National Heritage Fellowship | |
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Awarded for | Lifetime achievement in folk or traditional arts |
Location | Washington, D.C. |
Country | United States |
Presented by | National Endowment for the Arts |
Reward(s) | $25,000 |
First awarded | 1982 |
Last awarded | present |
Website | https://www.arts.gov/honors/heritage ![]() |
The National Heritage Fellowship is a lifetime honor presented to master folk and traditional artists by the National Endowment for the Arts. Similar to Japan's Living National Treasure award, [1] the Fellowship is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. [2] [3] It is a one-time only award and fellows must be living citizens or permanent residents of the United States. Each year, fellowships are presented to between nine and fifteen artists or groups at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.
The Fellows are nominated by individual citizens, with an average of over 200 nominations per year. From that pool of candidates, recommendations are made by a rotating panel of specialists, including one layperson, as well as folklorists and others with a variety of forms of cultural expertise. The recommendations are then reviewed by the National Council on the Arts, with the final decisions made by the chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts. [4] As of 2024, 487 artists in a wide variety of fields have received Fellowships. [5]
The program was officially founded in 1982 by Bess Lomax Hawes, the first director of the Folk and Traditional Arts Program at the NEA, [6] following a five-year period of development. [4] In 1982, the monetary award associated with the Fellowship was $5,000; [1] in 1993, it was increased to $10,000 and since 2009, the award amount is $25,000, which is considered "enough to make a difference, but not enough to go to anyone's head". [4] Each recipient receives a certificate of honor, the monetary award, and a congratulatory letter from the President of the United States.
The annual recognition events are held in the Fall and consist of an awards ceremony, a banquet, and a concert that is open to the public. Over the years, the awards ceremony has been held at different locations in the US capitol city, including the NEA headquarters, Ford's Theatre, George Washington University, [1] the Library of Congress, [7] and for the first time at the White House in 1995. [8] Since 2000, the banquet has been held in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress. [4] The concert features musical performances, craft demonstrations, and interviews with the honorees. [7] Masters of ceremonies at the concerts have included folksinger Pete Seeger, actress Ruby Dee, author Studs Terkel, journalist Charles Kuralt, and since 1997 Nick Spitzer, the host of public radio program American Routes . [4] Beginning in 2010, the Fellowship concerts have been streamed live on the NEA website and archived on YouTube.
In 2000, the NEA instituted the Bess Lomax Hawes Award in conjunction with the Fellowships, "given to an individual for achievements in fostering excellence, ensuring vitality, and promoting public appreciation of the folk and traditional arts". [7] The Hawes Award has been given annually since 2000 to recognize "artists whose contributions, primarily through teaching, advocacy, and organizing and preserving important repertoires, have greatly benefited their artistic tradition. It also recognizes individuals, such as producers and activists, who have comprehensively increased opportunities for and public visibility of traditional artists." [4]
Awardees have included Native American basket weavers, African American blues musicians, traditional fiddlers, Mexican American accordionists, and all manner of traditional artisans and performers of numerous ethnic backgrounds.
1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 |
1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 |
2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 |
2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 |
National Heritage Fellowship winners are:
Walter Brown "Brownie" McGhee was an American folk and Piedmont blues singer and guitarist, best known for his collaboration with the harmonica player Sonny Terry.
William Smith Monroe was an American mandolinist, singer, and songwriter, and created the bluegrass music genre. Because of this, he is often called the "Father of Bluegrass".
Thomas Jefferson Jarrell was an American fiddler, banjo player, and singer from the Mount Airy region of North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains.
Etta Baker was an American Piedmont blues guitarist and singer from North Carolina.
Michael Louis Doucet is an American singer-songwriter and musician best known as the founder of the Cajun band BeauSoleil.
Edwin Duhon was an American musician and co-founder of the Hackberry Ramblers, a band playing a combination of Cajun music, Western swing, and country music.
Kevin Burke is an Irish master fiddler considered one of the finest living Irish fiddlers. For nearly five decades he has been at the forefront of Irish traditional music and Celtic music, performing and recording with the groups The Bothy Band, Patrick Street, and the Celtic Fiddle Festival. He is a 2002 recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Claude "Fiddler" Williams was an American jazz violinist and guitarist who recorded and performed into his 90s. He was the first guitarist to record with Count Basie and the first musician to be inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame.
Marc Savoy is an American musician, and builder and player of the Cajun accordion.
Alphonse "Bois Sec" Ardoin was a Creole accordionist who specialized in the Creole music called "la la music" or "la musique Creole" and was influential in what became zydeco music.
Wade Eckhart Mainer was an American country singer and banjoist. With his band, the Sons of the Mountaineers, he is credited with bridging the gap between old-time mountain music and Bluegrass and is sometimes called the "Grandfather of Bluegrass". In addition, he innovated a two-finger banjo fingerpicking style, which was a precursor to modern three-finger bluegrass styles.
Joe Derrane was an Irish-American button accordion player, known for re-popularizing the D/C# system diatonic button accordion.
Cephas & Wiggins was an American acoustic blues duo, composed of the guitarist John Cephas and the harmonica player Phil Wiggins They were known for playing Piedmont blues.
Michael Alpert is a klezmer musician and Yiddish singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, scholar and educator who has been called a key figure in the klezmer revitalization, beginning in the 1970s. He has performed solo and in a number of ensembles since that time, including Brave Old World, Kapelye, Khevrisa, The Brothers Nazaroff, Voices of Ashkenaz and The An-Sky Ensemble, and has collaborated with clarinetist David Krakauer, hip-hop artist Socalled, singer/songwriter/actor Daniel Kahn, bandurist Julian Kytasty, violinist Itzhak Perlman, ethnomusicologist and musician Walter Zev Feldman, trumpeter/composerFrank London and numerous others.
Luderin Lawrence Darbone, was a Cajun-Western swing fiddle player for the band Hackberry Ramblers.
The North Carolina Heritage Award is an award given out by the North Carolina Arts Council, an agency of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, in recognition of traditional artists from the U.S. state of North Carolina. The award was created in 1989.
Julia Florence Parker is a Coast Miwok-Kashaya Pomo basket weaver.
Lenard Ray Hicks was an Appalachian storyteller who lived his entire life on Beech Mountain, North Carolina. He was particularly known for the telling of Jack Tales.
Clyde Thomas Davenport was an American old-time fiddler and banjo player from Monticello, Kentucky.
Stanley Hicks (1911–1989) was an American folk artist from Watauga County, North Carolina. Hicks was known for his musical instrument building, particularly banjos and dulcimers, and for his woodwork, work as a musician, dancer and storyteller.
Keshick refers to her practice as 'quill art' rather than 'quill work,' both to assert the aesthetic significance of her creations and to firmly position this artistic practice as a valued art form.