Today we’d like to introduce you to Jim Cundiff.
Jim, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
An Information Security professional by trade/day, I have also been a sports and music photographer for 30+ years. Starting in the dark (room) ages with a small-town weekly newspaper in the early 1990s, I found my love of photography. After I left the journalism field, the photography fell by the wayside until my younger son decided he was going to play football his freshman year of high school. I picked up a dslr, began photographing his sports and never looked back. Soon I was photographing all kinds of sports from pre-K/kindergarten to D1 college. Within a couple years of picking the camera back up, I was looking to get into photographing music, since I have always been a music lover, and music was at the top of list of what I liked photographing during my time in journalism. I began with a couple of local acts and festivals and it grew from there. As the next seven or eight years passed with me photographing more and more local, regional, and national acts, the sheer volume of the musical talent in the Appalachian region that was largely unknown outside the region, prompted me to start kicking around the idea of a music video series to promote our regional talent. Around this same time, the small nature park on the edge of my town was hit really hard with a couple of bad storms. In an effort to raise visibility of the vast regional musical talent as well as the condition of the park, the Rodburn Hollow Sessions came to life. Around this time, I started keeping a list of the regional artists that I was aware of, ranging from national acts like Tyler Childers and Arlo McKinley to young aspiring musicians who haven’t played their first show in public. To date, this list is now over three hundred artists across multiple genre, hailing from Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, South Carolina, and Georgia ( as well as one British bloke who the Appalachian region adopted {Jack Browning}). Filmed on location in Rodburn Hollow Park, the Rodburn Hollow Sessions was born.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
We film all the session on location in a small nature park on the edge of Morehead, Kentucky, so it is dependent upon the weather. I can’t film in inclement weather, if it is raining, we have to reschedule. I try to film on Sunday afternoons to not interfere with gigging. The other significant challenge we face is budget, since I am doing this as a labor of love to hopefully extend the reach of the Appalachian artists’ music, everything is paid out of pocket with no sponsors. Because we film completely unplugged with just the microphone on my camera, we are limited to the types of performances we can film for a session.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
The Rodburn Hollow Sessions is filmed on location in Rodburn Hollow Park in Morehead, Kentucky. Unlike other online music video series, we feature each artist for two full weeks with new videos released every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We just filmed our fifth episode of Season Three. Each season is a full calendar year, so twenty-six episodes per season. The videos are published to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Since I don’t have a budget or any kind of sponsorship to pay the artists who come out to the park to film each session, I provide every artist with the high resolution images I take in between the videos, which is a minimum of forty images suitable for use in EPKs, show announcements, etc. This provides each artist with something of value in addition to the videos. I never expected the Rodburn Hollow Sessions to have the reach that it has had, midway through season two, I had Jo Ellis reach out to me. Jo is a well known music producer from South Africa( with multiple video game and movie credits), so something I am doing in Morehead, KY was viewed and loved by someone in South Africa. Jo told me he loved both what I am doing as well as the region’s sound. He graciously took a few of the videos I released and extracted the audio from them and then proceeded to build full instrumentation around that base and provided the tracks to the artists. The Rodburn Hollow Sessions are open to all genres of music, but due to the fact that we film on location in a nature park with a single camera-based microphone we are limited to ones that can perform 100% acoustically. My Grandfather always told me ( and the rest of my family) that if you are blessed, you should find ways to give back to others, based on this, beginning with season three, each season will feature a charity guitar that each artist from the season will be granted the opportunity to sign. At the end of each season’s filming, the guitar will be given to a charity to auction or raffle to raise funds for that charity. Our mission is to bring the unheard music that needs to be heard to the world while looking for ways to give back to our community and beyond. Over the 57 sessions that we have filmed to date, ranging from artists on the cusp of breaking out of the regional scene like Wes Shipp and Kevin Thomas(Jones) to up and coming young artists just starting their careers like thirteen year olds, Dalton Dailey and McKenleigh Anglin and everywhere in between, we seek to publize the music that isn’t being heard but definitely should be!
How do you think about happiness?
My happiness is exposing the world to unheard artists from the Appalachian region
Contact Info:
- Website: https://offthetrailphotography.com
- Instagram: @offthetrailphoto
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/offthetrailphotos and https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557379504106
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@offthetrailphotography
