Appalachian Figures
On a winter night at the end of 1968, fire swallowed the McLain family’s house above Troublesome Creek in Hindman, Kentucky. The seven family members escaped, and so did the instruments that had already begun to stitch their lives together in song. Within a few years those same fiddles, banjos, mandolins, and basses would carry the McLain Family Band far from Knott County to Carnegie Hall, the Grand Ole Opry, and more than sixty countries as musical ambassadors of the United States.
Today the McLains are Kentucky Music Hall of Fame members and recipients of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award, yet their story remains rooted in a particular Appalachian place. Hindman Settlement School, with its long history of folk-song collecting and community arts, gave the family both a home and a stage. Their journey from a creekside campus to the world’s concert halls traces not only one family’s career but also the changing face of Appalachian traditional music in the later twentieth century.
Hindman Settlement School And A Family Of Musicians
The McLain story in Appalachia begins not in a tour bus but in a settlement school office. In 1954, musician and scholar Raymond Kane McLain moved with his wife, Mary Elizabeth “Betty” Winslow McLain, to Hindman so he could serve as director of Hindman Settlement School. He brought with him a strong academic background in music theory and folk music, along with family roots steeped in folklore through his mother, Beatrice “Bicky” Kane McLain, a folklife scholar at the University of Alabama.
Hindman was already famous among folklorists. Since the early 1900s, staff and visitors had collected ballads, hymns, and fiddle tunes from students and neighbors, work now preserved in the Hindman Settlement School Records at Berea College and in related collections on English-language ballads in Kentucky. Scholars like Josiah Combs and visiting collectors such as Cecil Sharp had treated the campus and surrounding county as a living archive of Appalachian song, even as the school’s mission blended education, social reform, and cultural preservation.
Into that context stepped the McLain children: Raymond Winslow, Alice, Ruth, Nancy Ann, and Michael. Surrounded by faculty, staff, and neighbors who still danced, sang, and played in the older styles, the youngsters absorbed the music around them. In later oral history interviews, Raymond W. McLain remembered childhood in Hindman as a world of Friday-night dances, community events, and informal music-making that blurred the line between family recreation and public performance.
“Music Is What We Do Together”: A Family Band Takes Shape
By the late 1960s, Raymond K. and Betty were looking for a way to put that family music on a more formal footing. At Betty’s urging, Raymond formed a band with the three oldest children in 1968. The group soon appeared weekly on Hazard’s WKYH television station (now WYMT), playing a mix of bluegrass, gospel, and regional tunes for viewers across eastern Kentucky.
That same year, according to family accounts and later journalism, the New Year’s Eve house fire in Hindman destroyed their home but not their determination to keep playing. Within two years the family relocated to Berea, where Raymond joined the faculty of Berea College and began teaching what are often described as the first university-level courses in bluegrass and Appalachian music in the United States.
Kim Kobersmith’s Kentucky Monthly profile of the band highlights one of the simple phrases that guided them across those years of uncertainty. Looking back on five decades of touring, Nancy Ann McLain Wartman summed up the family’s philosophy as “Music is what we do together.” That sentiment would carry the McLains from Hindman’s hillside porches to some of the world’s most prestigious stages.
Country Life Records And The Sound Of Troublesome Creek
Once settled in Berea, the McLain Family Band launched their own label, Country Life Records. Their discography through the 1970s and 1980s chronicles both their repertoire and their evolving sound, from early albums such as The McLain Family Band (CLR-2) and Country Ham (CLR-3) to themed projects like Troublesome Creek, Kentucky Wind, Family Album, and Big Hill.
These recordings are more than products to sell at concerts. They serve as audio primary sources that document the band’s arrangements, vocal harmonies, and choice of material. The song “Troublesome Creek,” written by Raymond W. about the Hindman waterway, shifts between gentle and turbulent passages in a way that echoes the creek itself and the community’s history of floods and hardship. Listening across the albums, one hears the band balancing standard bluegrass numbers, original compositions, novelty songs, and eastern Kentucky traditional music, reflecting both their settlement-school grounding and their willingness to experiment.
The LPs and later CDs preserved at Berea College’s Special Collections and in the band’s own pictorial history book, The McLain Family Band: 50 Years of Music, together provide a richly layered record of tours, festivals, and shifting line-ups. Posters, tour maps, and photographs in that volume complement the sounds on the records, giving faces and places to the tunes.
