Author: North Carolina Arts Council
ince 1989, the North Carolina Heritage Award has honored our state’s most eminent traditional artists and practitioners. Recipients of the Heritage Awards range from internationally acclaimed musicians to folks who quietly practice their art in family and community settings. Awardees receive a cash award and are honored in a ceremony that draws large and enthusiastic audiences. Several North Carolinians have gone on to receive the National Heritage Fellowship Awards presented by the National Endowment for the Arts.
These awards deepen our awareness of North Carolina’s diverse cultural traditions, and their importance to our state’s past, present and future.
Heritage Award recipients are nominated by citizens of the state and selected through panel process.
Dorothy & Walter Auman
Dorothy and Walter Auman devoted their lives to the practice and preservation of production pottery-making, a 200 year-old tradition in the eastern piedmont. They operated Seagrove Pottery from 1953, where they created both the utilitarian forms of the 19th century, such as the milk crock and baking dish, and the more decorative wares that came to be popular in the 1930s and '40s. The Aumans had a complementary working relationship. While she turned rack after rack of pie dishes or beanpots, he prepared the clay, mixed the glazes and burned the kiln.
Descended from a long line of Cole family potters, Dorothy Cole Auman was born in 1925 near Seagrove in Randolph County and learned her craft as a child from her father Charles C. Cole and her great uncle Wren (Lorenzo) Cole. A self-proclaimed tomboy, she was probably the second woman in her area, after Nell Cole Graves, to become a turner. This most skillful part of the pottery trade was generally considered the domain of men.
Walter Hadley Auman was born in the same area in 1926. He was not raised around a pottery shop like his wife, although his grandfather was a potter during the late 19th century, and his father had occasionally hauled wares or helped out at shops when he wasn't farming. He learned the pottery business primarily by working for Dorothy's father.
The contributions that Dorothy and Walter Auman made to their craft tradition have gone far beyond the wares they turned out daily at Seagrove Pottery. During the 1960s, when business was slow, they worked with state officials to develop a promotional campaign for the potteries that soon brought new customers to their doorsteps. Partly as a result of their efforts, area potters have enjoyed unprecedented prosperity over the past 40 years.
Equally important was their long-standing mission to recover the centuries-old history of pottery-making in the region. They were involved in a number of archeological digs, most significantly at Mt. Shepherd near Asheboro. The Aumans first recognized the importance of this 18th century kiln site, one of the oldest in the eastern United States, and funded its excavation. Through the years they were avid researchers and collectors of pottery artifacts, many of which they displayed in their museum adjacent to the shop. Their valuable collection was purchased by the Mint Museum of Charlotte.
Etta Baker
Etta Baker is a master of the blues guitar style that became popular in the southern piedmont after the turn of the century. She was raised in the foothills of Caldwell County where music was central in the lives of her family and friends. Both parents played several instruments, and Etta began picking the guitar at the age of three. "I was so small, I had to lay the guitar on the bed, stand on the floor and play on the neck," she recalls. Her seven brothers and sisters already played some instruments and soon she was making music alongside them at community entertainments and corn shuckings.
Mrs. Baker plays the six- and 12-string guitar. She rarely sings, preferring to let the instrument speak for her. Like most traditional artists, she plays music for personal satisfaction and for the pleasure of friends and family. However, in 1956, her music was recorded on the influential album Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians. She is also featured on a 1972 recording Music From the Hills of Caldwell County. Her popular CD, One Dime Blues, came out in 1991 to great reviews.
Mrs. Baker has carried her music far beyond the borders of Caldwell County. She has performed at the National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap Park in Virginia, the 1984 World's Fair in Knoxville, the Kent State Folk Festival and the Augusta Heritage Festival. In 1982 she and her sister Cora Phillips were honored jointly with the North Carolina Folklore Society's Brown-Hudson Award. She received the National Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991.
Mrs. Baker and her late husband Lee raised nine children, many of whom carry on the family musical tradition. In addition to her duties as a mother, Mrs. Baker worked for more than 20 years at the Skyland Textile Company.
