Joe Wilson

NEA National Heritage Fellow, Advocate for Folk and Traditional Arts
Headshot of Joe Wilson wearing a straw hat.
Photo by Tom Pich

Joe Wilson Transcript

Music credits: (Music performed  live by Tony Ellis, Daniel Greeson, Keith Williams, Ivan Oglestreet, and Stevie Barr)

Joe Wilson: That magic of the very special musician, and sometimes, sometimes it’s a basket maker who can make a perfect one. I think it’s good for us to take the best of what we have and to look up to them and honor them in their communities because that extraordinary effort, especially that reaching-beyond they have is the best us and almost unearthly. When I go to the Heritage Awards and see people like that in the room, you can almost feel the magic.

Jo Reed: That is 2001 National Heritage Fellow Joe Wilson. He was a great advocate for folk art who passed away last week.

And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Art. I’m Josephine Reed.

Joe Wilson was a tireless and enthusiastic advocate for folk art in America.  His background was varied: he had been a country record producer, a door-to-door salesman, a civil rights reporter, and a Madison Avenue consultant.  But Joe Wilson was devoted to the cultural traditions of his Blue Ridge Mountains.  And as the executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, from 1976 through 2004, he had the clout to help create programs that insured the vitality of folk and traditional arts. His mark can be seen in the shaping of national institutions such as the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the National Park Service, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Joe Wilson produced national and international festivals. He produced recordings and wrote books. He created the Blue Ridge Music Center and curated its exhibit, The Roots of American Music. Keenly aware of the culture and music found along South West Virginia’s Highway 58, Joe dubbed it “The Crooked Road” and worked to make it an important part of the region’s economy.  He was a larger than life, natural-born storyteller whose passion for folk art and the people who created it only grew stronger with the years.  In 2013, I spent time with Joe in Galax at the Fiddlers’ Convention where he seemed to know everybody and the history of every tune being played. It was a day I will never forget: filled with music, stories and joy.  I interviewed Joe the following day on his back porch. Or, more accurately, I asked him questions and he held forth while I sat entranced.

Jo Reed:   Southwest Virginia has an amazingly rich musical heritage.  Why do you think that is?

Joe Wilson:  Well, it's the mountains; it's the Scotch Irish people who came here who had a ballad tradition.  I think lots of the country did and Southwest Virginia has discovered it and utilized it a little more.  I mean, there's more of an official recognition of it by the state government, by the county government, by official people here.  I think there's been more of an attempt by the state to utilize it for tourism and for other things like that.  

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The state has never put a lot of money or a lot of effort into assisting the musicians.  It will utilize their aura. They will utilize the events that they created. We're now engaged in the Old Fiddlers' Convention that Galax started in '35, but as for putting money back into folk music, I can't think of any entities other than the National Endowment for the Arts and some of the state endowments, a lot of whom were created after the NEA was created, to receive funds from the NEA.  But our country has not been terribly supportive of the arts, and it certainly hasn't been all that supportive of folk arts.  Now, you can find some sterling, beautiful, wonderful examples of support by the NEA and some of the state people, but as an ongoing function, historically sound, there's still people in this country who think that the arts should support themselves in a commercial way, and that there should not be a concern of government at any level. I guess they really don't think much about it.  They operate on an automatic no; there's a lot of people in the country that, if you threw them in the creek, they'd float upstream.

Jo Reed:  But you actually are kind of a master at moving beyond that automatic no, and you've done that many, many times over your career as director of the National Council of Traditional Arts, in so many ways.

Joe Wilson:  Well, I've tried to say, "Look, there's truth and beauty here."  One of the strengths of this nation is vested in these basic people.  They're the keepers of the verities.  They keep the music, they keep the stories, they fight the wars.  They're the soul of this country. The basic strength of the country is invested in people who are wonderfully creative, if they have the opportunity.  And it's not that they expect full support from the government or anything like that, but a little recognition, a little, getting help to be put on the stage of life, where your contributions are as visible as others, that's a good thing, and I think it's a great thing for the country. I always knew that the old lady who lived up the hollow and told stories to my brother and me, was as good a storyteller as William Faulkner. And there were singers in my community.  My mom was a singer.  She knew old songs and she knew songs that have roots in the British Isles.  And there were German people in our area. They were Germans and Scottish people.  And of course we're all a mix of people.  Our little corner, we were mountain Yankees in the Civil War. We didn’t have slaves and didn’t know why anyone else should have them.

