National Heritage Fellowships and Mike Seeger

Seeking an appropriate way to honor folk artists for their contributions to American culture, the National Endowment for the Arts began awarding National Heritage Fellowships in 1982. Each year, the NEA honors 10-13 individuals (and occasionally performing groups) for their lifetime achievements and artistic excellence. To date, the NEA has awarded 338 Fellowships, this country’s highest honor for folk and traditional artists.

The NEA announced the 2009 National Heritage Fellowships in August, and the 11 honorees represent the vast range of folk traditions in the U.S., including a willow basket-maker, a Cambodian classical dancer and choreographer, a cowboy poet, a Yoruba singer, a Puerto Rican cuatro player and two artists presented in the past by Cityfolk, zydeco master “Queen” Ida Guillory and the a cappella gospel singing group the Birmingham Sunlights.

The 2009 honors had a bittersweet aspect as well as the celebratory, as the recipient of this year’s Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship--musician, record producer and folk music advocate Mike Seeger--was in hospice care nearing the end of his battle with cancer.

Mike Seeger (1933-2009) is as responsible as any one musician for the re-discovery, preservation and ongoing revival of the country music recorded between 1925 and 1942, what we now call “old-time country.” Seeger was a tireless evangelist for the charms of this music, and he was the portal through which many of us first approached the stringbands, ballad singers, fiddlers and banjo players of this formative era in American music. Seeger called these songs and tunes “Music from the True Vine,” and he tended and nurtured the vine with love, care, respect and intelligence.

Seeger is best known for his work with the New Lost Ramblers, the pioneering old-time revival band he co-founded in the late 1950s, but his contributions to American music go far beyond the recordings and tours of that seminal trio. He was also a prolific solo artist, with a dozen albums to his credit displaying his mastery of guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, autoharp, harmonica and dulcimer.

Seeger did lots of important field recordings and produced albums by the Country Gentlemen, Elizabeth Cotten, Sam and Kirk McGee, Roscoe Holcomb, Ernest Stoneman, Dock Boggs, Kilby Snow, Cousin Emmy and many others, as well as the 1956 record that’s considered the very first bluegrass album, American Banjo: Three-Finger and Scruggs Style. He was also an avid collaborator, touring and recording with such musicians as Tommy Jarrell, Alice Gerrard, the Strange Creek Singers (Seeger, Gerrard, Hazel Dickens, Tracy Schwartz and Lamar Grier) and John Hartford.

“It was Mike who said to a generation of musicians, ‘Dig a little deeper,’” said Joe Wilson, head of the National Council for the Traditional Arts and himself a recipient of the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship. “His contributions as an advocate of great artists who had been ignored will shine for generations to come; he is our teacher in inclusiveness, the one always willing to put others before himself, to say ‘You need to hear this.’”