But first, Kentucky's musical traditions have been passed down for generations, and at Cowan Creek Mountain Music School, students of all ages learn not only how to play these timeless tunes, but also how to keep this rich musical heritage alive.

Let's visit a place where tradition, community, and old-time music come together to create something truly beautiful.

[music playing] If you're coming here to Cowan Music School for the first time, you're going to find a curvy road, and then you're going to start to hear music.

The Cowan Creek Mountain Music School has been going on since 2002.

It's a week-long summer music camp in the heart of Letcher County, Kentucky.

It's a place where people of any age can get together and learn old-time music that comes right from this area.

You can take classes in fiddle, banjo, guitar, dulcimer, mandolin, all the way from beginning to advanced, and learn from the best players there are in this style of music.

It is an opportunity for musicians here locally, across the state, and nationally, and sometimes internationally, who come together to celebrate, learn, practice, and be in community with those who love traditional mountain music.

An inspiration, a catalyst for this would rest with Bev May, a fiddle player who's been at the school for the 25 years.

She had a visit to Ireland.

She saw all these different schools going on.

She just thought, “Well, why can't we do this back in eastern Kentucky?” The summer schools in Ireland have been really important to bringing back their music, which almost went extinct, just like ours.

I took an intermediate film class.

About two-thirds were local kids, and the other third were people from other countries.

It was just beautiful.

The whole community was so much in love with their own culture and their own music, and it really made an impression on me.

When I came home, my mission was to build the audience for old-time music.

If you want to build the audience for old-time music, you've got to make more musicians.

She pulled together a mixture of community organizers, and they got together and created something really from scratch.

They had the space, and they had folks to teach, and it resonated deeply with the community and got an immediate, wonderful turnout.

The first year, we had 75 students.

About half of them were local kids.

They'd never square danced before, most of them.

They'd never heard this music except in the movie, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” They had that connection.

[music playing] We doubled in five years.

I believe it got up to 150 in the fifth year.

I think that it grew so fast at the beginning because people were just hungry for it.

People that were lovers of that style were already somewhat engaged and looking for a way to get involved that was more closely related to the place that music comes from.

That meant a lot to the local community immediately.

It made them feel heard and special, and they had something to offer.

But it also really resonated with people from around the country that were trying to learn old-time music without that deep connection to place.

Old-time music and Appalachian music, traditional folk music, if nothing else, associates the emotion that you feel as you create, perform, remember, pass down, but you associate it with a place and a time.

It's music that is deeply rooted in the people who created it, the people who passed it down, the people who perform and witness it, but also the place you're from.

To me, that's a pretty powerful combination, and I'm not positive that many musical traditions have that.

It looks like Angeline again.

Open 1, 3.

[fiddle playing] One thing that really sets this camp apart is the fact that you're often learning from people for whom this is a lived experience and a living tradition.

I love the intergenerational nature of this camp.

It's so special and so unifying to see five-year-olds literally jamming with 80-year-olds, and that's been that way since the beginning.

Here, the kids are integrated.

As soon as they can play, they're integrated in with the adults, and they're almost the most important part of this.

It is ingrained in our culture and our history here that we respect our elders, and not just that we respect them nicely, neatly on a shelf, but that we engage with them, and we listen with them, and we learn from them.

It's natural that that would come with music.

[music playing] The cultural impact of the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School extends far beyond the week itself and far beyond that place.

There's a recognizable Cowan repertoire that you can see in Kentucky fiddle music across the state.

If there are folks that have come to Cowan before and you hear them jamming, they're going to start calling these Kentucky tunes that have very much been preserved by Cowan.

Many of the masters that teach there come representing a certain repertoire, and then you learn from them, and when they pass on, you're holding on to that language, that shared language that could possibly die out if you don't work to preserve it.

Why that's important, I think, is because these playing styles are, I mean, they're culturally vital, but it's also a living tradition that represents the aesthetic of a specific place and the economy and culture of that place and what it meant to be somewhere in a certain time.

[music playing] These are songs that evoke a particular feeling and an association with people before you, and I think that for young people in particular, knowing that you're part of something larger than yourself, knowing that you're not by yourself, knowing that you have accountability and visibility and responsibility and that people are there to help you too when you need it, that's what community is.

Music has been a part of humanity for millennia.

To really see how communities use that as a way to pull together tightly, I think it's part of the point.

[music playing] [people cheering]