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I did what I did with my life, believing that you need to question authority and the existing order, and also trying to be a good representative of my people. I wanted to represent them well.  And I also recognized that there were people like them everywhere.  I figured it out.  I was walking down the street in Brooklyn once, and there was a jewelry shop there.  And there was this Hasidic man sitting there, and he had a violin beside him.  I asked him about it, he can't speak much English.  But he let me pick up the violin and I did a couple of things.  I can't really play one, but he could tell that I was trying.  So he takes the violin and shows me this and that.  So I brought him a recording, Clark Kessinger, great old fiddler from West Virginia, and gave it to him.  And he received it graciously and in wonder.  We became friends. They were from Poland.  But I recognized that they were my people too. There's a set of basic people who make the world turn, who keep all of the things in order.  These people who are the working people, the people who make things click.  I've always identified with them.  They're my people.  They may not know it, you know, but they are.

Jo Reed:  I'd like you to talk a little bit about how you got the Music Center, the Blue Ridge Music Center, built.  How did you go about getting support for that?

Joe Wilson:  Well, when I was in Washington, I'd come down to run this folk music presenting program, the Old National Folk Festival Association.  And I came there to run that, and one of the people I met, we had a,

Jo Reed:  What year was this?  Was this '76?

Joe Wilson:  '76.  We had a relationship with the Park Service.  There'd been a Park Service person who was on our board and who got the Folk Festival Association to do a few little programs.  And there was a lady who was, worked for the Park Service, and she was one of the people who made the Park Service relate to people around the parks.  At any rate, her name was Jean Hender. She took me to meet the director of the Park Service.  And he was a guy who was from the Blue Ridge area and we became friends and they made him in the superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway.  So, we were talking about this area here and its effect and, "We should build something up there."  So, he and I came to the Galax city council and told them they should give all of that land up there where the Music Center is located to the Park Service.  And they did, and we got some money to buy other land. I knew the local congressman here, his name is Rick Boucher, and I went to talk to Rick about this. So he goes to work on it with us, and there's a wonderful congressman from Wisconsin, David Obey. He helped me put some money together for building these things.  It took over 20 years, but we built it

Jo Reed:  Wasn't Senator Talmadge helpful in building the Music Center?

Joe Wilson:  Oh, Senator Talmadge, well, that was when they were creating the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress.

Jo Reed:  Oh, was that it?  Sorry.

Joe Wilson:  Archie Green is a folklorist and carpenter and nut, from San Francisco-- god bless him.  We need more people like old Archie.  And he and I seemed to have been the only folklorists who ever cared much about dealing with the political apparatus in Washington.  But we went about that with a zest and a zeal and we got a lot of good stuff done.  We were in Washington, we got some people signed up. They had supported creating this Folk Life operation at the Library and I ask Archie, I said, "Why don't we get some Southern Democrats?"  I'd been an old civil rights worker, but I could see they were changing. We went down, and we went into Herman Talmadge's office.  Talmadge's father, Eugene, had been the governor of Louisiana, and there's a dynasty there.  Herman had said at one point that he'd see anybody came to his office from Georgia.  So there was a line that snaked out the door, and we stood there, and as we moved, got inside the senator's office, I’m looking at a picture on the wall, and it's his dad, Eugene Talmadge, campaigning for governor from the back of an old Model-T truck. And down there beside is the guy who got the crowd together, that's Fiddlin' John Carson, one of the people who made some of the first recordings made of hillbilly music.  He’s got his slouch hat on and his fiddle under his arm.  So I looked at the picture, when it came time for us to see the senator and I said, “That's Fiddlin' John Carson."  And he reached over and turned me around and he says, "How in the hell do you know that?"  And I said, "Well, it's my business to know stuff like that."  He says, "What do you know?"  And I says, "Well, you know, I knew that he helped your dad get elected, but his song, "Georgia's Three-Dollar Tag", and at this point you could have a ten-dollar car, an old Model-T, but the tag costs thirty dollars to go on it. “So we're going to lower the price to three dollars."

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And he says, "Can you get me a copy of that record?"  And I says, "Eh, probably can.  I know some record collectors," and a couple of weeks later Archie and I are back in the line and we have a copy of the old recording and nicely packaged and cleaned up for the senator.  And he looks at it very carefully and he says, "Boys, come over here for a minute."  And he goes over to his Chief of Staff and he says to the chief, he says, "We need to help these boys."  He says, "We're going to cosponsor their bill to create a folk life center over here to keep the songs and the stories," and so forth. And he did.

