HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL HERITAGE FELLOWSHIPS

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE NEA NATIONAL HERITAGE FELLOWSHIPS In a 1982 program book for a celebration of the first class of National Heritage Fellows, Bess Lomax Hawes, thendirector of the Folk Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote: “Each year, we will greet, salute, and honor just a few examples of the dazzling array of artistic traditions we have inherited throughout our nation’s fortunate history…. We believe that this can continue far into the future, each year’s group of artists demonstrating yet other distinctive art forms from the American experience.” In the nearly 40 years since, the Arts

1984 National Heritage Fellow Ralph Stanley (center, with banjo) leads his band in a concert outside the Old Post Office Building in Washington, DC, in 1984.

NEA file photo Endowment has realized this vision, each year bringing national attention to the great diversity of folk and traditional artists practicing in our country. Inspired by the Japanese Living Treasures program, this one-time award to individuals recognizes both their artistic excellence as well as their efforts to conserve America’s many cultural traditions for future generations. While some of the almost 450 recipients are well known nationally—such as Mavis Staples, Michael Flatley, B.B. King, and the quilters of Gee’s Bend—many recipients are best known in their

1990 National Heritage Fellow Kevin Locke, Lakota and Anishinaabe.

Photo by Michael G. Stewart

home or cultural communities, where they are lauded as masters of crafts, dance, music, oral traditions, visual arts, and more.

The first class of Heritage Fellows included the blues singer/harmonica player Sonny Terry and his frequent performing partner, guitarist/ singer Brownie McGhee, as well as the Mexican American singer Lydia Mendoza, bluegrass musician Bill Monroe, and ornamental ironworker Philip Simmons. Since then, the award has recognized artists representing more than 200 traditional art forms, such as Passamaquoddy basketmaking, cowboy poetry, Cambodian classical dancing, and Tejano accordion playing. This range reveals the breadth and depth of the traditional art forms practiced in our nation.

All National Heritage Fellowships begin with a nomination, often by someone from the artist’s community, which also includes supporting materials and letters of support. Those are reviewed by a panel of experts with a range of experience in the folk and traditional arts, as well as one lay person. The panel’s recommendations are then reviewed by the National Council on the Arts, with the final decision made by the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The amount of the award started at $10,000 in 1982 and grew to $25,000 in 2009.

The program has also expanded in other ways since its inception. Initially an award just for individuals, in 1989, the African American

a capella gospel quartet the Fairfield Four became the first group to receive a Heritage Fellowship. Since then, 34 duos and groups have been honored. In 2000, the Arts Endowment added an annual award which honors an advocate in the folk and traditional arts. Named the Bess Lomax Hawes Fellowship as a tribute to the former Arts Endowment director, this award recognizes an individual who has made major contributions to the excellence, vitality, and public appreciation of the folk and traditional arts. Chris Strachwitz, record producer and cultural advocate, received the first of these awards.

While the Heritage Fellowships are a central component of the Arts Endowment’s support of the folk and traditional arts, the agency also has a long history of providing grants to nonprofit organizations to support projects ranging from festivals to documentary and media projects, exhibitions, and educational programs. The agency has also played an essential role in the creation and support of folk arts partnerships at the state level, providing opportunities for fieldwork, apprenticeships, and more opportunities for the public to experience and gain an appreciation for our nation’s diverse and ever-growing cultural traditions. This year, the Arts Endowment is investing $1,000,000 in a National Folklife Network to develop new infrastructure in spaces where it does not currently exist. In addition, the folk arts partnerships have expanded to include all states, territories, and regions of the country for the first time in the program’s history.

The physical award itself was created using two artforms celebrated during the inaugural year of the NEA National Heritage Fellowships: ornamental iron work from Charleston, South Carolina, and Osage ribbon work, which is being celebrated this year as the tradition continues with Osage ribbon worker and 2021 National Heritage Fellow Anita Fields.

