Thirty fiddlers, one muddy porch, zero pretension—this is American roots music at its rawest.
Captures the music and mood of the 1972 old time music festival 1973 held at the home of brothers John and Dave Morris in Ivydale, West Virginia. These annual "back porch" festivals were famous for their outstanding fiddle, banjo, and ballad music, as well as for their persistent rain and mud. About thirty musicians are featured.
Production
No budget, no crew, just pure documentary instinct.
Sound
Field recordings capture rain, laughter, and unamplified strings.
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
These Morris festivals ran annually from 1968-1980, creating an informal archive of Appalachian string band traditions that commercial bluegrass had largely abandoned.
The 1972-73 footage was shot on 16mm by an unknown filmmaker who never returned—leaving this as a ghost documentary with no credited director, only discovered in archives decades later.
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