Festivals, Orchestras, And A New Kind Of Bluegrass
The McLains were not content to remain a purely regional act. Beginning in the late 1970s, they hosted an annual McLain Family Festival near Bighill, Kentucky, a family-friendly gathering that ran for roughly a decade and drew fans and musicians from across the country. The festival is documented in independent photographs by Jean Ritchie and George Pickow, whose Library of Congress collection includes slides labeled “McLain Festival,” as well as in Berea College’s guides to regional folk and music festivals.
At the same time, the band began collaborating with symphony orchestras. Composers such as Phillip Rhodes and arrangers like Newton Wayland and Peter Schickele (under his comic alter-ego P. D. Q. Bach) wrote concertos and orchestral settings tailored to the McLains’ instruments and voices. These collaborations, described in both the band’s biography and Paul O. Jenkins’s book Bluegrass Ambassadors, made the group one of the first bluegrass ensembles to perform large-scale works with major orchestras on a regular basis.
The result was a style that kept its roots in eastern Kentucky while stretching genre boundaries. Reviews from the period note the family’s wholesome stage presence, tight vocal arrangements, and the way they made complex music feel accessible to audiences who had never heard bluegrass before.
On The International Stage
If Hindman and Berea formed the band’s base of operations, the world became their extended neighborhood. During the 1970s the U.S. Department of State began sending the McLain Family Band abroad as part of Cold War cultural diplomacy. Jenkins’s Bluegrass Ambassadors and its publisher’s description emphasize how often and how far they traveled: more than sixty countries across Africa, Europe, Asia, and Latin America in fifteen international tours, alongside extensive concerts in all fifty states.
In a 2024 episode of the Lexington Public Library’s Tales From The Kentucky Room podcast, Raymond W. and Ruth McLain Smith recalled those years as a whirlwind of airports, translators, and audiences hearing bluegrass for the first time. They spoke of learning how to communicate across language barriers with smiles, handshakes, and songs that carried hints of home even in far-off capitals.
The State Department engagement and subsequent tours earned the McLains a reputation as “ambassadors” in more than one sense. They represented the United States abroad, but they also represented Appalachia to a world that often knew the region only through stereotypes of poverty and coal.
The Band In The Archives
For historians, one of the remarkable aspects of the McLain story is how well it is documented. The McLain Family Band Records at Berea College’s Hutchins Library fill more than fifty boxes with correspondence, business records, tour itineraries, concert programs, photographs, and a large collection of sound and video recordings from roughly 1968 to 1988.
Hindman Settlement School’s own records, held at the same institution, preserve the institutional context in which Raymond K. worked, including files on folk-song collecting, recreational programs, and his tenure as director. Audio held by Berea’s sound archives includes at least one chapel performance labeled “Randy Osborne and the McLain Family Band,” while the library’s resources on square dancing in the Kentucky foothills note a 1975 street dance in Berea accompanied by the band’s music.
Beyond Berea, the Library of Congress’s Jean Ritchie and George Pickow collection documents the McLain Family Festival in photographs, and the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky has launched a dedicated “International Stage: McLain Family Band Oral History Project,” featuring multiple interviews with Raymond W. and a 2025 interview with Ruth. Together with recent radio features and podcasts, these primary sources make the McLains one of the best-documented musical families in modern Appalachian history.
Hindman Remembers
Despite their move to Berea and their far-flung touring, the McLains never fully left Hindman. Hindman Settlement School’s public-facing materials regularly highlight the band’s roots there. A striking photograph used in recent promotions shows a young Ruth McLain seated at the Hillside House on campus, cradling a dulcimer, while accompanying text reminds viewers that the family’s story began in those classrooms and on those porches in the late 1950s.
In February 2023, the school hosted a McLain Family Band benefit concert for Knott County’s Long Term Disaster Recovery Group, raising funds for survivors of the devastating July 2022 flood that ravaged communities along Troublesome Creek and beyond. The event description emphasized that the band’s “roots run deep in Hindman” and noted their decades of international touring, recognition from the IBMA, and appearances at venues like Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Grand Ole Opry.
Social media posts from Hindman and Berea have also celebrated the McLains’ 2023 lifetime achievement recognition at Berea’s Celebration of Traditional Music and their 2024 induction into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame, underscoring how institutions that once nurtured their early years now honor them as elders of the tradition.