“I think the importance of carrying on this knowledge that we have and the traditions that have been given to us is—it's the way that we can show the younger people in the younger generation, how to carry our ways on—so that they still exist into the future,” Fields said. “I have always felt that that was shown to me by really strong Osage women and they were my role models. So, I'm able to hopefully do the same thing for other people, for other young people. It's just important because we don't want to ever forget where we came from and who we are, because our folks went through a lot of hardship for us to be here.”

Through this award, the National Endowment for the Arts can both celebrate the richness of our nation’s cultural traditions and honor the immense dedication of the recipients in ensuring these art forms will continue to thrive for years to come.

2005 National Heritage Fellow Albertina Walker.

Photo by Tom Pich

Each National Heritage Fellow receives this custom-designed medallion.

Photo by Cheryl T. Schiele

Chilkat weaving by 2017 National Heritage Fellow Anna Brown Ehlers.

Photo by Hulleah Tsinhaunahjinnie

HILL COUNTRY BLUES MUSICIAN AND SONGWRITER

Ashland, MS

Cedric Burnside

The blues is music for all epochs, and Hill Country blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter Cedric Burnside is widely heralded as an exemplar of the genre’s timeless prescience about American life. Spanning three decades, Burnside’s work holds the legacy and future of North Mississippi’s sound stories, telling ancestral blues stories that honor the region’s heritage and ensure its future. These stories, monumental and everyday, at once African and American and Southern and Mississippian, document the human condition and the Black American experience, from the genre’s birthplace.

Born in Memphis in 1978 and raised in North Mississippi’s Marshall and Benton Counties, Burnside’s blues inheritance is multigenerational. The grandson of Hill Country blues luminary R.L. Burnside, Cedric spent his youth carefully studying his blues elder, playing alongside him at house gatherings and juke joint gigs. By age 13, he was out on the road accompanying his grandfather’s band on drums and coming of age as an artist in a distinct blues tradition. Before he was an adult, Burnside had made his own place as a collaborator and innovator in the tradition, traveling around North America representing the Hill Country blues, and the sound’s distinctiveness from its Delta, Texas, Piedmont, and Chicago counterparts.

As an architect of the second generation of the Hill Country blues, Burnside has spent his career tending to the legacy of the genre by expanding the next, electric generation of the North Mississippi sound. In Burnside’s care, the sound leads with extended riffs that become sentences, pleas, or exclamations, rendering the guitar like its West African antecedent, the talking drum. These riffs fuse with Burnside’s voice, like the convergence of hill and horizon in the distance, carrying listeners to a deep well of Mississippi history whose waters reflect the present and the future of the state and the nation.

Burnside has carried the Hill Country torch across nine individual and collaborative albums. He is a contributor on several awardwinning projects with other Hill Country blues musicians, work that has earned him numerous accolades, including multiple Blues Music Awards for his work as a drummer. He earned a Grammy nomination for the 2015 album project Descendants of Hill Country and another for his solo recording, 2018’s Benton County Relic. These projects are capstone statements for a lifetime of musical labor channeling the blues spirit on drums, guitar, and vocals in the North Mississippi Hill Country tradition. His 2021 album, I Be Trying, is a testament to Burnside’s understanding of this tradition and what must be done to maintain it, as he returns the tradition to its interior core and opens the space for a new generation of Hill Country artists to step in.

By Zandria F. Robinson, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Georgetown University

‟There’s no sugar-coating anything—it is what it is—and that’s what Hill

Country blues is all about.

It’s about the unorthodox changes, and to learn that, you have to dig really deep. It’s nothing you can read off paper. I feel that in my heart.”

—Cedric Burnside

RONDALLA MUSICIAN

Burbank, CA Tagumpay Mendoza De Leon

Tagumpay Mendoza De Leon is a master teacher and performer of rondalla, a traditional Spanishinfluenced form of music from the Philippines. Within the Filipinx diaspora, the rondalla is profoundly meaningful as a key cultural symbol. With his easygoing style and avuncular warmth, De Leon has promoted this tradition to thousands of Filipinx Americans as fellow performers, students, and audience members. His quiet, unassuming presence has contributed integrity and deep cultural knowledge to communities in Los Angeles, Southern California, and beyond.

