and Science Center 119 

National Quilt Museum 19, 35, 36 


Speed Art Museum 128, 129 

University of Kentucky Art Museum 

122 

Yeiser Art Center 36 

musicians. See artists 

N 

Naslund, Sena Jeter 153 


National Thumbpickers Hall of Fame 24 

New Editions Gallery 120 

New Grass Revival 49 

Newport 136 

Niles, John Jacob 141 

Norman, Gurney 83, 88, 140, 148, 151, 

160 

north central region 94 

Northern Kentucky Brotherhood Singers 

107 

Norton Center for the Arts 108

O 

Offutt, Chris 83, 90 

O’Hara, Theodore 141 

Ohio Valley Art League 24 

old-time music 20, 71 

connections to bluegrass 20 

jam sessions 78 




Orchestra Kentucky 13, 51, 53 

orchestras 12 

Bowling Green Western Symphony 

Orchestra 13, 51, 53 

Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra 13 

Kentucky Symphony Orchestra 13 

Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra 13, 

122 

Louisville Orchestra 13, 126 

Louisville Youth Orchestra 13 

Orchestra Kentucky 13, 51, 53 

Owensboro Symphony Orchestra 13, 

32 

Paducah Symphony Orchestra 13, 34 

outdoor drama 


Owensboro 32 

Owensboro Dance Theatre 14, 32 


Owensboro Symphony Orchestra 13, 32 

P 


Paducah Arts Alliance 16 

Paducah Symphony Orchestra 13, 34 


Paramount Arts Center 15, 72, 73 

Paris 136 

Pennington, Eddie 24 

Pennyroyal Arts Council 25 

performing arts. See also theaters 

Actors Theatre of Louisville 122, 123 

Alhambra Theatre 25 

Appalshop 78 

Capitol Arts Center 51, 52 


Center 103 

Fountain Square Players 51 

Glema Mahr Center for the Arts 25 

Grand Theatre 110 



Kentucky Center for the Performing 

Arts 126 

Kentucky Repertory Theatre at Horse 

Cave 54, 55 

Kentucky Theatre 116 

Kincaid Regional Theatre Company 

109 


Leeds Center for the Arts 139 


Lexington Opera House 117, 118 

Luther F. Carson Four Rivers Center 

34 



Norton Center for the Arts 108 

Paramount Arts Center 72, 73 

173

174 

Playhouse in the Park 30 

Plaza Theatre 54 


Ragged Edge Community Theatre 111 

RiverPark Center 32 

Singletary Center for the Arts 122 

Theatre Workshop of Owensboro 33 


Washington Opera House 132 

Woodford Theatre 138 

Pickin’ in the Park 36, 61 

Playhouse in the Park 30 

Plaza Theatre 15, 54 

poets. See literary artists 

poets laureate 


Gentry, Jane 146 

Hall, James Baker 148 

Norman, Gurney 88 

Sena Jeter Naslund 153 

Still, James 91 

Stuart, Jesse 92 

Survant, Joe 67 

Taylor, Richard 158 

Warren, Robert Penn 44 

Poor Richard’s Books 110 

Poston, Ted 39 

Pots Place Co-op Studio and Gallery 51 

Powderly 36 

Prestonsburg 77 


Pyro Gallery 128 

Q 

quilts 

Carcassonne quilting group 70 

Lyric Theatre commemorative quilt 

120 

mural honoring quilt-making traditions 

35 


quilt capital of the world 19 

quilt trails 8 

retail quilts at Cozy Corner 80 

retail quilts at David Appalachian Crafts 

74 

R 

Radcliff 137 

radio programs 

Barren River Breakdown 49 

Bluegrass Express Live 78 

storytelling 17 

Woodsongs Old-Time Radio Hour 116 

Rager, Mose 22, 23 

Ragged Edge Community Theatre 111 

Rector, Steve 24 

Red Bird Mission Crafts 73 

Red Dog & Company 11 

regions 

eastern 68 

north central 94 

south central 46 

western 18 

Richmond 137 

Richmond Area Arts Council 137 

Ritchie, Jean 82 

Ritter, Patricia 47 

River of Music Party (ROMP) 21 

RiverPark Center 32


Roberts, Elizabeth Madox 91, 154 

Robie Books 102 

Rolley Hole marble game 60 

Rosine 37 


RS Guitarworks 139 

Rubio, Gwyn 141 

S 

sculpture 


Fountain Square in Bowling Green 52 



Lear, Tom 108 



Wooldridge Monuments 31 


Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill 10, 111 

Shelby, Anne 83 

Sheltowee Artisans 16 


Singletary Center for the Arts 122 

Skaggs, Ricky 70 

Somerset 58 

south central region 46 

South Union Shaker community 10 

Speed Art Museum 128, 129 

square dance 70, 71 

Stage One Children’s Theatre 126 

state parks 

Barren River Lake State Resort Park 

58 

Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park 

136 

Cumberland Falls State Resort Park 

74 

Jenny Wiley State Resort Park 77 

John James Audubon State Park 25, 

26 

Kentucky Horse Park 116 

Stevie Ray’s Blues Bar 128 

Stewart, Al 83 

Stewart Home School 1792 Store 110 

Still, James 82, 88, 91 

