A Little on Piedmont Stringband Music
When most of people think of fiddle and banjo music, they think of the southern Appalachian Mountains as the source of this music. While the mountains of Virginia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina are great strongholds of traditional music today, they are certainly not the source. The nuances of piedmont stringband music stem from the demographics of the piedmont and thereby its focus on the banjo as the lead instrument. Among black ensembles, the banjo often set the pace and if a fiddle was present and it often was not, it served as accompaniment and not as the lead instrument as is more common in the Appalachian tradition. A guitar or mandolin would have been rare, but unheard of, in these bands but the foundation of this tradition lies rooted in the antebellum combination of fiddle and banjo.

Cool John Ferguson
Cool John Ferguson is the Director of Creative Development for the foundation. He helps artist develop their material so when they go out to perform they have an excellent show to present. Tim met John in Beaufort, South Carolina in 1995, in 1998 John moved to Pinnacle to support the work of Music Maker. He currently resides in Hillsborough and works closely with our visiting artists program.


Cootie Stark
A blind street singer, he learned his stuff from Greenville, South Carolina, bluesmen Uncle Chump and Pink Anderson in the 1930's. At 70 he rediscovered his unplugged genius and has headlined at festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe. His card catalog repertoire runs from soul classics to Piedmont blues songs like "Sandyland" and "Metal Bottoms."

Cootie Stark was one of the last authentic Piedmont blues guitarists/singers and provided a direct link to a South long gone.

Cora Mae Bryant
Cora Mae Bryant is the daughter of Georgia guitar legend Curley Weaver. She remembers, "When the weekend came, Daddy would come and get me. We did not know the difference between night and day." Curley would perform from one house party to the next often meeting up with his friends Blind Willie McTell and Buddy Moss. "When we was out partying, they loved to hear all Curley's songs but two they especially loved was Ticket Agent, and Tricks Ain't Working No More. You could really hear their feet stomping. Daddy and I used to sing Wee-Wee Hours together, it was really pretty."


Cueselle Settle (Mr. Q.)
Mr. Q was born in 1913. He is an old hep-cat whose music just makes you have to smile. A self-taught pianist, he has fashioned his own sound by mixing the piano styles of Art Tatum, Earl Hines and Oscar Peterson interspersed with songs by the Ink Spots.




Dave McGrew
The Okies and the Arkies used to do it. Now the Mexicans do it. In August they follow the pears and then the apples north from the eastern desert of Oregon and Washington into British Columbia. Some start in May with cherries inCalifornia and follow them north then east to Montana before running back for pears. After apples you can settle in an orchard and prune the trees for the winter or go do citrus in California.

For a moment in the 1970s and 1980s, among the Okie and Arkie old-timers, the Mexicans coming in, the fruit tramps were hippies you didn’t see on television. During the revolution the cameras focused on the sons and daughters of the professionals and managers, at Columbia and Yale. After the revolution they interviewed the bombers who became lawyers, the strike leaders who joined Wall Street.

Drink Small

I was born in 1933 in Lee County in Bishopville, South Carolina. I started playing when I was 11 years old. We had an old pump organ; I started playing Coon Shine Baby on that. Then I started on the one string guitar; I played Bottle, Up and Go. My uncle had a guitar around and I fooled around on that. I made my own little guitar, for strings I cut up an old inner tube.


Eddie Tigner

Eddie Tigner was born on Aug. 11, 1926, in Macon, Georgia. After his father died from mustard gas in World War I, his mother married a coal miner who moved the family to a mining camp in Kentucky. Eddie fondly remembers listening to bluegrass and country and western music as a child. When he was 14, the family returned South to Atlanta, and Eddie started following his piano-playing mother to house parties, breakdowns, fish fries, and barbecues, where she was in demand as an entertainer.

Elder James Goins / The Goins
Elder James Goins born July 18th, 1921 is Pastor for the Spiritual Holiness Church in Simpson, South Carolina. He and his wife Mother Pauline are a classic example of performing great music at its most basic and powerful best. It just shows you how much that less is more. Their music is a combination of the ancient African musical traditions and the early African American gospel traditions coming together. Electrifying! -Taj Mahal

Essie Mae Brooks
Essie Mae Brooks was born in Houston County, Georgia in 1930. Her father was a great drummer in the nearly forgotten African-American tradition called "Drumbeat." He would play the drum every weekend and people would gather and dance all night long. Her grandfather was a harmonica player and Essie started singing to accompany him. She began singing and writing gospel songs as a girl and has never stopped.

Etta Baker

Etta Baker of Morganton, NC, was born in 1913 and has been playing guitar since the age of 3. She is the premier female Piedmont blues guitar instrumentalist, plays the guitar everyday, and is constantly working on new arrangements. Etta maintains a beautiful yard and garden, and at the age of 91, is matriarch of 108 members in her immediate family.


