Ferrum, VA, July 9, 2026 — Ferrum College’s Program Coordinator of Music and Theatre Emily Blankenship-Tucker was selected to participate in a Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty on The Federal Writers’ Project: New Directions for Research, Teaching, and Public Engagement. She is one of twenty-five educators across the nation chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to explore the archives and historical records from a major project of the New Deal era in relation to current perspectives on history and teaching.
From June 29 to July 18, participants are meeting virtually for two weeks, and gathering at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. during the middle week, where the NEH, in collaboration with the City University of New York, has arranged for their access to the largest collections of documents on this topic. Between 1935 and 1939 during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration created many kinds of jobs for Americans out of work. According to NEH, “the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) sent nearly 7,000 unemployed workers out to document America.” They produced slave narratives, guidebooks of America, folklore collections, and other oral histories, archives, and writings. Some prominent writers, such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Chase, developed their careers by using their fieldwork in their books.
As founding director of the Appalachian Music program and Orchestra Appalachia, and also director of the Jack Tale Players at Ferrum College, Blankenship-Tucker has a strong interest in the Appalachian music and folklore found in the archives from Virginia and nearby states. The FWP and this institute are linked to her career and more than half a century of Ferrum College history because the James Taylor Adams Collection of folklore from Wise County, housed at the Blue Ridge Institute and Museum (BRIM), contains thousands of typed pages of folklore from the Virginia Writers’ Project that Adams directed from 1938 to 1943. Blankenship-Tucker has worked with some of these materials during her twenty-five years with the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre (BRDT) and Jack Tale Players.
Chase’s well-known books of Appalachian folktales grew out of his work collecting folklore with James Taylor Adams in Wise County (as well as learning folktales from the Hicks-Harmon-Ward family in the North Carolina mountains). Reading Chase’s The Jack Tales (1943) gave the late Professor Emeritus Rex Stephenson the idea to start dramatizing some of the folktales in 1975, to strengthen the program the College had begun before he came to Ferrum (in 1973) to offer plays for local children. Working with Director Emeritus of the BRIM Roddy Moore and eleven students, they searched for archive copies of folktales and interviewed local residents about folklore of the region.
Stephenson found the Adams Collection stored in boxes at Clinch Valley College in Wise County. Later Moore and BRIM Director Bethany Worley were involved in acquiring the Ferrum copy and cataloging it. Stephenson and his students developed their first folktale scripts improvisationally and began performing in local schools. For at least three decades he selected more tales from the collection to dramatize, traveling across the country and in England with Jack Tale shows. Blankenship-Tucker and the Jack Tale Players celebrated their fiftieth anniversary during a Homecoming reunion in October 2025 and at Callaway Elementary School in December. She views participation in the NEH Summer Institute as an opportunity to continue work begun by Rex Stephenson while also exploring creative ideas for new projects.
As music director for the BRDT since her early years in Ferrum, Blankenship-Tucker also arranged traditional music and performed in plays and musical revues that she and Stephenson developed about events in the history of country music and British folklorist Cecil Sharp’s trips to Ferrum and Callaway to collect ballads during World War I. In the 2012 photograph she depicts Mother Maybelle Carter playing guitar in The Night Loretta, Mother Maybelle, and Jeannie C. Spent in Jail. (Loretta Lynn is played by Rachel Blankenship-Tucker in back right).
In February of this year Emily Blankenship-Tucker directed Grandma Gatewood Took A Walk at the BRDT, performed by Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts Rebecca Crocker ‘02 and visiting performer Becky Prophet portraying Emma Gatewood, the first woman to complete a solo through-hike of the Appalachian Trail. Prophet, who was Blankenship-Tucker’s undergraduate mentor, called her “a distinguished graduate” of Alfred University, and said she was the best student she ever had in more than fifty years of teaching.
Blankenship-Tucker completed an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts in 2023 with a Performance Creation Concentration from Goddard College. She explained that her thesis, Oral Culture and Wildness: The Performance of Place, “explored the connections between living traditions of Appalachia, including music, story, and social dance, place-based practices related to landscape and seasonal cycles, and cooperation in community, which are deepened by shared experience in place over time.” She bases her work in theatre around this inquiry.
