By Frank Matheis
Blues Week at Augusta is a music summer camp for adults. Student-musicians from all over the U.S, Canada and the world, pack their guitars, harmonicas, ukuleles, mandolins, banjos, basses, fiddles and more, shut off their mobile phones and descend upon the oldest formal summer school for the blues in the United States: Blues & Swing Week at the Augusta Heritage Center, the annual workshop at Elkins-Davis College in Elkins, West Virginia.
In 1973, “Augusta Heritage Arts Workshops” was the name given to a summer program that was set up to help preserve the Appalachian heritage and traditions. Augusta Heritage Center is known nationally and internationally for its activities relating to traditional folklife and folk arts of many regions and cultures. All that translates to pure, unadulterated fun and good times: Students jamming with their teachers, including world renowned blues virtuosos, until the wee hours of the morning; exuberant dancing and singing; and a joyful spirit of harmony, musically and personally. More fun can hardly be packed into a week, and all that without free flowing liquid libations or drugs. It’s the liberation from the daily blues through the blues, comprised of lectures, classroom courses, jams, concerts, student showcases and more, all in a single week.
Beth King, the Director of the Augusta Heritage Center, stated[1],
Over the course of the six weeks of programming the goal is to preserve the traditional arts feature of a variety of genres, not just Appalachian, but a wide cross section of the arts, in a wide spectrum of folklore, arts and music. The local community interacts with the program, which started here in this community with some people here who were involved since the very beginning. So much of the community comes to campus, interacts with the people who come from all over the U.S. and the world. It’s an open and friendly community. In 2015 we had seven foreign countries and 49 states represented. Over the six weeks we have around 800 students. Our vision is to support the traditional arts with as broad a base as we can, that means to bring in more participants and to grow the family. The new direction for Blues Week is to get more traditional and acoustic. The Augusta family has an important multi-generational aspect, a caring community. The inclusiveness of the program is important to us, to be able for young and old to work with professionals. To me the energy the blues teachers have brought is amazing. Those people have it all. They relate to people and they are very good teachers. Our students have been thrilled and charged by Jerron Paxton, Marcus Cartwright, Phil and all the people he brought. Whether you are a new learner or experienced musician…we welcome everyone in this nurturing experience. Don’t be timid or hesitant about how good you are. You have a place here…
Augusta Weeks include Irish, Cajun/Creole, Bluegrass, Old Time Country and more.The program was started by Margo Blevins, and in 1983 musician/folklorist Joan Fenton integrated blues, an important regional music genre in the Piedmont and Appalachian region, into the program. That was the first summer workshop in the United States to focus on blues music, folklore, craft and dance. The first blues teachers came from the nearby “Piedmont” acoustic scene in Washington, D.C. – John Jackson, John Cephas and Phil Wiggins.
Blues and Swing Week continues the tradition of bringing together kindred spirits for a week of musical sanctuary in the scenic Monongahlea National Forest in the High Allegheny Mountains. Nowadays, potential students have a wide array of choices for summer programs offering blues related music instruction: the Centrum Port Townsend Acoustic Blues workshop in Washington State, the Swannanoa gathering in North Carolina and Jorma & Vanessa Kaukonen’s Fur Peace Ranch in southeast Ohio, to name just a few. The Augusta program in some ways had seen a decline. Both Fenton and Wiggins were called back in 2016 after long absences with the mission of bringing the music camp back to the roots of traditional blues.
Reviving the convergence of dance and acoustic blues
In 2016, coordinator Phil Wiggins sought to unite the acoustic blues and dance with the original spirit of the music program by again bringing in African American traditional blues musicians, this time with a troupe of dancers, in the heritage of the black community of the Piedmont and Appalachian region. His vision was to foster the give_and-take process, the interaction of students and teachers, and for dancers to partake in the process, and for musicians and dancers to inspire each other. “Blues music is dance music and dance is a musical expression of the complex history of the acoustic blues,” said Junious Brickhouse, the dance coordinator of Blues Week and the founder and executive director of Urban Artistry, a Washington, D.C./Maryland based non-profit organization dedicated to the performance and preservation of art forms inspired by the urban experience. Brickhouse brought along a troupe of young Urban Artistry dancers to the event, and invited special guests, such as the renowned dance teacher Moncell Durden and the famous buck dancer Williette Hinton from North Carolina, son of Algia Mae Hinton. Hinton and Wiggins have collaborated before, as Wiggins has been integrating dance in most of his recent projects, including with Junious Brickhouse, Baakari Wilder and Williette Hinton.