George Higgs
George Higgs was born in 1930 in a farming community in Edgecombe County near Speed, North Carolina ("a slow town with a fast name" as he is fond of saying.) He learned to play the harmonica as a child from his father, Jesse Higgs, who enjoyed playing favorite spirituals and folk tunes at home during his spare time. George got to catch the medicine showman and harmonica player Peg Leg Sam playing locally in Rocky Mount during the tobacco market season and he made a lasting impression on the young harp player. He was later attracted to the guitar as a teenager and reluctantly sold a favorite squirrel dog to a neighbor to raise funds to purchase his first. As a result of their close proximity the dog spent more time at George's home than at his new owner's, so he got to have the guitar and keep the company of his dog.

Guitar Gabriel
Drink houses in Winston-Salem, North Carolina's black community, like juke joints in the Mississippi Delta, remain a vigorous setting for the perpetuation of the blues at its most real and rooted level. A refuge for the homeless and the down-and-out, as well as a gathering place for friends and lovers, the drink houses are on-going house parties where emotions run high, alcohol flows heavy, and the music is raw and from the heart. It is out of this blues milieu that Guitar Gabriel has recently reemerged to join another blues scene—the blues world that includes recording contracts, write-ups in magazines, and gigs in college-town bars and at festivals overseas.

Jerry "Boogie" McCain
Jerry "Boogie" McCain is the greatest post war harp player alive today. In 2001 he remains at the height of his powers, constantly writing and delivering amazing live performances with the energy of a teenager. Born in 1930 in Gadsden, Alabama, Jerry began playing his harp and singing along with jukebox records at his fathers barbecue stand, the Green Front Cafe.

He began recording in the early 50s for the Trumpet label making records of his unique blend of country swing and down-home blues. In 55 he recorded for the Excello label and he has continued making great records from the 60s up until present day.

John Dee Holeman
John Dee Holeman was born in Orange County, North Carolina in 1929. He is a storyteller, dancer and a blues artist that played with musicians who had learned directly from Blind Boy Fuller. He possesses an expressive blues voice and is a wonderful guitarist incorporating both Piedmont and Texas guitar styles. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage fellowship and a North Carolina Folk Heritage award, John Dee has toured the U.S, Europe and Asia. John recently retired from a career as a heavy machine operator and continues to tour both in the states and abroad.


Lee Gates
Lee Gates was born in Mississippi and moved to Milwaukee as a teenager where he has been playing his brand of down home blues for the past 50 years. Blues legend Albert Collins is his first cousin and you can hear the family influence in Lee's fluid guitar style and tone.


Lightnin’ Wells

Mike "Lightnin'" Wells was raised in North Carolina and has had an interest in traditional forms of music since childhood. An avid collector of country and blues recordings, these formed the basis for his developing style of playing and singing using a variety of acoustic instruments, including the guitar, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, and harmonica. Variety is a trademark of Wells' musical style and he attempts to educate as well as entertain audiences in his various performances. A Lightnin' Wells performance is a spirited, exciting interpretation of folk blues classics and obscure material based on his over 20 years of experience, performance and research.

Little Freddie King
Little Freddie's real name is Fread E. Martin and he was born in McComb, Mississippi, July 19, 1940 down the road from Bo Diddley place. His father, Jessie James Martin, was a blues guitarist that worked the weekend southern circuit in the Delta. His father would bring him out on the town when he was out there playin. "I would go out there and sit around on the outside around the juke joints and listenin." He'd be playin and drinkin and everyone was havin' fun. Freddie eventually taught himself how to play guitar and develop his country-style blues or as he calls it "Gut Bucket Blues".


Little Pink Anderson
Little Pink" Anderson of Spartanburg, SC began singing at medicine shows and carnivals with his legendary father Pink Anderson at the age of 3. He still performs the highly entertaining old folk songs that his Dad made famous.




Lucille Lindsay

I asked Guitar Gabriel one day if he had any brothers or sisters. He mentioned that he had a sister but he had not seen her in eight years. He gave me her married name and I found her, blind from diabetes, in an awful nursing home. When I reunited this pair the next day they immediately broke into song. I scrambled to put up my recording equipment as they sang. Gabriel had written this spiritual the day their mother passed away. Their emotions were so intense they both began crying and their tears soaked the front of their shirts.

Macavine Hayes
Macavine Hayes was born in Tampa, Florida on June 3rd 1943. His family farmed and he was the oldest of 5 sisters and 5 brothers. He remembers, “There was always something to do down on the farm, we listened to the radio and got up on the back porch and played the music of Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed.”

