In this paper I argue that there are established vernacular music traditions in rural communities that can be productively integrated into a hybrid music education curriculum. I draw on my own informal education in folk music, which bore an ambivalent relationship to the kind of formal music education on offer in my youth. I argue that music education can and should draw on vernacular, hybrid, and improvisational rural musical traditions and practices. Such integration creates generative space for the entanglement of experience and schooling. Basil Bernstein called horizontal discourses reflecting everyday knowledge forms (little "m" music), and the vertical discourses that have dominated much secondary music education (big M" music). This way of think-ing about curriculum holds potential for building productive bridges and trans-lations that respects living musical knowledge and invites authentic rural community engagement as well as complex understandings of music and rural social space.