Courtesy of the Reed family

Nettie and Henry Reed

Fiddler’s convention

• Where: Glen Lyn town park
• When: Today and Saturday
• Cost: $6, Friday; $7, Saturday; $10, competitors

Newspaper clippings, letters, black-and-white family photographs and marriage and birth certificates have all wound up in one of the Reed family scrapbooks over the years.

Each piece of the Reed history points to the survival of a strong musical tradition.

Fiddler Henry Reed, who lived in the Giles County town of Glen Lyn, died in 1968. He was lauded at the end of his life and in the years since for his knowledge of songs that had been forgotten elsewhere.

His life and music will be celebrated today as the fourth annual Henry Reed Memorial Fiddlers Convention kicks off in Glen Lyn's town park.

The youngest of his 12 children, Alfred Dean Reed, remains active in the effort to spread music. He and his twin brother, Avery Gene Reed, now live in Rich Creek.

The family's passion for music has its roots in the late 1800s, when Henry Reed was growing up in West Virginia.

He started out learning music from Quince Dillon, who had been a fife player during the Civil War.

Henry's mother was American Indian, said Dean Reed. "She didn't believe in that kind of music."

Nevertheless, Henry Reed continued to play, learning his way around the guitar, banjo and harmonica, in addition to the fiddle.

And in the years following, Reed taught music to neighborhood children.

The Reed family continues to help spread music to children. All of the proceeds of the two-day fiddlers convention help underprivileged children who want to learn music.

"That's what Daddy always wanted," Dean Reed said. "I wish he could see it now."

The Reed home was filled with music. During the Korean War of the 1950s, when Dean Reed was serving as a soldier in the Army, he would often bring home two or three companions on leave. Family and friends would come over and join his father, who would be playing the fiddle.

"All of the neighbors and a lot of people would be here, and the soldiers couldn't believe it," he said. "All these people to play music ... we had a great time."

Later, when Dean Reed was in his 30s, he made regular appearances playing music on "Country Jamboree," a weekly show on WHIS-TV in Bluefield, W.Va.

Dean Reed said he had an opportunity to chase a career in music in Tennessee, but he turned down the offer.

He needed his family, he said, "more than I needed that down there."

One of his sons passed away at a young age from cancer.

"Everything hasn't been always like we wanted it to," he said.

Reed continued to work for the Celanese Acetate plant, logging a total of 46 years there.

In the meantime, his father's music was spreading among fans of old-time music. In the 1960s, Alan Jabbour, a fiddler and graduate student at Duke University, began making weekend trips to Glen Lyn to learn Henry Reed's music. Jabbour's band recorded albums that featured songs learned from Reed, and the albums became popular among younger old-time musicians.

Jabbour went on to become the founding director of the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center, which now maintains "Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection." The collection, accessible online, includes 184 selections.

In January 2001, the Library of Congress endowed The Henry Reed Fund of Folk Artists for the purpose of "preserving the legacy of old-time folk music," said Terry Reed, Dean Reed's son, a software engineer in Herndon who returns each year for the convention.

"I think Daddy would be the happiest person in the world" seeing how his music has spread around the globe, Dean Reed said. People from almost every state in the United States attend the convention in Glen Lyn each year.

Jabbour has played an active role in the convention, and conducts fiddling workshops there.

"We're all happy and we're all proud," said Dean Reed.

Visit the Web site maintained by Terry Reed at www.henryreed.org. The Library of Congress Henry Reed collection is at memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/reed/. The festival Web site is www.gilesmountainstringband.com