The Rounder Founders

Both Ken Irwin and Marian Leighton were living in Ithaca, New York at the time. Inspired by the new organization in Boston, they launched the similarly named Ithaca Area Friends of Bluegrass and Old-Time Country Music, clearly modeled after BAF. In their case, they received some modest funding from Cornell. For a while, they also did a weekly Sunday morning radio show there, Salt Creek, on WVBR. Among the shows they put on were ones by Joe Val and by the Contraband Country Band (which evolved into Country Cooking), as well as a supergroup with Red Allen, Frank Wakefield, Don Stover, Tex Logan, and Bob Tidwell. 

Bill Nowlin, meanwhile, continued a weekly night-time show he had been doing on the MIT radio station, which then had the call letters WTBS: Give the Fiddler A Dram. He recalls going to Nancy’s second-floor apartment on Putnam Avenue in Cambridge several times over the next couple of years to help with mailings for Boston Area Friends. 

On October 25, 1970, the Rounders all attended the BAF show at the Freshman Union – and had their first two albums to sell, the first two albums on the Rounder label. Both albums were officially released that very month.  

The first BAF show that earned mention in the Boston Globe was in 1971 on Sunday January 19 at the Harvard Freshman Union, an event dubbed “a real ‘do’.”  The show ran from 1 PM to 8 PM and featured Don Stover and the White Oak Mountain Boys, Spark Gap Wonder Boys, Hudson Valley Boys, Mother Bay State Entertainers, Devil’s Dream, Sakonnet River String Band, Gene Yellin, Andy Statman & Kenny Kosek. ¹⁰

It cost $3.00, but was family friendly. A couple could attend for $5.00 and children were free.  

On February 21, BAF followed with a 3 PM show featuring Frank Wakefield and John Herald and the Greenbriar Boys. For that one, the Globe advised, “ticket purchasers will dine on Cokes, coffee and home-baked surprises.”

There was a pickin’ party on the last day of April. That cost one dollar.

An attempt to launch a New England Bluegrass Festival for July 16-18 fell victim to a bank foreclosure on a site in Escoheag, Rhode Island, and denial of a health permit at an alternate site in Warren, Massachusetts. ¹¹

Undeterred, Boston Area Friends returned on October 10 with a show at the Freshman Union featuring Eddie Adcock, Jimmy Gaudreau and the II Generation. On November 14, they presented Red Smiley and the Tennessee Cut-Ups. In early December, Frank Wakefield, John Herald and Greenbriar Boys returned. One week later, on the 12^th, BAF presented Clint Howard and Fiddlin’ Fred Price.

On January 23, 1972, there was a “bluegrass band competition.” In mid-April, Frank Wakefield came back again, this time with Don Stover; they held mandolin and banjo workshops. Boston Area Friends staged a larger show, at Harvard’s Sanders Theater, starring Doc Watson on April 22. The price was stiffer: $3.50. 

There was a May show featuring Mud Acres – the name adopted by a group of musicians from the Woodstock area who released their first album that month on Rounder Records, the label’s ninth release. Jim Rooney, Maria Muldaur, Happy and Artie Traum, and John Herald were among those performing.  

On November 11, Boston Area Friends offered a Sunday afternoon show at The New Theater (12 Holyoke Street) with the Lilly Brothers, Don Stover, and Tex Logan. They took out a small advertisement in the Globe to announce that one. On the night after Christmas, there was a half-hour television show on Channel 44’s Catch 44 program featuring the organization.  

BAF shifted venues to a site off Cambridge Common in early 1973, to the First Church Congregational – which was always portrayed by lovers of the music as “the big brown church with the rooster on top.” The church was at the corner of Garden and Mason Streets and dates its own history all the way back to 1636. 

The February 26, 1973 show featured the Spark Gap Wonder Boys and an open jam session. Nancy’s sister Bar ran the food room at the Sunday gatherings. 

A March 11 show was declared “Bill Monroe Day” by Boston Mayor Kevin White, and a show with Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys was announced for Rindge Technical School Auditorium in Cambridge. Monroe received a silver punchbowl on behalf of the mayor, with the inscription “One man’s genius, a gift to us all.”  ¹²

There were no notices of BAF shows in the Globe for almost a year and a letter to the editor of the newspaper in February 1974 asked if there was a group in the area encouraging bluegrass. Yes, was the response, “a loosely structured all-volunteer group of people who sponsor and promote concerts and shows of authentic southern music.”¹³

On September 29, Larry Sparks and the Lonesome Ramblers played at the church.

On November 30, a show listed as 2 PM to midnight had Don Stover and the White Oak Mountain Boys. Lightning Express, Tasty Licks, and others.

Fred Bartenstein graduated from Harvard in 1974 and left the Boston area in December 1974.¹⁴ Fred went on to continue to work with bluegrass, but from the Dayton, Ohio area. Nancy did have him return to emcee at the Berkshire Mountain Bluegrass Festival. In 2006, the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) honored him with its Distinguished Achievement Award. Later, and for more than eight years, he headed up the IBMA Foundation which has distributed several hundred thousand dollars in grants. He has written, edited, or co-edited six books on bluegrass and related topics and has taught country and bluegrass music history at the University of Dayton.

