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.
Melvin Wine was an American Appalachian fiddler from the state of West Virginia. He was a lifelong resident of Copen, in Braxton County, West Virginia.
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.
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.
Liz Carroll is an American fiddler and composer. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Fellowship Award. Carroll and collaborator Irish guitarist John Doyle were nominated for a Grammy Award in 2010. She is considered one of the greatest contemporary Irish fiddlers.
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.
