George and Rodi Jackson live in a comfortably furnished unit in the upscale Charleston Green town homes community on West Walnut Street.

But after a few minutes inside their home, you get the feeling you're sitting on the front porch of a house in the mountains.

George, who is 85, and Rodi, who's 81, have been married 59 years. Both speak in a soft mountain accent. Both are well-educated and articulate people. But each sentence of their flawless English is served to the ears like a spoon of sorghum molasses is served to the mouth very smoothly.

But it's not their speech that identifies their roots as much as it is their singing. And they seem to love to sing even more than they love to talk.

"In the mountains and other rural areas, there is a long tradition of the fifth Sunday," George tells a visitor. "On the fifth, different congregations would go to other churches, and they would worship together and then have dinner on the grounds."

The Jacksons decided to stop talking about the tradition and started bringing it to life through a song titled "Stringing Beans and Singing Hymns."

"Dear old mother was the proudest, dear old father sang the loudest. Cousin Anna sang soprano. Brother Casey brought in the bass," the Jacksons sang, looking at each other and smiling with each note of a stanza.

"If I were dying and one wish allowed me, this wish I make so proudly. Let me join them a way up yonder, stringing beans and singing hymns."

The couple sang that fifth-Sunday, dinner-on-the-grounds favorite a capella. They could have accompanied themselves with the mountain instruments they know how to play.

Both play the harmonica, banjo, guitar and lap dulcimer. George also can play the mandolin.

While the singing and playing couple have never made a country music hit, they have thousands of fans around the country. It?s hard to call people in their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s groupies, but over a period of some three decades, they used to flock by the dozens, even the hundreds at times, to see and hear the Jacksons perform in their home community of Morehead and other places.

But it was more than a performance that the Jacksons delivered the people who came to Morehead State University, Berea College and the University of Kentucky leadership center in Jabez from the 1970s through 2008. They were lectures and hands-on seminars. The Jacksons were teachers, and their followers were students.

The Jacksons taught in the Elderhostel program, and they not only taught their students how to sing and play mountain instruments but also how to make them, using strong pieces of cardboard and strings.

The week-long sessions drew senior citizens from all parts of the country and from all walks of life.

"We had doctors, lawyers, teachers and people from other occupations, and they came from every section of the country," says George. "One 85-year-old retired physician drove all the way from California to Morehead."

Another retired doctor told the Jacksons that one reason he attended their Elderhostel program was that he was searching for something to occupy his time.

"He didn't know what to do with his life," says George. "He had never played a mountain instrument and thought that might be something he could do."

Later, the Jacksons got a knock on their front door.

"It was the retired physician, and he was holding his own guitar,"
says Rodi. "He had found what he wanted to do with his life."

It was at the beginning of other own retirement when the Jacksons decided to make Elderhostel the centerpiece of their lives. The transition was easy because both were educators, working in school systems in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio. George rose through the ranks of the teaching profession and served as a principal, and Rodi served years as a teacher and librarian.

The couple shared not only the same profession but also the same mountain roots. Rodi is a native of Morehead, and George came from up the road in Williamson, W.Va., across from Pike County. They met and married while they were students at Morehead State.
But George admits his wife's roots in mountain culture are a little deeper than his, and she agrees.

"My dad was a fiddler and would take me to different places where he?d perform, and my mother played the piano," says Rodi.

"My dad was a preacher, and mountain music was not something he believed in very much," says George. "I didn't realize till later what Rodi had grown up with and that is the importance of music to Appalachian culture, and the overall richness of the culture."

George then smiles and adds, "A lot of people wouldn't use the word rich and Appalachia in the same sentence, but as poor as most Appalachian people are, their culture is very rich."

The Jacksons moved to Danville about 10 years ago. Their motivation was to be close to their two grandchildren, the offspring of their only child, Ron Jackson, who is head of the Idea Farm.

While the Jacksons halted their Elderhostel program last year, they haven't stopped teaching. They teach dulcimer classes at the Boyle County Senior Citizens Center and perform with their students at schools, nursing homes and hospitals.

"As long as we are able, we will keeping teaching and singing and playing," says Rodi.

"Yes," says George. "Teaching and playing mountain music is to us what stringing beans and singing hymns was to generations of Appalachian people before us."