The guitar’s history is a story of people: the musicians who carried its traditions forward, the teachers who opened doors, and the communities that gave their music a home. Here in East Tennessee, that story connects concert stages, radio broadcasts, front porches, and classrooms to a much wider musical world. Knoxville Classical Guitar is pleased to introduce The East Tennessee Guitar Heritage Project, an educational initiative exploring these connections through historical articles and guitarist profiles. The history that follows offers a starting point for discovering how classical, fingerstyle, and folk traditions have influenced one another and continue to shape what we hear today.

In 1971, Larry Long founded the guitar society that became Knoxville Classical Guitar. That date begins the story of our organization. It also gives us a place to ask a larger question: how did classical guitar and the fingerstyle traditions of folk and country music come to share a community in East Tennessee?

Long’s work offers an answer. He taught guitar privately and at the University of Tennessee, was a prolific composer for classical and fingerstyle guitar, and served as the society’s president and program director from 1971 to 2002. His own collection, Conversation Pieces, is described by its publisher as classical and folk in style, with music presented in both notation and tablature. Andy LeGrand identifies Conversation Pieces as Long’s best-known collection. Teaching, composing and bringing people together were closely connected parts of his musical life.[1]

That connection continues in the people who gather around Knoxville Classical Guitar today. To understand it, we can follow the musicians and the ways their music traveled: through lessons and printed music, through radio, and into rooms where people could listen together.

Classical guitar finds an American home

The American classical-guitar story reaches back well before the famous twentieth-century concert soloists. Justin Holland, a nineteenth-century Black guitarist and teacher, helped build that culture through his arrangements and instructional work. His published music belongs to an American guitar world that was already learning from European repertoire while developing its own teachers and audiences.[2]

Holland was born to free Black parents in Norfolk County, Virginia, in 1819. He moved to Massachusetts as a teenager, later attended Oberlin’s Preparatory Department, and established himself as a guitar teacher in Cleveland, Ohio, around 1845. His musical career unfolded alongside participation in the antislavery movement and Black political conventions. He lived until 1887, helping shape American guitar teaching during a period when slavery and racial exclusion restricted opportunities for Black Americans.[3]

His Comprehensive Method for the Guitar appeared in 1874, followed by the more compact Modern Method in 1876. The surviving Comprehensive Method takes students from musical fundamentals and hand position into alternating fingers, arpeggios, slurs and harmonics. Such detail gives us a sense of the work behind the printed page: a teacher explaining how to coordinate the hands, produce a clear sound and understand the instrument. These were subjects for sustained study in American guitar lessons well before the twentieth-century concert revival.[3]

Holland’s arrangements show what those players could make of their studies. In his contemporary account, James M. Trotter describes collections of operatic selections, songs and instrumental pieces, including variations on Home, Sweet Home and The Carnival of Venice. Familiar melodies could become substantial guitar solos, giving players opportunities to develop expression and technique through music they already knew. His teaching and arranging helped place that repertoire within reach of people who encountered the guitar through a lesson or a piece of sheet music.[3]

In the early twentieth century, William Foden and Vahdah Olcott-Bickford continued that work. Their teaching methods made serious study available beyond a personal lesson with a celebrated performer. Olcott-Bickford also helped establish the American Guitar Society in Los Angeles in 1923. A society gave players somewhere to bring the music they had been practicing alone.[4]

William Foden was born in St. Louis in 1860 and began his musical studies on the violin before turning to the guitar. His teachers included Jeremiah McGrath and William O. Bateman. His pupil George C. Krick later described a repertoire grounded in composers such as Sor, Giuliani and Mertz. In 1911, Foden toured with mandolinist Giuseppe Pettine and banjoist Fred Bacon, then continued teaching and composing in the New York area. His career gives us a glimpse of concert guitar within a wider world of fretted-instrument teachers and touring ensembles.[5]

Foden’s two-volume Grand Method appeared in 1920 and 1921. He also taught through the musical press. In his October 1923 “Guitarists’ Round Table” column in Crescendo magazine, he explained that a guitarist might repeat a finger on successive notes to leave other fingers ready for an approaching chord. He connected the angle and movement of the fingers with tone, then referred readers to his method for fuller instruction. A player far from his studio could encounter his ideas in a magazine and pursue them in a book.[5]

