Old Granny Hare by William Ernest Bird (1925)
CD 4, track 24
William Ernest Bird (1890-1975) was a lifelong North Carolina educator, who taught at Cullowhee Normal and Industrial School as it evolved into Western Carolina University. Bird was an English department head, dean, and a temporary president of the university. Here he is early in his career singing a folksong, “Old Granny Hare,” on a field recording made by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1925 in Asheville. Gordon had just moved from California back to Harvard and was on sabbatical documenting on cylinder the musical traditions of the southeastern seaboard states.