Teachers, Mentors, And Hall Of Fame Members
The band’s legacy is not confined to records and awards. Over the years, McLain family members have become educators and mentors at institutions across Appalachia and beyond. Raymond W. has directed programs in bluegrass and traditional music at East Tennessee State University and Morehead State University, while Ruth McLain Smith teaches at Morehead State’s Kentucky Center for Traditional Music, where she was recently recognized by the International Bluegrass Music Association as a mentor of the year nominee.
Radio pieces from WEKU and Morehead State Public Radio around the time of the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame induction capture both the scope of the band’s career and the humility with which Raymond and Ruth regard the honor. They speak of more than fifty years of performing, teaching, and traveling, yet they frame the recognition in terms of community and students. For many young musicians across eastern Kentucky, the McLains have been not celebrities on a distant stage but teachers in a classroom or friendly faces leading a workshop.
Why The McLain Family Band Matters To Appalachian History
Seen from one angle, the McLain Family Band is a success story about a Kentucky group that “made it” on the national and international stage. They built an independent label, pioneered collaborations with orchestras, and toured more widely than almost any other bluegrass act of their generation.
From an Appalachian historian’s perspective, though, their importance runs deeper. The McLains represent a living bridge between early twentieth-century settlement school work in ballad collecting and square dances and late twentieth-century experiments in global cultural diplomacy. Hindman Settlement School, once a hub for collecting songs from local students, became the incubator for a family band that would carry those musical traditions far beyond Knott County, even as it adapted them into new contexts and combinations.
Their story also shows how archival, oral, and commercial sources can work together. The family’s own pictorial history, the extensive Berea and Hindman records, the Ritchie-Pickow photographs, the Nunn Center’s oral histories, and the LPs and CDs themselves form a mosaic that lets researchers trace not only dates and venues but also evolving understandings of Appalachian identity, family labor, and the economics of touring.
Finally, the McLains remind us that Appalachian history does not unfold only in coal camps and courthouse squares. It also lives in church basements, settlement school rec rooms, television studios in Hazard, and street dances in Berea. A child standing on a milk crate to reach an upright bass in a Hindman living room can, in time, help shape how the world hears bluegrass and how the world imagines Appalachia.
Sources & Further Reading
McLain Family Band Records, BCA 0086 SAA 086, Berea College Special Collections and Archives (correspondence, photographs, business records, sound and video recordings). bereaarchives.libraryhost.com
Hindman Settlement School Records and Hindman Settlement School Collection, Berea College Special Collections and Archives (institutional records, ballad collecting materials, and documentation of Raymond K. McLain’s directorship). bereaarchives.libraryhost.com+1
Jean Ritchie and George Pickow Collection, Library of Congress, “McLain Festival” photographic materials. Finding Aids
Berea College Sound Archives, including “SC-OR-138_a Chapel: Randy Osborne and the McLain Family Band” and related festival and dance recordings. Berea Access Preservica+1
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, “International Stage: McLain Family Band Oral History Project,” interviews with Raymond W. McLain (2022, 2023, 2024) and Ruth McLain Smith (2025). Kentucky Oral History+2Nunn Center+2
The McLain Family Band: 50 Years of Music – A Pictorial History (2017), by Ruth McLain Smith and Alice McLain White.
Paul O. Jenkins, Bluegrass Ambassadors: The McLain Family Band in Appalachia and the World (West Virginia University Press, 2020). West Virginia University Press+1
Kim Kobersmith, “A Family that Plays Together,” Kentucky Monthly, October 2018. kentuckymonthly.com
“The McLain Family Band,” official band biography and discography at mclainfamilyband.com. mclainfamilyband.com+1
“The McLain Family Band (2024),” Tales From The Kentucky Room podcast, Lexington Public Library. LexPubLib+1
WEKU, “The Kentucky Music Hall of Fame to induct The McLain Family Band,” October 24, 2024. Weku
WMKY, “Band with strong ties to MSU has been inducted into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame,” October 31, 2024. wmky.org
Hindman Settlement School, event listing “McLain Family Band Concert,” February 26, 2023, and related social media posts. hindman.org+1
“McLain Family Band,” Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum inductee biography. Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum
“The McLain Family Band,” Wikipedia, for an overview of the band’s history, membership, and recognition. Wikipedia