His arrangements included Alice, Where Art Thou? and Annie Laurie, familiar melodies expanded into introductions, variations and finales. Krick’s account also describes Foden’s tremolo playing, in which repeated melody notes continued above a thumb accompaniment. The interest lay in what one player could make audible at once, with distinct musical parts emerging from the same instrument.[5]

Olcott-Bickford’s career gives this history another long personal thread. Born Ethel Lucretia Olcott in Ohio in 1885, she grew up in Los Angeles, studied with George C. Lindsey, and spent 1903–04 studying with Manuel Y. Ferrer in Berkeley. She later performed and taught in New York before returning to Los Angeles in 1923. Her education brought her into direct contact with an older generation of guitarists, and she carried that experience into decades of teaching and writing.[6]

Her guitar method, first published in 1921 and revised decades later, shows how carefully she considered a beginner’s experience. In the revised edition’s advice to teachers, she recommends starting with open strings so students can work on the right hand and rhythm before adding the demands of the left. She also asks teachers to play duets with their pupils and demonstrate phrasing and expression. Recalling Ferrer’s practice of playing with his students, she makes the lesson itself a place to hear and share musical ideas.[6]

The American Guitar Society extended that educational work beyond the lesson. Olcott-Bickford became its musical director, and its aims included encouraging compositions, supporting education and establishing funds for scholarships and publications. Through the Zarvah Publishing Company, she and her husband, Zarh Myron Bickford, also helped supply music to society members. The scores and correspondence she preserved are now held at California State University, Northridge. They let us follow the practical work of maintaining a guitar community over many years, from preparing music to exchanging letters with players around the world.[6]

Andrés Segovia’s American appearances in 1928 brought another powerful example of the guitar as a concert instrument. But the quieter work of teachers and local organizations remained essential. A recording could awaken an interest; a teacher could help someone act on it; a concert community could sustain it.[7]

Long belongs in that history. He studied classical guitar with C. I. Maracle of Toronto and earned a music-education degree at the University of Tennessee. His biography connects Knoxville with a wider teaching tradition while grounding his work here. The society’s founding in 1971 gave that work an enduring local home.[1]

Fingerstyle travels through East Tennessee

Country fingerpicking has its own history of musicians learning from one another. In western Kentucky, Merle Travis followed the playing of Mose Rager and Ike Everly at local gatherings. Their approach let a guitarist carry a rhythmic bass accompaniment and a melody at the same time. Travis developed it into a widely influential personal style.[8]

Mose Rager, born in 1911, was a central figure in the thumbpicking tradition around Drakesboro in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. He worked as a coal miner and barber, and also played professionally with artists including Grandpa Jones, Curly Fox and Texas Ruby. His playing helped shape Travis, and the Country Music Hall of Fame’s oral-history collection preserves his recollections of that influence. Rager’s career reminds us how much of a musical tradition can develop among players whose names are less familiar than those of their successors.[9]

Ike Everly carried the western Kentucky tradition into his family’s musical life. The father of Don and Phil Everly was an accomplished fingerstyle guitarist before his sons became famous. After working in Chicago, he moved to Iowa, where his appearances on KMA radio in Shenandoah grew into a family act. The Everlys moved to Knoxville in 1953 and performed on local radio, giving this Kentucky guitar story a direct East Tennessee connection. During those years, Don and Phil developed as a duo, and Ike’s friendship with Chet Atkins helped open opportunities in Nashville.[9]

Travis brought the sound he had absorbed at home to increasingly large audiences. His characteristic approach combined rhythmic playing on the lower strings with his thumb and melody on the higher strings with his index finger. By 1938, he was appearing on Cincinnati’s WLW with the Drifting Pioneers. He moved to California in 1944 and signed with Capitol in 1946, building a career as a singer, songwriter and guitarist. His success carried a regional way of playing into commercial recordings and national entertainment, while its roots remained in the musicians and communities of western Kentucky.[8]

Radio made that sound available to musicians far from Kentucky. Chet Atkins, born in Luttrell in 1924, heard Travis over Cincinnati’s WLW while living with his father in Georgia. He worked out his own variation, using his thumb and two fingers. The young East Tennessean was learning across a distance, through careful listening.[10]