storytelling 

artists 17 


cave guide traditions 49 



Paramount Joe ghost stories 72 



Shaker ghost stories 11 

Stuart, Jesse 82, 91, 92 

studios, open 

Gastineau Jewelers 98 



Survant, Joe 62, 63, 67 

Swanson Reed Contemporary 129 

Swinson, Ken 133, 134 

symphonies. See orchestras 

T 

Tate, Allen 38, 41, 44, 91, 141, 156 

Taylor, Richard 141, 158 

175

176 

Tevis, Walter 141 

theaters. See also performing arts 

Alhambra Theatre 15, 25 

Capitol Arts Center 15, 51, 52 

Grand Theatre 15, 110 

Historic State Theatre Complex 15, 

109 


Kentucky Repertory Theatre at Horse 

Cave 54, 55 

Kentucky Theatre 15, 116 

Leeds Center for the Arts 15 

Lyric Theatre 15, 120 


Paramount Arts Center 15, 72, 73 

Plaza Theatre 15, 54 


restored Art Deco theaters 15 

Theatre Workshop of Owensboro 33 

The Bookstore 137 

The Weavery 11 

Thompson, Chris 50 

Thompson, Hunter S. 159 

thumbpicking 

birthplace 22 


Drakesboro City Hall 22 

National Thumbpickers Hall of Fame 

24 


Tompkinsville 61 

Top Drawer Gallery 102 

towns. See cities 

Travis, Merle 22 

True Kentucky 111 

U 

University of Kentucky Art Museum 122 

V 

Versailles 138 

Vine Grove 138 


visual arts. See also galleries; See 

also museums 



Center 103 

Frank Duveneck Arts and Cultural 

Center 106 

guilds 16 



Loudoun House 113, 117 


Ohio Valley Art League 24 

VSA Kentucky 50 

W 

Waddell, Leona 59 


Walker, Frank X 83, 141, 160 

Warren A. May Woodworker 102 

Warren, Robert Penn 38, 44, 91, 155, 

156 

western region 18 

WhaBah Steakhouse 

jams 51 

performances 49

Whitesburg 78 

Wilkinson, Crystal 83 

Williams, Lisa 141 

Winchester 139 

Winter Wonderland 32 

Woodford Theatre 138 

Woodsongs Old-Time Radio Hour 116 

Wooldridge Monuments 31 

writers. See literary artists 

Y 

Yeiser Art Center 35, 36 

Yoakam, Dwight 70 

Z 

Zephyr Gallery 131 

177

178 

Acknowledgments 

Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” from 

Collected Poems, Counterpoint Press, 1985, is 

reprinted with permission. 

George Ella Lyon’s “With a Song in His Heart,” soon 

to be published in a collection titled She Let Herself Go, 

LSU Press, is reprinted with permission. 

Bobbie Ann Mason’s excerpt from Spence + Lila, 

Harper & Row Publishers, 1988, is reprinted with 

permission. 

Gurney Norman’s “Vision,” 1974, is reprinted with 

permission. 

Jesse Stuart’s excerpt from The Thread That Runs So 

True is reprinted with permission from the Jesse Stuart 

Foundation. 

Frank X Walker’s “Anniversary” from Black Box: Poems, 

Old Cove Press, 2005, is reprinted with permisson. 

Information about selected literary artists was 

adapted from: 

The Kentucky Encyclopedia, John Kleber, Editor-in 

Chief, The University Press of Kentucky, 1992. 

The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of 

Writing in the Bluegrass State, Wade Hall, Editor, 

The University Press of Kentucky, 2005.

Discover More Art Online 

The Kentucky Arts Council makes it easy to find artists of the 

highest caliber whose work has been recognized for artistic 

excellence by independent panels of arts professionals. Visit 

our online directories (http://artistdirectory.ky.gov/) to discover 

the rich diversity of the commonwealth’s professional artists. 

Architectural Artists—features Kentucky artists whose work 

includes architectural installations, custom-made fixtures and 

uniquely crafted home accessories. 

Arts Education Roster—features teaching artists of all disciplines 

who have the skills and training to be resident artists in 

schools and communities. 

Kentucky Crafted—recognizes and promotes traditional and 

contemporary craft and visual art of the highest quality. 

Performing Arts Directory—showcases some of the 

commonwealth’s finest performing artists available for 

bookings and performance-related projects. 

Something to Add? 

The Kentucky Arts Council is in the process 

of migrating the information in this book to 

its website (www.artscouncil.ky.gov). The online 

version will include interactive maps and 

more extensive information. If you have corrections 

or additions to the information in this 

book, please contact us at kyarts@ky.gov. 

1

Lexington… - Kentucky Arts Council

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