With the Jack Tale Players, she often leads workshops in storytelling and creative drama at schools, camps, and libraries, or lecture/demonstrations on Jack Tales or ballads for community programs, scholarly groups, or Professor of English Tina Hanlon’s classes in Folktales and Literature. In 2022, she participated as a storyteller in a Council of Independent Colleges Humanities for the Public Good project led by Hanlon, which included storytelling workshops conducted by Stephenson at the Franklin County public libraries.
Senior Nick Gore said, “Emily-Blankenship Tucker hasn’t really been a teacher to me; she has become more of a role model about not just theatre but about learning the history of folktales and storytelling. She has made me understand how to tell a folktale to an audience by making them feel different emotions throughout the whole story and making them feel like they are in the story itself. If it wasn’t for Emily B-T, theatre wouldn’t be a choice to do for my career.”
Hanlon participated in a shorter summer seminar in 2011 at West Virginia University on American Magic: The Fates of Folk & Fairy Tales in the Appalachians, led by folklorist Carl Lindahl. She will travel to D. C. and research Appalachian folktales at the Library of Congress while Blankenship-Tucker attends the NEH seminars. They both collaborated closely with Stephenson for decades but in different capacities, with some overlap in teaching and scholarship, since Blankenship-Tucker performs, composes, designs lighting, and directs, while Hanlon researches, archives, writes publicity and scholarship, and helps with various other theatre jobs.
Hanlon said, “I am proud that Emily’s beautifully written proposal was chosen for this NEH Institute, and Rex Stephenson would be so proud of the way she carries on his legacy. I know she will contribute much to the seminar discussions as well as bringing new insights and ideas back to Ferrum. She taught ballads and folktales to my English classes many times, sometimes at our farm museum. Once long ago a student said it was the worst field trip of her life because she was afraid to go near any species except humans. The next morning, when we were all frazzled at the end of the course, that student was sitting in the front row before class started, singing ballads she had learned from Emily in the barn.”
Between 2002 and 2008, Blankenship-Tucker, Hanlon, and other Ferrum faculty and performers contributed to sessions of several NEH Summer Institutes hosted at Ferrum College, led by the late Professor Emeritus of English Pete Crow. Focusing on “Appalachia Up Close” as an exemplar for regional study and the liberal arts, they included travel for the visiting educators to coal fields and cultural sites in this region, as well as meetings on campus with visiting and local experts involved with Appalachian studies and arts.
According to the NEH, this 2026 Institute aims to build an educational “framework for bringing FWP materials and resources to college students across disciplines and local libraries, community centers, and other public venues. The institute will offer participants the unprecedented opportunity to collaborate on archival research, curricula, and public humanities programs that critically engage this extraordinary New Deal program.”
“I am excited to have access to the tunnels, vaults, and archives at the Library of Congress,” said Blankenship-Tucker while in D.C. At the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, she is even finding documents relating to folklore collected in and around Ferrum, and a Ferrum String Band from the 1930s, as well as copies of Jack Tales she had never before known about.
Just before leaving home, she learned that she will have the opportunity to perform at a gathering of NEH Institute participants before the week in D.C. ends. Silas and Rachel Blankenship-Tucker will join her in performing “Jack and the Robbers” and a song or two, while Hanlon will help with offering background on the Ferrum traditions of moving from archive materials to performance to workshops and classroom activities.
Blankenship-Tucker believes her participation will directly impact students at Ferrum College through the evolution of courses such as Introduction to Music in Appalachia and Storytelling in the Oral Tradition, which guide students to interact with collections of field recordings, stories, and songs through the BRIM, the Digital Library of Appalachia, and the Library of Congress. At the same time, she expects that what she learns will have an influence on community-centered cultural activities, where, as she observed, “stories, songs, and shared histories take on a life of their own once they belong to the community.”
Gage Shelton ‘25, a financial aid counselor at the College, is in the center back in the 2024 Jack Tale Players group photo, next to Blankenship-Tucker. Crocker is on the left next to Stephenson. Shelton said, “Working with Emily, whether it be with Jack Tales, Band, Choir, or any ensemble, has been life-changing. Emily has a knack for inspiring you to do things you didn’t think you could ever do. You can tell how incredibly passionate she is about telling these stories and continuing the legacy of the Jack Tale Players. I would not be as resilient, nor as confident as I am today, without the time I spent with Emily in rehearsals and on-stage. If there was only one person in the whole of Appalachia who could tell a folktale in a way that makes a child’s eyes sparkle or perform an old song that tugs at your heartstrings–it would be Emily Blankenship-Tucker.”
