wo local musicians—Mel Jones (harmonica) and Randy Gardner (guitar)—perform for an assembly of fourth graders at New Hope Elementary in Orange County. Later, spending time with each class, they’re showered with questions. "What’s the history of your instrument?" "Do you ever have stage fright?" Jones explains how songs evolve over time, and Gardner recounts childhood memories of gathering outside tobacco barns to hear old-time music played as men tending the fires necessary for curing the tobacco whiled away the night. Students take careful notes so they can write newsletter articles, journal entries, or reviews of the performance.

This is a scene from the North Carolina Curriculum, Music, and Community (CMC) project—a shape-shifter that can embrace any subject, fit any locale, and is roaring good fun to boot.

Led by Glenn Hinson, chair of the Curriculum in Folklore, and Dwight Rogers, associate professor of education, CMC encouragesteachers to weave music into the state-mandated fourth-grade curriculum. With help from local musicians, the project connects students to their cultural heritage.

CMC is indebted to a music festival first held in 1924 to raise funds for school supplies, Carolina professors’ love of old-time music, and teacher frustration.

In May 1998, Madeleine Grumet, dean of the School of Education, stepped off a bus at the Ole Time Fiddler’s and Bluegrass Festival in Union Grove, North Carolina. "I was struck by how much local music there is in the state," she says.

On a bus tour designed to introduce new Carolina faculty members to the state, Grumet fell into conversation about the arts in education with the festival’s cohost Wansie Van Hoy, a former teacher. The women discussed integrating music into the standard curriculum.

Grumet passed the idea to Rogers, who immediately turned to Hinson; both men are musicians and deeply immersed in old-time music. Hinson suggested involving the Arts in Education and Folklife divisions of the North Carolina Arts Council, which provided core funding and logistical support. Since local music is the linchpin of the project, the team decided to work with the fourth-grade curriculum, which focuses on North Carolina.

By the summer of 1999, CMC was ready for a trial run, so interested counties proposed schools for inclusion. "We looked at the level of interest, the strength of the principal and the county arts council, and the availability of local musicians," Rogers says. They also considered the income bracket of the student body because they especially wanted to work with schools in less affluent systems. (Currently, at least 60 percent of the children touched by CMC are enrolled in free- or subsidized-lunch programs.)

Hinson and Rogers settled on Gamewell Elementary in Caldwell County and invited the school’s fourth-grade teachers to a weeklong workshop. At that point, the only certainty was what the two directors didn’t want: a rigid, one-size-fits-all plan handed down from afar.

The workshop, which included staff from the Arts Council, the North Carolina Museum of History, local musicians, and the Caldwell County Arts Council, went swimmingly until Hinson and Rogers asked the teachers to devise a plan for nine weeks of classroom instruction that incorporated music. As teachers wrestled with meshing curriculum requirements and local music, their collective mood plummeted.