Event Description
Nancy Cardwell Webster is known throughout the bluegrass music world, working in the music industry most of her life as a performer, journalist, and on the staff of the IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association), where she served for 21 years as Special Projects Director and Executive Director. Nancy has been the executive director of the Nashville-based IBMA Foundation since 2016 (Bluegrassfoundation.org), the charitable organization focused on making the future of bluegrass music brighter through the support of college scholarships, grants, youth educational programs, the Arnold Shultz Fund grant, and more. Nancy is a 2021 recipient of the IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award, the 2006 Charlie Lamb Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism, a Kentucky Colonel, and a graduate of Leadership Bluegrass (2000) and Leadership Music (2009). She has written for publications since college, and she still writes regularly for Bluegrass Unlimited magazine, as well as editing a free monthly enewsletter for the IBMA Foundation, The Cornerstone. Nancy has written one book: The Words & Music of Dolly Parton, Country Music’s Iron Butterfly(Praeger/ABC-Clio), she writes songs on Zoom, and she still plays some bass, hammered dulcimer, and guitar. Nancy has worked previously as a high school Spanish and English teacher, a professional Girl Scout, and an entertainer in the Branson, Missouri and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee areas. Musicians and fans in the Springfield area will remember her as a part of the Cardwell Family Band, Homegrown, Mountain Aire, Midnight Flight, the Wildwood Girls, Jesse McReynolds & his Virginia Boys, The Persimmon Sisters, Dulcimer Dance (with daughter, Erin Faith Erdos), and as a writer for Branson’s Country Review magazine, BU, Bluegrass Now, and the Springfield News Leader’s Branson This Week.