Expert dance instructors Durden and Brickhouse led the team of young Urban Artistry dancers and the dance students in the class to create a beautiful scene of physical expression. The spirited and skilled dancers inspired participants to join in and transfixed the event into a joyful occasion. The dancers were especially fired up when they were joined by teacher and dance partner Hinton, who they all admired and felt inspired by as one of the living-greats in the art form. Hinton led everyone on the pavilion dance floor in an unforgettable night of joyful dancing.
Phil Wiggins said, “To make a workshop like this work, you need to bring in musicians who you know are of generous spirit”; so he brought along some of his musical soul mates to help teach and jam. Some of the teachers had double-duty. In addition to their daily teaching assignments and the general jam sessions they backed the dance classes and event. For that, Phil needed hardcore players, the “generous spirit” type of musicians who can’t stop playing, even after the gig is over. That magical core musical ensemble of people who love to play from the minute they wake up until the wee hours of the morning, “the core band” for the dances was the explosive country blues trio of Phil Wiggins on harmonica, multi-instrumentalist Jerron Paxton on guitar, banjo, fiddle and more, and the 22-year old blues sensation Marcus Lamont Cartwright, a guitarist from Louisiana. They were steadily present at seemingly every jam and dance performing all day long until late into the next morning with such unbridled joy of playing that they literally ignited the dancers. North Carolina multi-instrumentalist Mike “Lightning” Wells joined Phil and Jerron for a dance on the main Pavilion of Elkins & Davis College.
Multiple blues award winner Jerron Paxton, a sheer musical genius, has an almost insatiable hunger for playing. And the only guy who could possibly keep up with him in the euphoric compulsion to play was the brilliant young Marcus Cartwright. With Phil at the helm as senior musician, they formed a powerhouse acoustic blues trio of such enormous combined skill and musical exuberance, it was infectious and history-making. Jerron Paxton is not just one of the most talented roots & blues musicians of our time; he is a witty Master of Ceremonies, who added a dimension of off-the-wall humor to the instructor performance. He said, among other funny quips, “We want to teach you how to play together nicely. Music goes good with everything. It’s kind of like salt. “(Long pause. The audience is searching for meaning. Salt? What? Until he finally closed the deal with) “…It’s all a matter of proportion!” It took a while for the bard’s sharp wit to sink in before the auditorium of students and teachers finally got the point, and Jerron just got started from there throwing out his many funny ditties. Paxton can play anything from deep roots Appalachian mountain music on fiddle and banjo to deep roots blues. He taught String Band/Jug Band performance and he played, and played, and played.
Phil Wiggins’ current effort is to reunite dance with acoustic blues, and this collaboration had connected him with Junious Brickhouse, the founder and executive director of Urban Artistry. The Urban Artistry Dance Academy, located in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., describes their mission as “…provides an interdisciplinary urban dance education with a global perspective. Students are encouraged to become active participants and thought leaders in their respective communities, where they are not limited to mainstream trends but strive to become advocates of cultural preservation and artistic innovation.” Brickhouse, whose troupe now bridges the gamut of the Africa American dance experience from contemporary urban hip-hop to the traditional acoustic blues roots, invited special guests Moncell Durden, Rebecca Conley and Abigail Browning to Augusta Blues Week. His remarkable team of young dancers ignited Blues Week.
Hawnnah George Wheeler, Maren Cummings, Jade Ballard, Ryan Webb and Michael Esmeralda were a steady presence and they danced with such grace, beauty and joy to the old blues and roots music that everyone in their presence was filled with happiness and joy. It was almost indescribably fun, where this writer would have to reach for descriptive adjectives and none would seemingly do justice to the truly euphoric state of happiness these young people brought to the event.
Joan Fenton remembers:
Folklorist and performer Joan Fenton reminisced[2]about her role in founding the Blues Week at the Augusta Heritage Center. She is a highly skilled musician and a folkorist who earned a master’s degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1981. Joan Fenton is the owner of several stores in Charlottesville, Virginia, that feature traditional and contemporary handicrafts. She has made a series of historically important collections of sound recordings and related documentation of traditional music and arts. Presently she lives in Charlottesville, but grew up in Manhattan, New York City. In college she met bluesman “Philadelphia” Jerry Ricks, who turned her on to playing blues, and she also met Reverend Gary Davis. She took lessons directly from these masters.