De Leon was born in 1945 in Nueva Ecija, Republic of the Philippines. His mother, Illuminada Mendoza, was an accomplished pianist. His father, National Artist Felipe Padilla De Leon, was a bandleader and composer. De Leon first studied the instruments he found around the house: the piano, the accordion, and the violin. When his siblings formed the De Leon Rondalla, he chose the upright bass to accompany them, an instrument at which he excelled. The De Leon children played for family and community functions in 1960s Manila.

De Leon emigrated to the United States in 1971, settled in Burbank, California, and began performing rondalla within the Filipinx diasporic community. De Leon first played bandurria (a 14-stringed tenor rondalla mandolin) and guitar with the Pamanlahi Dance Troupe, then worked with the Fil-Am Cultural Family Group under musical director Nitoy Gonzales of the famed Bayanihan Philippine National Folk Dance Company. De Leon joined the group as the assistant director in 1985 and performed widely in Southern California.

Within a broad network of West Coast Filipinx American musicians and dancers, De Leon rose to prominence as a teacher of rondalla instruments, an ensemble leader, and an expert on instrumental repertoire. His own group, the Rondalla Club of Los Angeles (RCLA), continues to perform with new members and experienced instrumentalists alike who play the bandurria, laúd, octavina, guitar, and upright bass. According to one RCLA member, rather than preach the importance of history and tradition, De Leon’s stalwart reverence for their repertoire of traditional folk songs radiates outward to both fellow players and audiences.

De Leon uses both the classroom space and the performance stage to steward the rondalla tradition and transmit this rich heritage to the Filipinx diasporic community. Since 1991, the RCLA has regularly performed at Pilipino Culture Nights in many Southern California colleges and universities. De Leon is a popular instructor at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches rondalla to eager Filipinx American undergraduates of all experience levels.

With the Fil-Am Family Cultural Group, De Leon performed at the Chateau-Gombert International Folk Dance Festival in Marseille, France, in 1990 and 1993. In 2002, De Leon was a master artist in Alliance for California Traditional Arts’ Apprenticeship Program. When not teaching or performing, De Leon plays bass with the Filipino American Symphony Orchestra of Los Angeles.

By Deborah Wong, Ethnomusicologist, University of California, Riverside, and Neal Matherne, Historical Interpreter, Oklahoma Historical Society, and Affiliated Researcher, Field Museum of Natural History

‟Having been involved with the Philippine cultural scene since my childhood days in the Philippines, I have been deeply attached to the beautiful sounds of rondalla music. It is very important for the Filipino

American community to be constantly reminded of their culture and where they came from and one way I can accomplish this is to let them hear the beauty of their own music by listening to the rondalla.”

—Tagumpay Mendoza De Leon

OSAGE RIBBON WORKER

Tulsa, Oklahoma Anita Fields

(Osage/Muscogee)

In her artwork, Anita Fields comfortably helms the intersection of duality, a deeply held philosophical concept of her Osage culture, where notions of earth and sky and male and female inform many of her designs. It is a position in which Fields creates important bridges to carry forth her people’s traditions while affirming their place in the modern world, and it has gained her wide acclaim over a 40-plus year career.

A multidisciplinary artist who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Fields primarily works in clay and textiles, often fusing the two by incorporating into her ceramics aesthetic qualities that are unique to Osage ribbon work. An early adopter among Native American artists who create conceptual pottery installations, Fields has achieved the status of both the perpetuator of longstanding Osage practices and the originator of new contemporary modes of expression.

