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FOUR-TIME GRAMMY AWARD WINNER DAVID HOLT
NAMED 2011 UNCLE DAVE MACON DAYS HERITAGE AWARD WINNER
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Four-time Grammy winner David Holt has been named the 2011 Heritage Award winner of the 34th annual Uncle Dave Macon Days Festival.
This honor is presented to an individual who has dedicated their lives to the promotion and preservation of traditional southern music.
Holt easily meets the criteria. For more than 40 years, with banjo in hand, he has taken the music and stories of the Appalachian Mountains around the world. Multi-talented, he is a musician, storyteller, author, historian, television and radio host, educator and folklorist.
“Receiving the 2011 Uncle Dave Macon Days Heritage Award is a great honor. This award completes the circle for me. In my beginning days in the 1960s, I was inspired by Uncle Dave to learn old-time music and now I am being honored as someone carrying on his passion,” Holt said of the honor. “I never needed to look any further than the Dixie Dewdrop (Uncle Dave Macon’s nickname) to hear a master entertainer at work. He still inspires me.”
The honor will be presented on stage Saturday, July 9, at approximately 5 p.m., with Holt performing afterward. Earlier in the day, the Heritage Award winner will serve as the grand marshal of the motorless parade. From its 10 a.m. start at Central Magnet School, it will roll down historic East Main Street toward the courthouse, continue down West Main and cross Broad Street to Cannonsburgh.
As a solo performer or performing with his band, The Lightning Bolts, or sharing the stage in a two-man show with the venerable Doc Watson, Holt delights audiences, playing everything from a guitar to a paper bag. Although he never met Uncle Dave, one of the early Grand Ole Opry stars, Holt says when he made his first Opry appearance in 1980, he played Macon’s “Down the Old Plank Road” in tribute.
Growing up, Holt credits his father, Joe, for introducing him to a style of music other than the popular tunes of the day. The elder Holt did this by teaching his son how to play the spoons and bones. The bones, a rustic rhythm instrument, have been played by five generations of Holts and were first carved by an ancestor in the Civil War.
While a college student at the University of California Santa Barbara in the late 1960s, Holt attended a Ralph Stanley concert and was captivated by the performer’s clawhammer banjo playing. Following the show, he asked Stanley where he could learn to play that style. The answer was easy: Holt needed “to go back to the mountains where a lot of old folks still play that style.”
Following his college graduation, Holt moved to western North Carolina. There he immersed himself in the vital folk culture of the area and experienced, firsthand, the excitement of “learning from the source . . . the old-timers themselves.”
In 1975, he founded and directed the Appalachian Music Program at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C., just east of Asheville. Six years later, he embarked on his full-time career as an entertainer.
Along the journey, he has toured for the U.S. State Department as a musical ambassador, hosted the acclaimed “Fire on the Mountain” television show on The Nashville Network and the long-running “Folkways” series and Emmy award-winning “Great Scenic Railway Journeys” for PBS. His voice is heard on Public Radios’ “Riverwalk: Classic Jazz from the Landing,” which has been broadcast from San Antonio, Texas, for more than 20 years. Also, he was one of the street musicians in the popular film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
For more information on David Holt, visit his website by clicking here.
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