In 1974, I took a class and maintained some contact with Augusta, and in 1983 I got a call asking me if I wanted to start a blues program. I had been talking to them about it, and they finally decided they wanted to do it. So I was hired as the first person to coordinate a blues week as part of the Augusta Heritage Workshop, which is a five-week music and crafts and dance in Elkins, West Virginia.
Margo Blevin was the director of Augusta. She had decided that she wanted to hire Sparky Rucker, one of the instructors. I decided I definitely wanted to hire John Jackson. And we decided we wanted a harmonica teacher, and neither of us knew one, so somebody – it could have been John Jackson — recommended that we hire Phil Wiggins. So we hired Phil for the first year. In the first year we had 15 students, and Sparky Rucker got stuck in Customs, didn’t get here till Tuesday. John Jackson was late – didn’t get here until Monday – so it was only Phil and me when it started. He had the harmonica students and I had all the guitar students for the first day. It was wonderful. It was just very exciting, very delightful. Everybody was thrilled with the program. We had somebody from Switzerland who came; one of the years we had somebody from Singapore. It was successful enough that we continued. Phil is somebody who I hired every year that I was coordinator to be on the program. He said to me that year, when we were talking about doing it again, ‘I play with this guitar player, John Cephas, and I’d like you to consider hiring him.’ I believe I had heard John play with Big Chief Ellis, so I was familiar with him – so the second year we hired John Cephas – and we also hired a woman by the name of Maureen Delgrosso to teach piano. So the program just started growing and growing and growing. Phil just became an institution here, as did John.
Phil Wiggins is a key core person for the program; he really was the basis of the harmonica program. He had a really wonderful way of being open to everybody in teaching. He loved to jam and be part of the evening scene and the jamming and to be getting out of their shells and really play. He was very good at encouraging and he did a lot of the beginning classes. He really seemed to enjoy that when it started. As the program grew we hired other harmonica teachers, but Phil was always like the core. John Jackson and John Cephas were always the core of the guitar program. Maureen was always the core of the piano, and then Ann Rabson became that core. You need some consistency of the people that seem to be really good teachers that people really like, that are part of the spirit of Augusta. So those people I would always bring back each year and then try to alternate other people into the program.
Then things got messy. I was the coordinator for many years; then at some point they asked me to co-coordinate with somebody else. Then they took it away from me and he became the coordinator. Then he quit. They gave it to yet somebody else and it was a disaster. So they asked me to come back. So I came back and coordinated again for a good while. Then the director left. There was somebody who thought they were going to become the director, and he fired me. He didn’t get the job. There was a new coordinator instead for all Augusta, and she started with somebody else. There were several transitions and then I got asked to come back again. Now, I’m back as being coordinator. When I got asked to come back I had been working on Phil for several years, seeing if he would consider being a coordinator of the program. Up to that point he had been a teacher but had never been coordinator. At various times I asked him if he would do it and he didn’t want to. So this year (2016) when I got asked I said I’ll do it if he’ll do it with me. He had been thinking about it a lot and how he thought the program should go and wanted it to go back into a direction where it really focused on traditional Piedmont blues. Augusta started the focus was on traditional Appalachian music, and so the focus always was traditional music of this area. The program had been slowly drifting away from our roots, and I think we returned to them. And in looking at the energy of the students, the energy of the instructors, the fact that our attendance is up by 25 percent, it’s all working for the 150 students.
The thing about Phil is that there are very few musicians of his age who have that direct connection to the older generation. So you have some people who come in who really didn’t grow up with blues but learned it from records. It’s what you grew up hearing – but you didn’t really know all those old musicians and you weren’t part of that direct scene– having it handed down to you. I think Phil is really that person that bridges that gap. He’s the real thing, because he’s part of a tradition that’s been orally handed down to him. It hasn’t been “Oh, I just discovered blues; I’ll see if I can play it. And now I can play it.” It wasn’t tab, it wasn’t a book. It wasn’t going back and looking at videos. He got it direct– and I think there’s a different sensitivity, a different feel. And I think some of what he’s trying to do with Blues Week this year is to bring back that feel of the whole culture – that if you just learn the song it’s not the same as learning about where it comes from. You don’t get the whole essence or the feel of it. You haven’t seen it.
An event like this is life changing. If you’re at home listening to music then you’re an outsider – you’re an audience – you’re not part of the scene. Here you’re included. You’re a piece of it, a participant. If you watched the jams that we had on the porch today, it really didn’t matter if you could barely play or if you were great. You got to play with everybody. You’re encouraged. We have a student concert on Friday. There’s probably three people that were just awful. There’s probably 10 people that can blow your mind away. But all of them will get praise. They’ll all get enthusiasm. And the three that are awful will come back next year and they will be better. And you’ll watch them five years from now and they’re going to be incredible musicians.