The seeds of Fields’ craft dyad were planted firmly in the memories of childhood mud pies made under the hot Oklahoma sun, and through the influence of her grandmother, who nurtured in Fields a reverence for the significance of Osage clothing worn for cultural gatherings. For Fields, clothing is a link to family and community. She views her textile work as an assertion of the strength of Native women, and she sees in it the love and spirituality endowed generationally through her grandmother and other women in her family. Abstracted details from traditional garments sewn onto contemporary designs and expressed in clay dresses, moccasins, and purses are a means for Fields to convey Native resilience. The implementation and style of Osage ribbon work is unique, and Fields is an exemplar of the practice. Fields is also known for inventively transcribing her textile designs into her work in clay. In both mediums, Fields uses layers and writing to reference the complexities and distortions found in written histories of Indigenous cultures. Through her art, Fields aims to dispel myths and stereotypes surrounding Native people while encouraging deeper understanding of that which is common to all living things.

A Tulsa Artist Fellow since 2017, Fields recently earned a prestigious 2021 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship. In 2019-2020, her work was part of the landmark traveling exhibition, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists. Other notable exhibitions include Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Legacy of Generations: Pottery by American Indian Women at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Fields’ work is in permanent collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her work is part of the Oklahoma State Art Collection.

By Joel Gavin, Oklahoma Arts Council

‟The work I make signifies a continuum of thought, knowledge, and the essence of who we are as

Indigenous peoples living in a modern, chaotic, and challenging world.”

—Anita Fields

MEXICAN AMERICAN BAND

Los Angeles, CA Los Lobos

Los Lobos has defined the East Los Angeles sonic landscape for nearly a half century. Following the musical trajectory of giants such as Ritchie Valens and Lalo Guerrero, who melded traditional Mexican music with other popular forms, Los Lobos has carried the torch of Chicano music into the present and has amassed a body of work that will be cherished, studied, and emulated for many years to come.

Formed in 1973 by guitarist/accordionist David Hidalgo and percussionist and lyricist Louie Perez, their joint eclectic musical interests led them to recruit two other students from Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. Guitarist Cesar Rosas and bassist Conrad Lozano joined and they decided to call themselves Los Lobos del Este. As young, music-loving Chicanos from the barrio, they were a product of their surroundings. African American influences such as the blues, rock n roll, jazz, and doo–wop were a natural complement to the deep and soulful Mexican and Latin American sounds they had grown up with, such as the bolero, rancheras, música norteña, son jarocho, son huasteco, and cumbias. Los Lobos utilized these multicultural influences to give birth to their unique sound.

From back yard family parties, weddings, and Mexican restaurants, Los Lobos was quickly in demand amid the pre- and post- Chicano civil rights movement. In 1978, they recorded and released their first album Los Lobos del Este De Los Angeles (Just Another Band From East LA), which led them to more popularity and to connect them to the versatility and angst of the city’s punk rock music scene. Their association with the LA roots band, the Blasters, led to the addition of multi-instrumentalist Steve Berlin, who left the Blasters to join them, further expanding their sound.

The wildly successful soundtrack of La Bamba (1985) catapulted Los Lobos into international stardom, earning them industry recognition and a Grammy Award. Los Lobos responded to this success by releasing the traditionalist La Pistola y El Corazon (1988). The band’s accomplishments do not overshadow their ongoing commitment to mentoring and elevating up-and-coming bands that have benefited from their trailblazing, such as Making Movies, Ozomatli, Chicano Batman, La Santa Cecilia, and Quetzal.

A “musician’s band,” Los Lobos’ lyricism and unique poetic prose, mostly manifested by lyricist Louie Perez, expresses the environment and consciousness of the barrio in relation to the world around it. Their delivery in English, Spanish, or Spanglish espouses the important ideas of humanity, pro-immigration, depression, love of self, community, and deep Mexican/ Chicano culture and heritage. Each of their albums takes the sound of Chicano rock music into another stratosphere.

Los Lobos has earned numerous awards, including three Grammy Awards; induction into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame; and countless congressional and community recognition. The pride of their community, they are deep-thinking vatos with the diverse sound of America coursing through their veins.

By Martha Gonzalez, Artivista, Associate Professor, Scripps College

‟When Los Lobos formed in 1973, it was really unusual for kids right out of high school to play traditional

Mexican music. It was the beauty and complexity of the music that attracted us. We were unaware that we were bringing generations together and drawing attention to our culture. These were the unexpected gifts we received for doing what we loved.”

