Brown- Hudson Award
The North Carolina Folklore Society presents the Brown-Hudson Folklore Awards to persons who have in special ways contributed to the appreciation, continuation, or study of North Carolina folk traditions. Past recipients include playwright Paul Green, African-American quilters Lillie Lee and Jennie Burnett, folk potters Nell Cole Graves and Burlon Craig, teachers Cratis Williams and Charles G. Zug, musicians Doc and Merle Watson, Etta Baker, and Tommy Jarrell, writers Richard Walser and John Parris, and folklife advocates Mollie Blankenship and George Holt.
Eric Ellis
Ellis was raised in Wilkes County in a musical family who helped him develop his own style of three-finger banjo playing. Eventually he became one of the most accomplished bluegrass players in the state, winning contests at the Galax Old Fiddlers Convention,The North Carolina State Fiddlers Convention, and the Mountain State Fair in Asheville. Throughout a musical career spanning nearly 4 decades Ellis has played with regional and nationally acclaimed musicians including Jim Shumate (a fiddler for both the Bluegrass and Foggy Mountain Boys) Steve Kilby, Tony Rice, Chubby Wise and Charlie Monroe. Today Ellis is not only a musician but a teacher as well, helping continue the area’s musical traditions through his numerous banjo students, and his extensive knowledge of the music’s history. In 2007 Ellis joined the Artist in Residence Program at Appalachian State University where he was a co-instructor in the Bluegrass Traditions course in Appalachian Studies. He is currently working on an album of banjo music, including three original compositions.
M. Anna Fariello
Anna Fariello’s interest in craft traditions began as a girl growing up in the Italian-American community associated with St. Vincent’s Catholic Church in New Jersey. She received a Master’s Degree in Museum Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University (and an MFA from James Madison) and was the founding director of the Radford University Museum. In 1998 she moved to Virginia Tech, where she organized a public outreach program concerning the African-American Christiansburg Institute, as well as a cultural inventory of rural southwest Virginia. Before coming to Western Carolina University, Fariello was a Senior Research Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Archives of American Art, where she worked on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. At Western Carolina University, in addition to leading the Craft Revival Digital Collection project which has coordinated the collections of seven key craft archives in the region, she also recently produced the book Cherokee Basketry: From the Hands of Our Elders.
Jerry Wolfe
Jerry Wolfe was born in Sherrill Cove on the Qualla Boundary in a cabin that was removed to make way for the Blue Ridge Parkway. He is a native speaker of the Cherokee language whose storytelling connects the many phases of his life with the mountain homeland of his ancestors. Jerry learned to carve Cherokee ball sticks as a young man when he played the traditional game and is often in demand still as a “caller” or announcer during ball games during the Cherokee Indian Fair. At age 85 he is still in demand for “story-telling.” He has a boundless knowledge of Cherokee Culture. He speaks often at a variety of locations about Cherokee culture and is a pillar to the entire Cherokee community. He provides a strong connection to the past as he lives comfortably in the modern world. He is cherished by his family and is a prize among men. One of his daughters eloquently summarized her thoughts about him, “Jerry knows his home. He has walked many of the trails that circle the nearby mountains. His head swims with stories of Uk-te-nuh, Kanoti and the great leech. He has spent many hours walking the trails to gather delicacies such as wishee and ramps, medicines and dyes, teas and ginseng. From the river he catches fish while he watches the waters for other wildlife. He notices small things such as the mama Canadian goose sitting on a nest, a rare loon diving the depths for dinner, and a blue heron standing stock still, blending into the riverside. Jerry will seek out the new: newborn elk, baby geese and ducks, a young deer trying shaky just born legs. These are the sights that move him-- the simple beauty and continuity of nature and life.”
Alice Gerrard
Gerrard has been a musician and a proponent of traditional music since the 1960s, when she made the first of her recordings with Hazel Dickens on the Folkways Label. A native of the West Coast, Gerrard discovered traditional southern music while attending Antioch College in Ohio. Later, she made trips to the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia to visit and learn from traditional musicians, playing with them on field recordings and later in the studio. Gerrard has recorded and played with some of North Carolina’s most loved artists, including Elizabeth Cotton, Tommy Jarrell, and Joe and Odell Thompson. She also participated in the Southern Folk Festival tours as part of Anne Romaine and Bernice Johnson Reagan’s Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, which brought white and black musicians together in the midst of the Civil Rights struggles to share songs and perform with one another in concerts throughout the south. In 1987 she founded the Old Time Herald, still the premier publication devoted to old time music, and two years later moved her home and the magazine to Durham. She continues to make recordings as a solo artist and with Brad Leftwich and Tom Sauber as Tom, Brad and Alice. The International Bluegrass Music Association honored Gerrard with a Distinguished Achievement Award in 2001. In 2009 she was the Lehman Brady Visiting Professor of Documentary Studies an Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she shared her knowledge with a new generation of field recorders.
Community Traditions Reciepient
The Community Traditions Award recognizes the contributions of a group or organization to the continuation and appreciation of state folklife.
The Folk Heritage Committee:
Shindig on the Green &
Mountain Dance and Folk Festival
The Folk Heritage Committee’s mission it is to preserve and present the music and dance heritage of the Southern Appalachians for entertainment and education. The Folk Heritage Committee produces two events: Mountain Dance and Folk Festival and Shindig on the Green. These events aim to support the preservation and continuation of traditional music, dance, and storytelling of the Southern Appalachians. Members of the Folk Heritage Committee provide volunteer leadership throughout the year to raise the funds necessary and stage the three-day Mountain Dance and Folk Festival and the weekly Shindig on the Green outdoor summer events. Shindig on the Green runs for eight Saturday and is free and open to the public.
Helen C. Vance & North Shore Historical Association
Helen Vance, together with all the others who have helped lead the North Shore movement, are expressions of a larger tradition of cemetery heroes woven deeply into the cultural fabric of western North Carolina. She and her sister Mildred Johnson organized the first decoration on the North Shore, and it was directed at the cemetery with which their family had the closest association, Cable Cemetery. The success of that undertaking led them, teaming up with others, to organize a decoration at Proctor Cemetery and then other decorations, as the movement exploded. The magnitude of the accomplishment tempts us to regard it as unique in the history of western North Carolina—and in certain respects it is unique. But it takes nothing away from the accomplishment to say that Helen Vance belongs in the pantheon of cemetery and Decoration Day heroes who have arisen as visionary caretakers of the rural community cemeteries – governed and managed by no formal organizations or legal structures but simply by voluntary community consent and spiritual investment – that are so culturally characteristic of western North Carolina.
Etowah Christian Harmony Singers
The Etowah group is now in its 103rd year. Participating in a tradition of reading music in shaped notes, extending at least to the English Renaissance, these singers continue to sound the American arrangements gathered and noted by the Spartanburg, South Carolina singing master William Walker in the mid-1800s. Through multiple venues, varying numbers of participants, and regardless of weather, these active tradition bearers have remained enthusiastic participants across generations in a unique and continuous musical tradition. |