In the 60s he met Guitar Gabriel playing on the streets of Tampa. He followed his new friend back to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “Gabe taught me how to experience the road, sleep outside, go to some gals house and spend the night sometimes. Go to church on Sunday, we always carried nice suits and shoes. We would look good. We did a lot of travelin'.

We went to Atlanta down to Augusta and all through Florida. We played at juke joints and lay a hat down. Gabe was a free spirit and taught me that you can go anywhere you want to go. We ran a drink house together for years down on Claremont Street. Living with Gabe was not a hard life; you just had to drink all the time.”

Mr. Frank Edwards
Mr. Frank Edwards, elder statesman of Atlanta's blues community, died Friday, March 22, 2002 in Greenville, SC. He was 93.

Born March 20, 1909, in Washington, GA, Edwards left home at 14 after a disagreement with his father, bound for St. Augustine, Florida. He bought a guitar and began learning to play, receiving encouragement from guitarist Tampa Red (a.k.a. Hudson Whittaker). Later, Edwards took up harmonica, drawing inspiration from John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson and others.

Mudcat

Born on the banks of the Mississippi and raised in Georgia, Mudcat dropped out of acting school in New York to pursue a Blues major on the streets. Eventually he graduated to Atlanta where he converted the Northside Tavern into his school of music. His tutelage continues under Cootie Stark, Frank Edwards, Eddie Tigner and Cora Mae Bryant. A world class slide guitarist with a voice so rich it feels fattening, Mudcat's education is something you can feel right to your bones. Mudcat serves on the Foundation's board of directors.

Neal Pattman


Nobody made moonshine, worked a cakewalk, chopped wood or played a harmonica like Neal Pattman (1926-2005).

Losing an arm in a wagon wheel at the age of nine didn't slowed him at all. "66 years ago the Blues knocked on my door and they wouldn't leave."

His testimony can be heard in a sound and a style his daddy taught him as a child in the country outside Athens, Georgia.

Patrick & Cathy Sky
Patrick Sky, for those of you unfamiliar with the '60s, has been involved in singing, playing and performing his music and songs for over thirty years. In the past he has sold out Carnegie Hall and played for standing room only all over Europe and the United States. Among his major appearances are: The Montreal Expo, The Central Park Music Festival, Town Hall in New York and the Royal Festival Hall in London. He has the shared the billing with such artists as Pete Seeger, Buffy Sainte Marie, Joni Mitchell and Emmy Lou Harris, to name a few. Patrick has seven solo albums to his credit on the Vanguard and MGM labels, and his latest release, Through a Window on the Shanachie label. In addition he has produced over thirty records for other artists such as Mississippi John Hurt, Rosalie Sorrells and the great Irish Uilleann piper Seamus Ennis. It was while recording Ennis in the field that Patrick founded Green Linnet Records. This fact and Patrick's involvement in Irish music, especially piping, have made him one of the seminal figures of the Irish music revival in the United States.

Precious Bryant

Precious Bryant hails from Waverly Hall, Georgia. She is an honest, wonderful songwriter and a spellbinding performer. I met her in 1995; many years had passed since 1967 when folklorist George Mitchell had come knocking on her door. We performed with bluesmen Neal Pattman and Cootie Stark at shows in Atlanta, New York and Washington State. She even went to Switzerland. I learned quickly that Precious does not enjoy traveling, so we concentrated on letting the world know about this magnificent artist.

Preston Fulp
Preston Fulp grew up in Walnut Cove, an area just north of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where his family sharecropped tobacco. Preston took to music at an early age, starting to play the guitar when he was six. By his teens he was proficient on the violin and banjo and was a singer of both blues and hillbilly songs. He played blues with local musicians such as Wheeler Bailey, Arthur Anderson, Blind Blake and Blind Willie McTell.

Pura Fé
Pura Fé's voice soars the heavens, taking us on a visionary ride, elegantly stating the Indigenous influence on the birth of the Blues. Pura Fé explains the musical contributions made by Southeastern Indigenous people. “My Nation has been systematically disenfranchised and disregarded. Many people think we have nothing to do with the development of Southern culture. Not only were we captured and shipped off as slaves to West Africa and the Caribbean, we were bred together on slave plantations during colonization of our land.”


Skeeter Brandon
Despite his relative youth, still in his early 50s, Skeeter’s music reflects the influence of a century of African American songster traditions. He has the capability of earning a living by making music for any audience - black or white.


Slewfoot & Cary B.

Slewfoot was born Mark McLaughlin in 1953. He began playing guitar at the age of 13 and in 1980 he started his career as a New Orleans street musician.

Cary Beckelheimer, born in 1968, graduated with a degree in Theater. She traveled with a childrens theater company for 9 years before turning her full attention to music.