—Louie Pérez (Los Lobos)

IRISH FLUTE PLAYER

Yonkers, NY Joanie Madden

Joanie Madden is recognized as one of the most influential women in Irish music worldwide, with an accomplished career as a composer, recording artist, and performer. One of the great flute and whistle players of her generation—and steeped in a generations-long musical tradition that she proudly champions to audiences around the world—she is a leading presence in the advancement of traditional Irish music, from its community grassroots to its modern presentation in the international concert hall.

Born in the Bronx, Madden’s musical passion was ignited by her father, Joe Madden of County Galway Ireland, an accordion player and well-known bandleader in New York’s Irish-immigrant community. The family home was a vibrant musical space, and she spent her early childhood completely immersed in the practice. She began learning the tin whistle from Jack Coen (NEA National Heritage Fellow, 1991), and would often enthusiastically practice in school by tapping the notes on a wooden pencil held to her mouth. She advanced through the competitive music circuit, becoming the first American to win the Senior title at the All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil (Festival of Music) on the tin whistle in 1984. Her Songs of the Irish Whistle albums (1996, 1999) are among the most successful whistle albums ever sold.

Described as “virtuosic” by her peers, Madden’s playing is praised for being uniquely expressive, ranging from jubilant upbeat reels to meditative ballads and slow airs. Rather than playing with the wooden flute, which is standard amongst traditional Irish musicians, she plays on silver flutes more common with classical musicians. This affords a greater range of playing capability while paradoxically complicating the common ornamentations of traditional Irish playing, creating her distinct style.

In 1985, Madden began leading what is now one of the most commercially and critically successful music groups in Irish traditional music. Cherish the Ladies, the first all-female troupe of its kind, has gained international fame and has notably achieved honorable status within the symphony hall environment. In continuing the family tradition of bandleading, Madden has become an immensely respected figure. Her multidimensional understanding of music is informed by decades of casual Irish traditional music sessions, or seisiúns, professional production work, and a broad understanding of Irish cultural practice, including dance. This, with her vibrant charisma and heartwarming sincerity, has instilled among fellow artists a unique level of trust in her leadership and direction, while preserving a genuine sense of collaboration and partnership.

Madden continues to bear the mantle of tradition-keeping through regular educational engagements, including ethnomusicologyfocused bus tours through Ireland and cruises offering Irish workshops and dance lessons. She leads workshops at the storied Catskills Irish Arts Week in Durham, New York, and has served as director of Augusta Heritage Celtic Music Week in Elkins, West Virginia. She actively mentors flute and tin whistle students and has proudly coached three All-Ireland champion-winning tin whistle musicians.

By the Irish Arts Center

‟It's wonderful to be performing a concert and see some little girl come up to you after the show and say, ‘Wow, I could do this too.’ I'm a girl from the Bronx who's made my living playing traditional Irish music.

I've toured all over the world, recorded 24 albums so far, and played on three Grammy-winning records. It's been great to be able to show people, if you believe in a dream… if you put your mind to it and you work very hard, you can do it.”

—Joanie Madden

Chicago, IL Reginald “Reggio the Hoofer”McLaughlin

Reginald “Reggio the Hoofer” McLaughlin is the Windy City’s most revered master of tap dancing. For more than 50 years, he has brought his inspired distinctive “hoofing” to the nation’s stages—classrooms, senior centers, streets, and festivals —earning a respected place as a passionate performer and teacher who has kept this dance tradition alive.

Born in 1953 on Chicago’s South Side, McLaughlin developed a fondness for tap dancing while watching a performance in second grade. After a stint in his teens as a professional R&B musician, McLaughlin met Jimmy Payne, Sr., a prominent Chicago tap dancer, who took the young artist under his wing, providing him with a solid foundation and the motivation to lace up his dancing shoes full-time.