Thomas Burt
Blues guitarist Thomas Burt grew up hearing the reels, rags and spirituals that gave form to black musical expression in North Carolina's eastern piedmont at the turn of the century. Born in 1900 near Raleigh to a family of sharecroppers, Mr. Burt gained his early knowledge of music informally within a family and community setting. His father played accordion for local dances, his mother sang hymns as she performed the daily chores, and friends dropped by often to pick the banjo or play tunes on the fiddle.
By his early teens, Mr. Burt had joined the music-making, first learning banjo and later mastering the guitar. It was on the guitar that he earned his reputation, playing at house parties, in tobacco warehouses and at community gatherings from the 1920s through the '40s. He became a prominent figure in Durham's flourishing blues community, performing alongside local masters such as Sonny Terry and Blind Boy Fuller. His occupations included sawmilling, laying railroad track, farming and working seasonal jobs in Durham's tobacco factories.
The blues faded in popularity within the black community in the 1950s and '60s, but enjoyed a resurgence of support in the following decades, primarily by white audiences. During that time, Mr. Burt was frequently invited to give concerts and to perform at festivals. Often accompanied by his late wife Pauline, a fine singer of hymns and sacred songs, he appeared at the National Folk Festival, the National Downhome Blues Festival and the North Carolina Folklife Festival. In addition, his music was featured on two albums and three television documentaries. Mr. Burt received the North Carolina Folklore Society's Brown-Hudson Award in 1987.
Thomas Hunter
Thomas Hunter made a lifetime pursuit of mastering and preserving the traditional fiddle tunes of western North Carolina. A fiddler of near legendary regard, his sensitive and melodic style and his ability to play the difficult hornpipe tunes were much admired and emulated by fellow musicians.
Born in 1919 in Madison County, young Tommy loved to listen to the expert fiddling of his grandfather and uncle when they gathered to make music on cold winter nights. Soon he began to borrow his grandfather's instrument on the sly. "I was always careful to put it back just exactly the way I found it so he wouldn't suspect somebody had fooled with it. I did this for some time and I got to where I could play a little tune."
It wasn't long before he began to play music with family members, and by age 12 he was performing at square dances and fiddle contests with a family group. A couple of years later he played lead fiddle in the Windy Gap Ramblers, a string band much sought after for school and community festivities.
Mr. Hunter's reputation as a fiddler spread quickly. In 1939, he performed professionally with musicians Zeke and Wiley Morris, then popular entertainers on WWNC in Asheville. He accompanied the Morris brothers until he joined the army at the onset of World War II. While overseas he often entertained the troops, and in Ireland he recorded for the BBC.
Mr. Hunter returned to Madison County after the war and resumed his music-making with his family. In the late 1950s, he formed Tommy Hunter's Carolina String Band with his sister Nan, her husband George Fisher and Obray Ramsey. In the early 1970s, Mr. Hunter began his long association with banjoist Carroll Best, forming a group named the Hornpipers.
Tommy Hunter performed often at festivals in the 1970s and early '80s. He was featured on several commercial recordings and television programs during this period, and was recognized for his contributions to Appalachian music by the Smithsonian Institution and the Appalachian Corsortium. In later years, Mr. Hunter made occasional appearances with the Carroll Best String Band.
Emma Taylor
Emma Taylor is widely recognized as an especially gifted and productive basketmaker in the tradition of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Born in 1920, Mrs. Taylor grew up in the Birdtown community of the Qualla Indian Boundary. By the age of 7, she had learned to imitate her mother's basketry skills by working with discarded oak splints from finished baskets. Later, while attending the Cherokee school, she received more formal training in this ancient art from master basketweaver Lottie Stamper. By the time she was a young woman, Emma could produce sturdy baskets of white oak, honeysuckle or rivercane. After her marriage to Timpson Taylor, she began making baskets for sale. She continued to do this for income while raising her eight children.