Sol is a rare, one of a kind musician. His talent stretches from fiery rock to laid back jazz, and from funky innovative grooves to soulful ballads, always drawing on a deep background in blues.

Sol
Sol began his musical experiences gigging with blues luminaries such as Guitar Gabriel, Captain Luke, and Macavine Hayes. While earning a degree in the Recording Industry, Sol performed extensively throughout Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi fronting his own blues and rock bands.

Sol then graduated to performing nationally and internationally with the true pioneers of the blues including Cootie Starks, Lee Gates, Beverly 'Guitar' Watkins, John Dee Holeman, and Jerry 'Boogie' McCain.

Additionally, Sol has performed with blues heavyweight Taj Mahal, Kenny Wayne Shepard, and the international guitar hero Cool John Ferguson (nominated 2 years -Most Outstanding Guitarist-Living Blues), who he performs with on a regular basis. With Cool John Ferguson, Sol has opened for the great B.B. King, Robert Randolph & the Family Band, and the Derek Trucks Band. Sol's roots run deep into the blues but his unique versatility has allowed him to gig w/ Latin, African, reggae, gospel, jazz, funk, R&B, and folk performers. Sol also heads his own groups performing throughout VA, NC and DC.

Sonny Boy King


Sonny Boy King was born July 14, 1930 in rural Lowndes County, Alabama. He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a self-taught bluesman who honed his craft in clubs and house parties when he lived in Alabama, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland from 1946 into the 1970s.



Sweet Betty
Born in Duluth, GA, just northeast of Atlanta, Betty Echols Journey grew up listening to gospel music. (Her mother's singing in church influenced her.) Aspiring to become a singer herself, Betty began singing at parties at her friends' homes. In the mid 1980's, she was introduced to legendary saxophonist, Grady "Fats" Jackson. Jackson was so impressed with Betty's vocals that he began bringing her with him to his performances. It was through Jackson that Betty met former Muddy Waters guitarist, "Steady Rollin" Bob Margolin. Margolin and his band, upon passing thought the southern region of the United States in the early 1990's would regularly perform with Jackson and Betty in such places as Jackson Station nightclub in Hodges, South Carolina and Blind Willie's or Blues Harbor in Atlanta, GA.

Tad Walters
Born in Canton, OH, raised in Raleigh, NC, Tad Walters began playing the guitar at age twelve. As he was developing his guitar skill, Tad picked up the harmonica a couple years later at fourteen. He was influenced by the likes of Blind Boy Fuller, Robert Lockwood, Charlie Patton, Robert Nighthawk, and John Jackson, among others, and began his professional music career with the Bob Margolin Band in 1996. In that four year period he traveled the world with the band and played with musicians like Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin, Billy Boy Arnold, Cary Bell, and others. In 2001 one Tad joined the Big Bill Morganfield band and stayed until 2004. Tad is now teaching guitar and harmonica lessons and concentrating on Piedmont blues and old-time jazz with Dave Andrews.

Whistlin’ Britches

Haskel Thompson was born in Winston-Salem, NC in 1932, and has lived there to this day. Captain Luke gave Haskel his nickname Whistlin' Britches a year ago. He has an amazing spirit and exudes utter joy when he sings. He is the only fellow I have heard who can pop and click his tongue like a bushman.



Willa Mae Buckner
Willa Mae Buckner was born on June 15th, 1922 in Augusta, Georgia. In her days as a touring performer, Buckner was known as "The Wild Enchantress," "Princess Ejo," "The Snake Lady," and "The World's Only Black Gypsy." Her tent show performances could enthrall any crowd. She was a true performer, showcasing herself as a blues singer, burlesque stripper, contortionist and fire swallower. More than anything, she was an articulate, self-educated and fiercely independent woman who blazed her own trail from the day she ran away from home and joined an all-black tent show at the age of 13. Her frank wit and exotic past set the tone when she sings her risque songs.

Willie King
Willie King lives in Pickens County Alabama, just a few miles from Mississippi, several miles from Aliceville. He envisioned and created a non profit organization called the Rural Members Association to teach the young people their heritage and what he calls survival skills.

"We see these kids now, they got all the problems we had coming up-dealing with the oppressor, figuring how to survive, feeling their self-worth under attack; success around them most always wearing a white face unless it's the preacher's and most time he just content to have his fine clothes, nice car, a church where they come, and there on the wall is a blond Jesus. So all that's a problem. But these kids, they got nothing to do. They mess with gangs, with drugs; they got no family teaching them their traditions, the African- American traditions. No tie to the land, the crafts of survival we always practiced in the country; no time for the blues. Now, you can be poor, and ain't nobody likes to be poor, but when you lose your culture you lose everything.