With few professional opportunities and little knowledge of the dance scene, McLaughlin began his career underground, dancing in the subways to earn money to eat. Fortunately, a revival of tap paralleled his burgeoning career and doors soon opened. He joined the roster of Urban Gateways, a nonprofit dedicated to providing arts experiences for Chicago’s underserved youth, and presented programs at schools, libraries, museums, and park facilities that combined performance, historical commentary, and demonstration. With a professional track record, McLaughlin left the subway behind, securing bookings as part of dance team programs and as a workshop leader across the city.

In 1994, he met Ernest “Brownie” Brown, half of the vaudeville duo Cook and Brown that had performed on Broadway and with Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Brown also co-founded the legendary dance ensemble the Copasetics in 1949. Determined to keep tradition alive, Brown joined forces with McLaughlin in a duo that tapped together for nearly two decades. Not surprisingly, McLaughlin caught the attention of the Old Town School of Folk Music early on, and they quickly offered him a position as tap instructor. Today, nearly 30 years later, he maintains a vigorous teaching schedule, determined to pass on the tradition to another generation. Recently, McLaughlin worked closely with ragtime pianist Reginald Robinson and the Carolina Chocolate Drops on the musical production Keep A Song in Your Soul: The Black Roots of Vaudeville, which was supported by the Arts Endowment. He also produced two dance instructional videos, appeared in five documentaries, and is currently working on a one-man show.

McLaughlin’s efforts earned him a plethora of awards, including the Flo-Bert Award, given for achievement in the art of tap dancing, and grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. He also garnered funding from the Rockefeller Foundation’s MAP Fund and the Joyce Foundation. In 2015, the Old Town School of Folk Music honored “The Hoofer” with their Distinguished Teaching Artist Award, and in 2021 named a dance studio after him.

By Bucky Halker, historian, Chicago, Illinois

‟I realized somebody had to keep the American tap tradition alive. So,

I started my career tap dancing in Chicago subways, and I learn from that if you are true to your art form…it would be true to you.”

—Reginald McLaughlin

Photo by Terry Tasche

MUNDILLO MASTER WEAVER

Moca, Puerto Rico Nellie Vera

The soothing sound of the wooden bobbins meeting each other as they weave the mundillo lace have always been part of the life of Nellie Vera, known affectionately by everyone as Doña Nellie. Born in the town of Moca, known as the “Capital of Mundillo” in Puerto Rico, she learned this traditional art form from her mother, Manuela Sánchez, when she was seven years old. Mundillo is a handmade bobbin lace made in a lap box called a telar. It holds a rounded pillow with a pattern secured by pins that guide the process of maneuvering the threads holding the wooden bobbins. The lace is produced by the weaving of the wooden bobbins, which in turn make a harmonious click-clack melody.

That sound is what made Vera fall in love with mundillo as a child when she visited with her mother and other weavers in town. This was in the Puerto Rico of the 1930s, when mundillo was a strong labor force in Moca. Industrialization brought many foreign and cheaply made laces, which led to the decline of the mundillo art form. Along this time, she earned her bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Puerto Rico and worked as a teacher. After retiring in 1980, she reunited with mundillo.

In 1982, she was one of the founding members of the Borinquen Lacers, a respected mundillo weavers collective affiliated with the International Old Lacers. She also presided for 20 years in the Taller de Artesanos Mocanos, a nonprofit that fostered the work of more than 300 artisans from the town of Moca, and, alongside other mundillo weavers, pushed for the creation of the Museo del Mundillo. On an island where most of the cultural institutions are established in the capital of San Juan, Vera was adamant that if a mundillo museum was going to be created, it had to be in Moca, where it is now established.

In 2000, her work received an honorific mention in the first edition of FERINART, the International Arts & Crafts Fair in Puerto Rico. Then in 2004, she was awarded a national recognition as a Master Artisan by the Puerto Rican Artisanal Development Program under what is now the Department of Economic Development and Commerce. In 2009, she received the Artisanal Excellence Award from the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. In 2012, Vera was recognized as an Outstanding Artisan by the Puerto Rican Artisanal Development Program and in 2014, as National Symbol. Then in 2015, she was inducted into the Artisan Hall of Fame of Puerto Rico. She has also been lecturer in the Incarnate Word College of Texas (1995) and in The Field Museum de Chicago (2006).