Everybody is so supportive. It’s amazing. One of my favorite stories is one year we had John Jackson, and this young girl came who couldn’t play guitar at all. And she had just seen a picture of him, and she said, I just want to sit at his feet and listen to him play.” And I thought, isn’t that amazing that you can just come and sit next to this incredible musician for several hours a day and just listen to him. John Jackson was amazing. Some people came without knowing who any of these musicians were, and then it becomes – oh, my God, they’re so good.
One thing about the regional blues scene, if you look historically at the interaction of white and black musicians, here that has always existed. In this area you had a lot more of it than other places. As much as we see separation, there are a lot of examples of interracial string bands, lots of examples of blacks playing for white dances, and also interracial dances.
So Uncle Palmer Walker, who was a black banjo player from outside of Princeton, played with white musicians. I think he used to play with Blind Alfred Reed, who was one of the really great fiddle players – at least from the same area. John Jackson’s mother played banjo. His family played string band music. That harmonic sound is part of that interaction of the two musics, and it’s so much more. When you talk about Bill Monroe and the blues influences in bluegrass, it’s not that Delta sound; it’s this more harmonic sound. It’s this sound that really has an influence on string band and old-time music and bluegrass music. So I think it’s a much more important music. The thing is the Delta sound – those musicians tended to be more the ones to go to Chicago and have more of an influence on electric music. But if you look at American music and all the different genres, I think this (East Coast or Piedmont) style has much more influence.
There were actually numerous blues and traditional players in the region. I have a master’s degree in folklore and had done fieldwork in West Virginia. I had located blues musicians in the area including Nat Reese, who Phil also played with, down in Princeton. There was this white musician by the name of Carl Rutherford, who played both some country and also a lot of blues; a fiddle player, Raymond Johnson, who was again old-time but also played blues. I found a washboard player in Lewisburg, West Virginia, who had played with the Ringling Brothers Circus. He played in church. I found a mandolin player in Lewisburg, West Virginia. And then, because I played blues, all the people that I met, the white musicians, they would ask me to play some bad blues tune and they would then play some of their blues. So there were these women, Donna Gumm and her sister who lived just down the road from here, about 15 miles, and they were two little old ladies that played banjo – must have been in their 70s. And they played Hesitation Bluesfor me and it was hysterical. It was great. They just giggled through the whole thing. I recorded an album for Rounder Records of Oscar Eugene Wright. Oscar was about an 80-year-old fiddler at this time, his son a guitar player. On the album there were two blues tunes, because I played blues for them. So there’s a Bessie Smith tune and an Ida Cox tune on there.
Plus, we always eliminated boundaries here. If you listen to the backporch jams, Jambalaya. Nobody told us, “Oh, you can’t do that. That’s country music.” I remember going to a folk festival one time and it was in ’76 in North Carolina – it was Martin, Bogan and Armstrong and the Balfour Brothers. They all listened intently to each other play, because it was good music. If you’re really a good musician, all music that you like is because it’s good – it’s not that you’re stuck in a pigeonhole of a genre. I think we as a culture tend to do that. I have a business where I sell antique quilts. People are always asking, “Is it hand quilted?” “Is it all done by hand?” And you know what? Once they invented the sewing machine people wanted to show off their sewing machine. So they stitched that with their sewing machine. They weren’t stupid. They weren’t trying to impress you with their hand stitching. It saved work. We apply this aesthetic now of going, “Oh, is it all hand done?” “No.” It’s the same with music. It’s all good music, if you’re a good musician.
My greatest personal memory here at Augusta over all these years was dancing a slow dance with Ted Bogan. It was just the most amazing thing in my life, because the man – he was old, but he couldn’t move very well, and he was so smooth a dancer. It was just like mind boggling. So just my personal experience, better than all the music I listened to was that.
Phil Wiggins recollected, “Augusta was the place where a lot of people in our music community got their start. It’s the place where a lot of people first connected with the real thing. And even for me Augusta played an important role in my development. It’s where a lot of my songs first saw the light of day or I should say the light of the moon. It’s where I tried out ideas and where a lot of my songs got finished.”
[1]Personal interview with Beth King at Elkins-Davis College. July 18, 2016.
[2]Personal interview with Joan Fenton at Elkins-Davis College. July 18, 2016.