Jo Reed:  Let's talk about the Crooked Road and how that idea originated.  Can you describe what the Crooked Road is for people who might not know?

Joe Wilson:  Crooked Road is a term that when I was a kid we had for the part of the road that, coming east from Damascus, you go up 58 there, and it is crooked.  I mean, it is really crooked.  And, I have a friend who works for the Department of Housing and Community Development.  And he and I had met and his name is Todd Christensen and Todd’s job is to get things done in small towns, get them to build things.  He helped banish the outhouse in Southwest Virginia, got people to build. Todd’s job was helping people do what they need to do. We were talking about I was going to build a music center.  He was working on a museum devoted to Ralph Stanley, great mountain musician over in the Cumberlands, coal mining area.  And he recognized that what I was doing was related to what he was doing, and he's interested in tourism.  He's interested in generating money for working folks.  And so he says, "There's nothing that connects these places though."  And I says, "Yeah, there is.  Music connects them."  There's all kinds of music.  There's the Carter Family who come from Scott County over there.  Everybody in the country knows about them.  That goes back to the '20s.  And Dock Boggs was from Norton, and he was this lick on the banjo that Dock got.  And people recognized it as blues, but it has a kind of a hair-curling intensity to it.  And if you come east of where I am, you can go over into Franklin County, the bootlegging county, where they make the best liquor on earth.  And, I'm serious about that.  It's true.  We'll have a swig of it just to prove it.  

Jo Reed:  I'll do that for my job, because I'm devoted to the arts.  In all its forms.

Joe Wilson:  That's a real art form.  But at any rate, we decided that we would deal with this legacy of music that comes from here.  

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So we called it, you know, the government is the way it is.  You could call it the Heritage Music Trail.  But "That's not a good name.  That's academic and it sounds boring."  So "Crooked Road" came to me.  We were arguing about what name to put on it.  I mean, the highway people were involved with this, and when I come up with that term, it was a highway guy, "No, no, you can't call it that.  I said, "Well, you know, it has its attractions though." The little mountain crooked road that you can go sailing down and stop and see somebody who makes rocking chairs and hear some good music. There's no big stage and no big lighting system and no big sound system between you and those people.  You can walk right up to them and you can stick out your hand and shake hands.  At any rate, we had argued for a while and we were having a meeting and the highway guy, a guy from the highway department, he opened the meeting by saying, he says, "I've been thinking about that Crooked Road name that that damn rascal down there has been proposing."  And he says, "You know, you can't get that out of your mind.  It sticks.  It's a good name."  He says, "I think I've changed my position on that."  

Jo Reed:  Have we been able to see more appreciation of the musicians?  Have the musicians themselves benefited from it?  That's what I'm asking.
Joe Wilson:  Yeah, I think they have.  I think the thing that I like best about it is the acceptance and the pride by the musicians who live along the road and who live in these communities.  And county governments have picked up on it, and they support it.  

Jo Reed:  Briefly, let's discuss the significance of having a National Heritage Award that the NEA gives out yearly.

Joe Wilson:  Well, we've always had towering figures who affected our culture and our lives.  And many of them not celebrated.  That magic of the very special musician, and sometimes it's a basket maker, who can make a perfect one.  That search for quality, that search for perfection, that creativity that pushes almost beyond human possibility, that's a great thing, and we ought to recognize that.  And that's in many forms of life. It's the measure of how good things can be. I wish we had a way to honor the best bricklayer, the guy who lays the bricks.  We've never had that.  I mean, I go to Europe and see the ruins of things that were built by Greeks and Romans.  I always wonder, "Whose hand shaped that?  Who did that?"  You know they had that kind of recognition of the best.  And their work endures.  The work-- even after they've gone.  I think it's good for us to take the best of what we have and to look up to them, and to honor them in their communities, because that extraordinary effort, that special reaching-beyond that they have, is the best of us and almost unearthly.  When I go to the Heritage Awards and see people like that in a room, you can almost feel the magic.

Jo Reed:  You have also received a National Heritage Award.  In 2001, you received the Bess Lomax Hawes Award.  And, I know for you receiving an award named for Bess must have had special meaning.