After dedicating more than 40 years to the art of mundillo, Vera not only still finds the essence of nature in its intricate designs, but also describes it as her way of life.

By Jessabet Vivas-Capó, Program Advisor and Interim Director of the Folk Arts and Creative Industries Program, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña

‟Si a uno le gusta hacer algo, uno lucha todo el tiempo por eso. Luego de mi retiro como maestra volví a tejer mundillo y desde entonces no he parado. El mundillo me mantiene con vida, me llena.” ‟If one likes to do something, one fights for that something, forever.

After I retired as a school teacher I went back to mundillo lace and I haven’t stopped since.

The mundillo keeps me alive, it fulfills me so.”

—Nellie Vera

EASTER ROCK SPIRITUAL ENSEMBLE

Winnsboro, LA

Winnsboro Easter Rock Ensemble

The Winnsboro Easter Rock Ensemble, under the direction of Hattie Addison Burkhalter, maintains a rare women-led African American traditional spiritual ritual, rooted in both Christian worship and West African ring shout tradition. Documented only in the Northeast Louisiana Delta region and first practiced by enslaved Africans during the antebellum period, Easter Rock was held from Lake Providence to Ferriday, Louisiana, typically in the Baptist church. Today, this Franklin Parish group appears to be the last practitioners of this once thriving tradition.

Easter Rock, held on Easter Eve to celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, offers a visual, musical, culinary, and spiritual feast, filled with Christian and West African symbolism. The lighted lamps in the darkened sanctuary create an otherworldly, hypnotic atmosphere as the streamers of the banner representing Christ’s cross sweep back and forth around the white table representing Christ’s sepulcher. Moving counter-clockwise around the table, the Easter Rockers sing spirituals accompanied by the syncopated beat of their feet hitting the wooden floor of the Delta plantation church, echoing their ancestral drums and call-and-response improvisational singing.

Following in the footsteps of her mother Ellen Addison and five generations of the family, Burkhalter, born in 1953, began attending the rock as a child around age six. When she was older, she helped her mother, and later took over as leader when her mother stepped down. Since the rock ritual is embedded in a church service, the leader secures the venue, invites the musical performers and speakers, makes the program, repairs or makes the banner, fills the lamps, obtains the cakes and punch representing communion, and trains, rehearses, and coordinates the group of 12-20 participants.

As leader of the Winnsboro Easter Rock Ensemble, Burkhalter has recruited and orchestrated a host of family and community members with younger people coming in as older ones aged out or passed away: her daughter Laketa “PK” Addison Levy, her sister Pearlie Addison Whitten, grandchildren LaDejia Addison, Tyreal Addison, Ha’Tia Levy, Roderick Levy, Jr., her brother John White, and community members Emma Jones Bradshaw, Felicia Brown, Jeria Brown, Jalissa Brown, Kelly Brown Tammy Lynch, Deadrea Marzell, Nikiya Pleasant, Yazmine Pleasant, Jada Robinson, Nikki Smith, Karen Whitfield, Ashley Winn, D. J. Johnson, Tyron Williams, and caller Emma Hagan.

While the Easter Rock is a sacred service, they have performed numerous times for the Louisiana Folklife Festival (1994-2005), the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Natchitoches Folk Festival, the Northeast Louisiana African American Museum, and the 1997 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife. Burkhalter was inducted into the Louisiana Folklife Center’s Hall of Master Folk Artists in 2015, and selected for the Louisiana Touring Directory.

By Susan Roach, Director, School of Literature and Language, Louisiana Tech University

‟I knew when I first started out, my mother and grandmother and them—they were into it. It was just knowing what they were rocking for—a risen savior, and I just decided I loved it, and

I still love it and I’m going to carry it on until I can’t do it anymore.”