Before he left, though, there was another MC ready to take his place – 14-year-old David Hershey-Webb. David recalled, “My mother [Susan Hershey] somehow met Fred Bartenstein. I don’t know how. Maybe because she went to one of the concerts. She became friends with Fred and then I started going to the shows. I was probably 13, 14. We would set up the food. That was my favorite thing (laughs). The great brownies.”  He became the MC for BAF shows – something of a child prodigy. “I started very young. Very young. Absurdly young.”¹⁵

Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys headlined a January 25, 1976, show at the church, their first in the area for 10 years. Admission had climbed to $4.50. BAF was said at the time to sponsor two radio shows and be planning “New England’s first major bluegrass festival for July 30, 31 and Aug. 1 in the Berkshires.” Once again, and on very short notice, the planned site fell through but the Henry Rothvoss family in Ancram, New York (just over the Massachusetts border) offered their farm as an alternative site, and the festival went on –  drawing 3,500 – with Bill Monroe, the Osborne Brothers, Jim and Jesse, the Lilly Brothers, Red Allen, and J.D. Crowe and the New South. Nancy Talbott grinned, “A festival like this draws the real bluegrass people who are a special breed of insanity.”¹⁶

David Hershey-Webb worked on it with her. “Nancy and I spent millions of hours together.  Literally. We put together the program for the first Berkshire Festival. I spent many, many, many hours with her. Many hours.”

Nancy herself was featured in Steve Morse’s Boston Globe column on September 14. By that time, BAF was registered as an educational, non-profit Massachusetts corporation. Nancy pursued promoting bluegrass in the area with what Morse called “messianic zeal.” She said, “I’ve gone to Nashville and driven guys up here to do a show because I wouldn’t get them otherwise. Southerners are home-oriented, and sometimes you have to drag and pull them up here.”¹⁷

She hosted a radio show at the time, Breakfast Jamboree on Newton radio station WNTN. It ran from 6 to 10 AM on Saturdays. Listeners could then turn to WHRB, where Hillbilly at Harvard ran from 10 AM to 1 PM, hosted for the previous 10 years by “Ol’ Sinc” Brian Sinclair (from Maine, he worked in the employee relations department at Harvard) and “Cousin” Lynn Joiner (a Maryland native and anthropology graduate student at Harvard.) “Ol Sinc” – as he was also known – died of leukemia on December 28, 2002. At the time, Sinclair (who had graduated from Harvard with a degree in French) was also the chief civilian administrator at the Harvard University Police Department. ¹⁸

Into the year 2026, Cousin Lynn has faithfully continued to host Hillbilly at Harvard every Saturday morning, though switching to remote broadcasts in 2020 due to that year’s pandemic.¹⁹

Dan Marcus, one of the group of 22 who signed the September 1976 first announcement of the Boston Bluegrass Union, recalled Nancy Talbott: “I met Nancy and knew her for a few years. I was involved with some of her efforts, and then some of the first festivals she put on. Putnam Avenue, I remember it well.  

“She would put on shows in one of the Harvard buildings – the Freshman Union – and she would bring in our heroes of bluegrass. It was beyond belief, how she was able to pull these folks in. Fred [Bartenstein] was very involved. I just remember the people who came in… and the appreciative crowds. There was such high energy, and it was so exciting.” He remembered the pickin’ parties, too, as offering “a relatively intimate environment where you could really listen and just get into it with the musicians, because they were right there in front of you.”

“I give her a lot of credit for that. She did work hard.”²⁰

Footnotes –

10.  A new record label – Rounder Records, based in neighboring Somerville, had released its first two albums in October 1970. One of them was by The Spark Gap Wonder Boys (Rounder 0002). 
11. Ernie Santosuosso, “Intown: Bluegrass fete out,” Boston Globe, July 9, 1971: 19.
12. Bruce Sylvester, “Bill Monroe concert a bluegrass celebration,” Boston Globe, March 17, 1973: 36.
13. The response added, “They run pickin’ parties and offer lessons on banjo, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, and Autoharp and bass. A membership fee of $5 a year gets you on their mailing list of concert dates, record catalogues and discounts. Discounted lessons are also available to members. Write to Nancy Talbott at 238 Putnam av., Cambridge 02139 for more information.” “Ask the Globe,” Boston Globe, February 4, 1974: 2.
14. He was a Social Studies major, for whom urban policing had been an area of academic interest. Professor Gary Marx sent me to Dayton in 1971 to visit and write about remarkable innovations in the police department there. On several trips to Dayton, I stayed with bluegrass friends I’d met on the bluegrass circuit, notably Mary Jo Leet (then Dickman). Through her I was introduced to my wife Joy, who knew the Allen Brothers and David Harvey, who lived in the same housing project as she did. That’s how I got involved in the Dayton bluegrass scene (from which Frank Wakefield and Joe Isaacs had also emerged). I left Massachusetts in December of 1974 to take a temporary job in the Policy Bureau at the Dayton Police Department. From there I moved to the City Manager’s Office, and I’ve been here ever since.”
15. Interview with David Hershey-Webb on March 3, 2025.
16. Steve Morse, “Bluegrass in the Berkshires,” Boston Globe, August 5, 1976: 28. Nancy ran festivals on the farm through 1981, and then in other locations through 1985. See Calvin Knickerbocker, “Ancramdale – the Cradle of Northern Bluegrass,” New Pine Plains Herald, July 27, 2023. https://www.newpineplainsherald.org/articles/local-history/ancramdale-the-cradle-of-northern-bluegrass
17. Morse, “Nancy Talbott sowed bluegrass in Boston.”
18. Maria S. Pedroza, “Harvard Radio’s ‘Hillbilly’ Dies at 62,” Harvard Crimson, January 6, 2003.
19. Lynn was in the Class of 1961 at Harvard, and did his first Hillbilly at Harvard show in 1959. He had a show of his own on WHRB which preceded Hillbilly at Harvard. “I was doing another show before Hillbilly at the time – in ’59 and ‘60 – with Cousin Mike Eisenstadt, who was a graduate student at the time: Saturday Morning Jamboree.” Lynn left the Boston area for several years – including time doing field work in Nepal – but returned around 1975 an joined the Hillbilly crew after Dave Schmalz departed. Interview with Lynn Joiner on October 12, 2025.
20. Author interview with Dan Marcus on December 22, 2025.