Knoxville became an important part of that education. Atkins worked at WNOX with Bill Carlisle and Archie Campbell, and station executive Lowell Blanchard began featuring his guitar playing on the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round. The station’s record library gave him more music to explore. He later returned to WNOX, working with Homer & Jethro and then Maybelle and the Carter Sisters before continuing toward Nashville.[10] Homer & Jethro paired guitarist Henry “Homer” Haynes with mandolinist Kenneth “Jethro” Burns, combining song parodies and deadpan humor with skilled instrumental playing; Burns was also an accomplished jazz musician. “Mother” Maybelle had been part of the original Carter Family trio with A. P. and Sara Carter. Her “Carter Scratch” put the melody on the guitar’s bass strings with the thumb while the index finger brushed the higher strings for rhythm. The Carter Sisters were her daughters Helen, June and Anita; June later became known as June Carter Cash. Atkins joined their act as lead guitarist, accompanying them from Knoxville to KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, before their move to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry in 1950.[11]

The Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round made live music part of everyday life in East Tennessee. Hosted by Lowell Blanchard, WNOX’s lunchtime variety show ran from 1936 to 1961. In its downtown years, audiences crowded into the station’s Gay Street auditorium, while the broadcast carried performances to listeners around the region. Country music shared the program with comedy, jazz and swing. The show helped launch artists including Roy Acuff, Kitty Wells and Don Gibson. For a developing guitarist such as Atkins, it offered a public stage within a working community of musicians and entertainers.[12]

Knoxville was one of the places where Atkins worked, listened and developed. His example helps explain why a country fingerstyle player here might be curious about music beyond the repertoire they first learned.

Folk and blues offer other paths into that curiosity. Elizabeth Cotten’s left-handed playing on a guitar strung for a right-handed player produced a distinctive fingerpicking approach. Her recordings and appearances helped bring her music to the folk-revival audience. Her story reminds us that fingerstyle includes individual solutions shaped by different lives, rather than one technique handed down unchanged.[13]

Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Cotten taught herself banjo and guitar as a child, practicing on her brother’s instruments before saving enough to buy a guitar of her own. She composed Freight Train when she was about eleven or twelve, decades before it reached a large audience. Marriage, family responsibilities and church life interrupted her music-making, and her professional career began much later.[13]

While working in a Washington, D.C., department store, Cotten helped reunite a lost Peggy Seeger with her mother, composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. Cotten subsequently worked in the Seeger household, where the family eventually heard her playing. Mike Seeger recorded her, and Folkways released her debut album in 1958, when she was already in her sixties. Those recordings preserved both her compositions and a varied repertoire of songs and instrumental pieces.[13][14]

Her approach also rewards close listening. Holding a right-handed guitar in the opposite orientation allowed her to pick treble strings with her thumb and bass strings with her fingers. This recognizable arrangement became known as “Cotten style,” although her repertoire included several guitar techniques rather than a single fixed pattern.[14]

Knoxville in 1971

The year Long founded the society contains a remarkable second guitar story. On June 4 and 5, 1971, the Chet Atkins Guitar Festival took place at Knoxville’s Civic Coliseum. Alongside its country and folk performers, it included a classical-guitar competition. Cash Box reported Laurie Randolph, Anisa Angarola and David Starobin as the classical division’s three winners.[15]

The three classical prizewinners went on to pursue distinct careers. Laurie Randolph’s work spanned guitar, viola da gamba, composition, teaching and music theatre. In Berlin, she worked with the Leo Kestenberg Musikschule; her surviving archive includes compositions, arrangements and guitar-teaching materials. Anisa Angarola, a University of Southern California graduate and student of Pepe Romero, was a founding member of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. She later formed the Angarola Guitar Quartet to commission new works and also performed and recorded Celtic music. David Starobin became an advocate for contemporary guitar music, with hundreds of works dedicated to him. He founded Bridge Records in 1981, building a parallel career as a performer and record producer, and helped establish the guitar program at the Curtis Institute of Music in 2011.[16]

The festival was a separate organization. There is no established organizational connection between it and Long’s new society. Its significance here is that classical and country guitarists were already being brought into the same Knoxville event in the society’s founding year.

There were precedents elsewhere. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Club 47 presented Andrew Caponigro playing Bach, Sor, Tárrega and Villa-Lobos in March 1964.

