Letter from Kelli Shay Hix to the Carter Family Fold Board

----- Original Message -----
From: Kelli Hix
To: howiebear1@embarqmail.com ; josephsmd@aol.com ; rita_j_forrester@wellmont.org ; vicki.virts@vdot.virginia.gov ; info@bryantlabel.com ; localfleur@comcast.net ; mclain@mail.etsu.edu
Cc: friends.fold@yahoo.com
Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2008 1:03 PM
Subject: Carter Fold Collections

Dear Carter Family Fold Board members,

My name is Kelli Hix. I am a moving image archivist, a musician, and a lover of country and roots music. Like so many other people, it was the music of the Carter Family that opened up the vast world of American roots music to me many years ago. This music greatly influenced the direction I took not only with the music that I make, but with my occupation and my daily life-- and I would like to thank you for the Carter Fold and for your work keeping music a living part of our culture.

A few years ago I was able to make a trip to the Carter Fold. What struck me the most about the experience was the dialogue between the performers and the audience. The passing on of music and dance that occurred was remarkable. Such a personal exchange of tradition is rare in our current culture. For better or for worse, it seems to me that recorded media has become a method as vital for sharing and passing down culture and tradition as the traveling storyteller or the family musicians were in times past. My belief in this is so firm that I have dedicated most aspects of my personal and professional life toward it.

As an archivist with great respect for both the Carter Fold and the Southern Folklife Collection at University of North Carolina, I would urge you to continue a partnership with the UNC archives in the interest of the longevity of your audio collection. This partnership would allow for the care of this fragile original media, and allow for the copying of it onto formats with greater longevity, while keeping the rights of the material in the heart of the Carter Fold where they belong.

As an artist, I know firsthand that it is a very difficult decision to trust an institution with objects that are highly personal. Yet, every day in my 7 1/2 years as an archivist, I have seen the evidence of the fragility of recorded media. Even in conditions that are comfortable for human beings, audio-visual materials suffer and are subject to vast decreases in their longevity. With all of this material, time is of the essence. A great amount of infrastructure (including environmentally controlled vaults, new casings, special equipment for playback and inspection, etc.) must already be in place before this longevity can be increased. And even when the original object lasts, it takes a trained staff and an even greater expense and amount of infrastructure to clean, catalog, and transfer such material so that its content can be made available. Such a task is great, but certainly not impossible.

Thank you again for your time with this letter, and for your work at the Carter Fold. There is truly no place like it in the world.

Sincerely,

Kelli Shay Hix
Moving Image Archivist, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

(The thoughts and opinions in this letter are solely my own, and do not reflect those of the institution for which I work.)

Kelli Hix is the Moving Image Archivist at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee. She is a 2002 graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Preservation in Rochester, New York. Before her move to Nashville, Kelli was Film Archivist and Archival Projectionist at the George Eastman House.