Yours for the Carters: The Vintage Sound Collections of Freeman Kitchens will be on display Aug. 22-Nov. 11 at the Kentucky Museum on the campus of Western Kentucky University.

The opening reception for the exhibit on Kitchens, a Warren County record shop owner and president of the Carter Family Fan Club, was held from Aug. 27 at the Kentucky Museum. The reception featured old-time music by members of Nashville’s Hogslop String Band; a field trip to Kitchens’ general store – Drake Vintage Music & Curios – followed.

Since the mid-1940s, Kitchens has collected and sold early country music recordings out of his general store/post office in Drake, a small community just south of Bowling Green and an hour north of Nashville, Tenn.

As founding member and president emeritus of the official fan club of the Carter Family, Kitchens and his club members have published and circulated some of the earliest forms of music journalism and grassroots documentation surrounding America’s beloved country music family, as well as other important country, blues, and country-western artists of the 20th century.

With rare and original artifacts and multimedia items from Kitchens’ shop, and from the collections of the Folklife Archives of the Kentucky Museum, this exhibit explores the wide reach of this local man, his small country store, and its legacy in contemporary music history.

The exhibit is curated by Jennifer Joy Jameson of San Diego, a graduate student in the WKU Folk Studies program who conducted nearly a year’s worth of research on Kitchens and his music collection.

Yours for the Carters: The Vintage Sound Collections of Freeman Kitchens is sponsored by WKU’s Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology and the Kentucky Museum.

More information on the exhibit and Jameson’s research is available online at http://YoursForTheCarters.tumblr.com