As Mrs. Taylor has matured in her craft, she has chosen to specialize in white oak basketry. Until her later years, she gathered and prepared all of the raw materials herself. This required locating the trees, cutting them down, splitting the logs into quarters and preparing the splints for weaving. She also prepared her own dyes from the bloodroot and walnut that she gathered in the forest.
Over the years, Mrs. Taylor has developed an impressive variety of baskets, such as fruit and bread trays, waste baskets, shopping baskets, and flower baskets, in which she combines the qualities of both function and beauty. Her work has won numerous awards at craft exhibitions and she was the only Native American craftsperson invited to demonstrate her basketweaving at the World Craft Council in Kyoto, Japan. She has often demonstrated basketry at local schools, at festivals, and at the Oconaluftee Indian Village in Cherokee. She was also featured in the documentary film Cherokee Basketweavers produced by Qualla Arts and Crafts.
Mrs. Taylor believes that “basketweaving should be carried on by the younger generations, as long as the world stands, because that’s our trade.
Doug Wallin
Born and raised deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Madison County, Doug Wallin sang time-honored ballads, hymns and love songs in the style and tradition of his ancestors. He performed with a natural artistry and a reverence for the meaning and heritage of the old songs. Mr. Wallin learned much of his seemingly limitless repertoire from his mother Berzilla and from other close relatives. Many of his most cherished ballads, such as "The House Carpenter" and "Barbara Allen," originated in the British Isles and were brought to America with the first settlers.
Mr. Wallin resided in the "Laurel Country," an area visited by English ballad collector Cecil Sharp more than 70 years ago. Sharp was astonished to find "a community in which singing was as common and almost as universal a practice as speaking." At the time of his visit, folk balladry had all but disappeared in England. Sharp documented numerous ballads from Doug's relatives, several of which appeared in his famous published collection English Folksongs of the Southern Appalachians.
Instrumental music was also valued in the Wallin family. Mr. Wallin's father was an excellent banjo player and his brother Jack was proficient on the banjo and guitar. And although singing was his special gift, Doug Wallin played the fiddle quite well.
Mr. Wallin, 69, stayed close to home all of his life, farming the family land. He rarely traveled from Madison County, but occasionally ventured out to share his fine singing with audiences at Western Carolina University, Mars Hill College and Berea College. He also performed at the Festival of American Folklife, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, and the British American Festival, held at Durham in 1984. He was honored with a National Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990.
Eva Wolfe
Eva Wolfe is an accomplished weaver of rivercane baskets, a traditional type of Cherokee basketry that is becoming increasingly rare. It is estimated that fewer than 10 people practice this technique today. Born in 1922 in the Soco community of the Qualla Indian Reservation, Mrs. Wolfe first learned the craft from her mother. She later expanded her skills under the direction of her aunt Lottie Stamper, a noted Cherokee basketweaving instructor. Mrs. Wolfe has pursued her craft all of her life, steadily making and selling baskets while raising a family of 11 children.
Although proficient in all aspects of basketmaking, Mrs. Wolfe has won special distinction for her doubleweave baskets. Considered one of the most difficult techniques of plaited basketry, the doubleweave technique requires the continuous weaving of one basket inside another to create a flawless surface both inside and out.
Weaving rivercane takes an immense amount of preparation. Each April, she and her husband Amble travel 80 miles from the reservation to select and cut cane. During the same month, she gathers her annual supply of bloodroot and butternut, which she uses to dye her baskets. Using a variety of knives, Mrs. Wolfe splits each cane stalk into four strips. When weaving she may use as many as 120 strips of cane at once, which she manipulates with amazing dexterity.
Mrs. Wolfe's devotion to the doubleweave technique has been a major factor in the revival of interest in this style. Having won awards for excellence in craftsmanship at tribal exhibits for years, her work placed first in a exhibition sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1968. The following year she was selected as the first Cherokee artist to have work displayed in a national exhibit. In 1978, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded a special grant for the creation of an exhibit of her work. She received the Brown-Hudson Award from the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1988.