Joe Wilson:  Yeah, I think her contribution, she worked at the Smithsonian.  She taught at university.  And she came to the job at The Endowment knowing full well who the people were that she needed to work on honoring.  And it is those kinds of people.  And she put together a very serious program of honoring those people who do the best work, who do the incredible work.  And she succeeded.  I was glad that she was there.  And I worked with her, fortunate.  It was a time once when Ray and Stanley Hicks were going to receive Heritage Awards.  Ray was a great storyteller of those old German stories, the Jack tales and those kinds of stories about wicked John and the devil, of great antiquity but great wit and Ray was seven feet tall and wore bib overalls, and sort of flapped around in those.  And he was, he was something to behold.  And Stanley was skinny and tall and they were double first cousins, and I was glad they were honored together; they were so much alike, and both had done so much. Ray lived up on Beech Mountain, and he didn't have a telephone, and he was way up on the mountain.  So, when someone called him, he had to walk down the mountain and walk back up, you now, a half mile down and a half mile back, and steep.  The Smithsonian was helping Bess, at that point, and so his name and that number went out at the Smithsonian. Every intern at the Smithsonian had a reason to call Ray for this or that, you know, some sort of detail.  And Ray had to go down the mountain every time one of them called.  And after about his tenth trip, he told his neighbor, he says, "I've had it with that.  I know they're going to give me some money, but I can do without the money.  I just can't walk up and down the damn mountain anymore.  Would you tell them I'm not coming?"  And so, "He's not coming?"  So Bess calls me and she says, "What could we do?  You know these people."  And I says, "Well, some people, Bess, you can't send for.  You have to go get them.  And I'll go down and get Ray and Stanley."  And there was just a few days left till the thing.  I says, "I'll fly down to tri-cities and rent a vehicle, and go over and get them and bring them up."  "Hmm."  Bess says, she says, "I'll go with you, Joe."  And she did.

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As soon as we got there, we see Stanley, and Stanley says, "Joe," he says, "We'll go over and see Ray."  He says, "Let's just go over there."  So we all jump in the big station wagon and we go over to Ray's.  It's the middle of the summer and the light's good, so we're sitting out on Ray's porch, and we talk for a long time, and he tells stories, and so forth.  And we were packing up and going back over to my house, and still haven't raised the subject of why we're there.  And Ray brings it up.  He says, "Joe," he says, "What time should we leave in the morning?"  And I says, "It’s a seven-hour drive to Washington.  Why don't we leave around nine o'clock?"  And he said, "Joe, we ought to leave by eight."  We headed to Washington and it came time to have lunch, and I said, "Well, let's stop at a restaurant."  Ray says, "Joe, that costs too much."  He says, "Why don't you stop at a store and we'll get a loaf of bread and a roll of bologna?"  I says, "We can afford better than that."  And Bess suddenly sides with Ray.  She says, "Joe, let's stop at one that has a little deli and we can get some potato salad, and we'll get ham."  And so we did, and we had a picnic. Heritage Awards was to start the next day, I think, the rehearsals. So everybody checks in, and the next day I'm over there and I see Bess and I says, "Well, how are you feeling today, Bessie?"  She says, "Joe, my, I'm hurting in my ribs."  I says, "What's wrong, Bess?"  And she says, "I laughed so much.  I've never laughed so much in my life.” Those Hickses, with their stories and their unending jokes. Anyway, they deserved the Heritage Awards.  They're both gone now, and Bess is gone, but as long as I'm in this vale of tears, I'll relish the memory of that trip and those damn nuts.  And Bess was one of them.  

Jo Reed:  Oh, Joe Wilson, thank you.  Thank you for giving me your time.  Thank you for everything that you've done and that you're doing.

Joe Wilson:  I have a good time with these crazy people here in the mountains.

Jo Reed: That was Joe Wilson: advocate for folk art, former director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, and recipient of the NEA’s 2001 Bess Lomax Hawes Award.  He passed away on May 18th. His work and inspiring commitment to folk artists is visible everywhere. We heard music performed live from some of the impromptu jams at the 2013 Galax Fiddlers Convention.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. The Art Works podcast is posted every Thursday at www.arts.gov. You can subscribe to Art Works at iTunes U: just click on the itunes link on our podcast page.

To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS  on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

2001 NEA National Heritage Fellow Joe Wilson weaves his storytelling spell into the history of Blue Ridge Mountain culture.