—Hattie Addison (Winnsboro Easter Rock Ensemble)

FILMMAKER, DOCUMENTARIAN, AND MEDIA CURATOR

Delaplane, VA

Tom Davenport

Tom Davenport, recipient of the 2021 Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship, has dedicated much of his life to creating forums to teach the world about different cultures and ways of life. Through collaborations with hundreds of documentary filmmakers, he brings stories and traditions of American culture to Folkstreams.net, a free streaming service for nearly 400 hard-to-find documentary films about American folklife. The curated site includes interviews with filmmakers, background essays, teacher guides, and film transcripts. The films of Les Blank, Arlene Bowman (Diné), John Cohen, Amanda Dargan, Gerald Davis, Bill Ferris, Debora Kodish, Alan Lomax, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Pete and Toshi Seeger, Bill Wiggins, and Steve Zeitlin are among those whose work lives on Folkstreams.

Davenport had early contact with iconic figures in folklife and cultural heritage when his father, Robert Davenport, moved to Washington, DC during the Great Depression and became president of the Washington Book Shop, a left-leaning cooperative which hosted performances of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly. He then discovered their 78 rpm records as a teenager in the 1950s.

Davenport attended Yale and spent time in East Asia, where he began a lifelong practice in Zen Buddhism and began to photograph folk traditions in Taiwan. He moved to New York in the mid-1960s, and found a job with Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, pioneers of cinéma verité. He married Miriam McDaniel, and in 1970, they moved to a farm in Virginia to complete work on his first documentary, The Shakers. There, he began a lifelong partnership with folklorist Dan Patterson from UNC Chapel Hill. Simultaneously, the Davenports produced From the Brothers Grimm, a live-action series of folktales set in Virginia.

Struggling to get his own documentary films seen, and to shine a light on other folklore-inspired films, Davenport became intrigued with new technologies of streaming in the late 1990s. In 2000, he wrote to folklorist Bill Ferris, then chairman of National Endowment for the Humanities, about his idea for a streaming site. This started a 20-year search for folklife films, a number of which would have been irretrievably lost but for his efforts to identify and stream them. The films now serve as a touchstone for younger generations to tap into the lived experiences of often overlooked Americans with deeply rooted traditions. As Davenport wrote, “One of the ways we made Folkstreams appealing was to treat the filmmaker as an artist, an ‘auteur.’ The films we selected for Folkstreams are not clips of performances, but documentaries that have a story, and in best of them, give something of the catharsis that art conveys.”

Davenport received the first Archie Green Award from the American Folklore Society, which recognized Folkstreams as a visionary project. The award described Folkstreams.net as “an extraordinary democratic initiative in public folklore and education, exponentially increasing the visibility of the field, and giving grassroots communities across the U.S. access to their own traditions, folklore, and cultural history.”

By Steve Zeitlin, Founding Director, City Lore

‘‘The idea of creating

Folkstreams.net grew out of our love of filmmaking, a respect for the traditional culture of ordinary Americans, and a desire to get our work to the general public.

Heretofore, much good independent film work was like the tree falling in the wilderness with no one to hear. With the internet and video streaming, we will be able to make a ‘national park’ within this wilderness where everyone can come and freely hear and see what we have labored on for so long and with such enjoyment.’’

—Tom Davenport

The Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship honors “keepers of tradition” who through their efforts as organizers, educators, producers, cultural advocates, or caretakers of skills and repertoires have had a major beneficial effect on the traditional arts of the United States. A member of the Lomax family of pioneering American folklorists, Bess Lomax Hawes (1921–2009) committed her life to the documentation and presentation of American folk artists. She served as an educator both inside the classroom and beyond, and nurtured the field of public folklore through her service at the National Endowment for the Arts. During her tenure as director of the NEA Folk Arts Program (1977–1993) an infrastructure of state folklorists was put in place, statewide folk arts apprenticeship programs were initiated, and the National Heritage Fellowships were created. In 1993 she received the National Medal of Arts for her many contributions in assisting folk artists nationwide and in bringing folk artistry to the attention of the public.