Orchestra Appalachia, in addition to travel and networking around the region, hosts a weekly Monday Night Jam in conjunction with the BRIM and The Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail. Blankenship-Tucker started these weekly jam sessions to, as she explained, “connect college and community in a stream of musical culture, as tunes are shared ‘knee to knee,’ including familiar favorites as well as ‘new’ tunes that are continually learned and introduced into community repertoire.” In early April, the Appalachian Music program organized a flatfoot dance contest in the Rex Stephenson Theatre in Schoolfield Hall that drew in a packed house of enthusiastic dancers. The number of visitors attending the Monday music jams from near and far has grown since that time as well, demonstrating the popularity of traditional music here and now, not just the historic value of preserving folk traditions of the past. On May 4, Blankenship-Tucker’s colleagues surprised her at the music jam with photos, food, and friends gathered to show appreciation and celebrate the 25th anniversary of her first arrival in Ferrum as a student theatre intern.
Emily and Rachel Blankenship-Tucker, along with former band member Mary Allison, created the trio After Jack in 2011, named in honor of their first meeting in the Jack Tale Players and their foundation in folk traditions. They and some of their family members perform at the Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax almost every year, where Emily has won several prizes. For example, she placed second in 2024 and third in the folk song competition at the 2023 convention with solo singing, while the Jack Tale Players also performed in the new Stories and Strings festival in 2023 at Galax. She has also taken Orchestra Appalachia to perform in the International Bluegrass Music Association Convention in Raleigh, North Carolina and the renowned Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion festival. She is on the right in the photo at the top of this page, in Bristol in 2023.
In summer 2025 Emily and Rachel Blankenship-Tucker performed in two prestigious and innovative concerts. In the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival’s Leipzig Service, they blended gospel music into a program with the festival chamber ensemble and chorus. They taught the congregation to sing one of their songs and performed “Mountain Railroad” with piano and fiddle, as they had done many times with the Jack Tale Players. Former Ferrum College Instructor of English Cara Modisett, now an Episcopal priest, happened to be a reader of scripture and speaker after they performed. Watch the beautiful service at this link.
Later at a Gala Concert at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg with Django Burgess, a former Ferrum student, they performed with a distinguished lineup of world-class musicians representing several international traditions. They presented the premiere of “Our Story,” a powerful new collaborative, eclectic work created by Emily Blankenship-Tucker with EMU music professors Dr. David Berry and Dr. Benjamin Bergey. On that trip these Ferrum representatives of After Jack also performed for over 1000 K-8th-grade students in the Harrisonburg and Rockingham County school system in association with the Any Given Child–Shenandoah Valley program.
Blankenship-Tucker’s scholarly knowledge of regional music history was shared with the Floyd County Historical Society on September 20, 2024, when she gave a public lecture it hosted in Floyd titled “What We Carried: Tracing Appalachia’s Musical Roots.” She wrote in her NEH proposal, “I believe that my work is part of the cultural inheritance that was intended by the architects and participants of the Federal Writers’ Project. I am looking forward to the opportunity to deepen my understanding of that legacy as the work continues.”
President Mirta Martin said, “Emily Blankenship-Tucker is a remarkable educator, artist, and cultural leader whose work embodies the very heart of Ferrum College’s mission to connect learning, place, and purpose. Her selection for this highly competitive NEH Summer Institute is a testament to her standing in the field of Appalachian music, storytelling, and performance studies. Emily’s scholarship and creative practice are deeply rooted in lived tradition and community engagement, and she brings that richness directly into the classroom and onto our stages. She has a rare ability to bridge archival research, performance, and teaching in ways that make Appalachian culture both accessible and deeply meaningful for students. This recognition is richly deserved and reflects the extraordinary impact she continues to make at Ferrum College.”
Click here to watch Emily Blankenship-Tucker sing “Wild Hog in the Woods” at home while her two pigs munch away at her feet, for the 2021 Southwest Virginia Traditional Music Contest.
Click here to watch “The Ballad of Henry Lee,” After Jack’s compelling 2014 music video filmed at Peaks of Otter, featuring an original ballad by their friend David Mantz, who died very recently. Ferrum College students contributed to the video. The song is on After Jack’s 2014 album Echo.
Read more about Ferrum College’s B.F.A. program in Music and Theatre: Professional Stage Performance.