Caponigro also taught classical and jazz guitar in the Boston area, advertising lessons in Broadside. The magazine’s review of his March 15 recital describes a musician building an appreciative following, who introduced selections with spoken commentary. Its reviewer particularly admired his Tárrega playing and described Villa-Lobos as his specialty. The program also included lute transcriptions. These details show how a performer could introduce a folk-club audience to a substantial range of classical guitar music.[17]

Its broader calendar also included Elizabeth Cotten, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, the blues singer and guitarist known for his gentle singing and intricate fingerpicking, and Merle Travis.[17] Across the Atlantic, advertisements for London’s Les Cousins in the 1960s placed recurring classical-guitar evenings in the same club world as John Renbourn, Bert Jansch and Davy Graham.[18]

John Renbourn brought classical guitar technique and an interest in medieval and Renaissance music to the steel-string guitar. Bert Jansch, a Scottish guitarist and songwriter, developed a distinctive fingerstyle approach blending folk, blues and jazz; his 1965 debut helped establish his reputation. The two went on to co-found Pentangle in 1967. Davy Graham had also studied classical guitar before exploring folk, blues, jazz and other traditions. His instrumental Angi, also widely known as Anji, became an influential piece for fingerstyle players, and he helped popularize the alternative tuning DADGAD. Their overlapping interests help explain the musical atmosphere in which classical repertoire and exploratory folk guitar could find listeners within the same London scene.[19]

Those examples give the local story useful perspective. Musicians did not need to play the same repertoire to share a venue or an audience. A listener could arrive because of one artist and discover another kind of guitar music worth following. Knoxville’s story belongs to this wider history of musical communities making room for curiosity.

The connection lives in the community

Some people in the Knoxville Classical Guitar community attend Chet Atkins Appreciation Society gatherings, play folk and country fingerstyle, also play classical repertoire, and come to KCG concerts. Their musical lives already bring these traditions together. The overlap is something people practice and enjoy, as well as something we can trace historically.[20]

For these listeners, a classical recital and a fingerstyle performance can invite related kinds of attention. How does a guitarist keep a melody singing while another part continues underneath? How much can change with the weight of a note or the space before the next phrase? Those questions can lead us toward Bach, a country instrumental, or a songwriter’s accompaniment without making their musical languages interchangeable.

KCG’s current mission explicitly includes classical and fingerstyle performance, education and community. That breadth gives people with different starting points a reason to keep listening to one another.[20]

The nylon-string guitar provides another point of contact. It is closely associated with classical repertoire, but string material does not determine what a musician plays. A familiar folk tune or an original song can also become a way to explore its sound.

Knoxville based guitar company, FlintMeryl, brings that question into the local instrument conversation. Its ONE FLEX is a nylon-string guitar described for both fingerstyle players and nylon-string enthusiasts. That is a practical invitation to explore an instrument across musical interests. The useful question for a player is what they want to hear and how an instrument responds to their touch. A label on a guitar cannot answer that for them.[21]

Hearing the history now

The coming weeks offer several ways to experience these connections around Knoxville.

On Sunday, October 25, 2026, at 3 p.m., KCG presents Leonela Alejandro at the Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan. The 2024 Guitar Foundation of America Rose Augustine Grand Prize winner brings the contemporary classical concert tradition into the local listening community.[22]

On Wednesday, October 28, at 7 p.m., Muriel Anderson leads a guitar workshop through LeGrand Music at the Fountain City Art Center. Anderson’s own education connects these histories directly: she studied with Christopher Parkening and Chet Atkins. Her account of what she learned from Parkening emphasizes tone and phrasing; her musical influences also include Doc Watson and Leo Kottke. A workshop makes that exchange personal, giving players a chance to ask how ideas from different musicians can enter their own playing.[23]

On Friday, November 6, LeGrand Music Studios presents Jess Kerber and Will Orchard in concert at the Fountain City Art Center.[24]

Then, on Saturday, November 7, at 7 p.m., Jess Kerber and Will Orchard appear in KCG’s Artist Circle series for an evening of songwriting and fingerstyle guitar. This is an intimate concert for Artist Circle members.[24] Their place in the program brings the song itself into the conversation, with the guitar supporting words, voices and storytelling.[22]

Together, these events offer a way to hear the history at work. Long’s society began in 1971; the community continues whenever someone comes to listen, brings a question, or carries a new musical idea home. For people who love guitar music, that is a good reason to be in the room.

Across these generations, the guitar has traveled through printed pages, parlors, radio studios, folk clubs and concert halls. Holland and Olcott-Bickford helped people study it; Rager and Everly shared sounds that others carried farther; Cotten revealed possibilities born of her own way of playing. Their stories remind us that a musical tradition grows through the work of individuals and through the communities that make room for them.

