Cumberland Trail and Great Eastern Trail travelers heading south toward Chattanooga through a preserved landscape in the coming decades also will travel through a preserved culture, thanks to Bobby Fulcher.
Fulcher, park manager for the Cumberland Trail State Scenic Trail, received the Folklife Heritage Award during the Governor’s Arts Awards in Nashville last week as a recognition for his decades of work documenting and preserving the music, crafts, culture and idiosyncrasies of life off the state’s beaten paths.
The 40-year state park service veteran launched the Tennessee State Parks Folklife Project in 1979 to document the fizzling folk traditions of rural Appalachia. He has continued with some form of that mission ever since, even as he has worked for the last several years to facilitate construction and maintenance of the sprawling Cumberland Trail.
“To me, it’s inconceivable that we would try and create a 300-mile-long corridor and not take within that corridor all those memories, all that knowledge, all that music, all those beautiful ideas and have them, too, along with the waterfalls, wild birds and caves,” Fulcher said Thursday night while in Chattanooga for an event honoring local groups working to maintain the trail. “We want all of that. It’s always been there together.”
The State Parks Folklife Project produced more than 500 hours of audio and thousands of pictures, helping bring recognition to some of the best folk musicians in the country, whose talents had been bottled up in the state’s hills and hollers until Fulcher showed up with a tape recorder. Musicians like Dee and Delta Hicks of Fentress County and Clyde Davenport, also of Fentress County, gained regional and national acclaim once they were discovered.