Knoxville Classical Guitar gives that ongoing story a place in East Tennessee. The organization Larry Long founded in 1971 can bring a listener into contact with centuries of music and give a student the encouragement to keep playing. In the hands of living musicians, that history is still taking shape. A melody reaches a new audience. An old piece finds a fresh interpretation. Someone hears the guitar differently for the first time. Here in Knoxville, we have the opportunity to receive what earlier musicians made possible and help carry it into the lives of those who will come next.

This history is an invitation to keep exploring. Visit The East Tennessee Guitar Heritage Project to discover individual musicians, follow the connections between their stories, and explore the sources behind the articles. Begin with a familiar name, then let it lead you somewhere unexpected: a recording you have never heard, a composer whose work deserves another look, or a chapter of East Tennessee’s musical life you did not know. Through this Knoxville Classical Guitar initiative, we hope to bring these stories into the present, deepening our appreciation for the instrument and the people who continue to give it a voice.

Sources

1. Larry Long and the society: KCG’s Larry Long Award page; Mel Bay’s author biography and Conversation Pieces listing; Andy LeGrand, personal account, October 18, 2026.

2. Justin Holland: New Music USA’s history of the American classical-guitar repertoire; Library of Congress guide to Black composers.

3. Holland’s life and work: Case Western Reserve University’s Encyclopedia of Cleveland History; James M. Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People, pages 114–130; Boston Public Library scan of Holland’s Comprehensive Method.

4. American teaching and societies: CSUN University Library on American guitar method books; Kathy Acosta Zavala, Soundboard 49 no. 4, page 31 onward.

5. Foden’s career and teaching: George C. Krick, 1939 Etude profile and 1930 profile, printed pages 19–20; William Foden, “Guitarists Round Table,” Crescendo, October 1923; Foden’s Grand Method for Guitar, Book I edition record (1920) and Book II catalog record (1921).

6. Olcott-Bickford’s teaching and society work: CSUN collection guide; American Guitar Society’s historical notes; Vahdah Olcott-Bickford, Method for Classic Guitar, revised edition, p. 5; AGS’s own history.

7. Segovia in America: University of Maryland research appendix on Segovia’s New York concerts.

8. Merle Travis: Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum biography.

9. Rager and Everly: Western Kentucky University’s description of the Rager biography by Nancy Richey and Carlton Jackson; Country Music Hall of Fame’s Rager oral-history catalog; Everly Brothers’ official history; Merle Travis biography (source 8).

10. Chet Atkins: Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum biography.

11. Atkins’s fellow performers: Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Homer & Jethro biography, Carter Family history, Maybelle Carter educational biography and June Carter Cash biography; Chet Atkins biography (source 10).

12. Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round: East Tennessee Historical Society’s WNOX history; Tennessee Encyclopedia’s WNOX entry; Knoxville History Project’s auditorium history.

13. Elizabeth Cotten: Smithsonian Folkways artist biography.

14. Cotten’s recordings and technique: Smithsonian Folkways, debut album catalog and archival Freight Train performance; artist biography (source 13).

15. Knoxville festival: Cash Box, June 26, 1971, printed page 31; archived mirror of the issue.

16. The classical prizewinners: Laurie Randolph’s official memorial and archive; 2021 Frauenmärz programme; Angarola’s own biography; Starobin’s Curtis biography.

17. Caponigro and Hurt: Broadside, March 18, 1964, page 9; Broadside, April 1, 1964, p. 16 (source 18); Smithsonian Folkways liner notes for You’ve Been a Friend to Me, page 37; Mississippi John Hurt Foundation biography.

18. Shared venues: Broadside, April 1, 1964, page 16; FOLK New England Club 47 calendar archive; Melody Maker, January 28, 1967, page 16 and March 26, 1966, page 20.

19. British guitarists: Newcastle University’s account of the Renbourn archive; Jansch’s official biography; Davy Graham, 1991 interview; Topic Records’ original EP notes; Guitar Techniques account.

20. Today’s community: Andy LeGrand, personal account of the KCG community; KCG’s current mission.

21. Nylon strings and FlintMeryl: FlintMeryl’s ONE FLEX product description.

22. KCG dates: KCG’s 2026–27 concerts and events page (accessed October 16, 2026).

23. Muriel Anderson: official tour calendar (accessed October 16, 2026); official biography; My Guitar Heroes description.

24. November 6 and 7 concerts: Andy LeGrand, personal communication, October 18, 2026; KCG’s concerts and events page (source 22).