 | Traditional Skill/Art: Appalachian Old-Timey Music Years Awarded: 2021 Passed away in 2025 |
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
John Meade was a self-taught fiddle and banjo player and a practitioner of old-time musical tradition. He had strong ties with the tradition through his family’s origins and the relations he had developed by playing in important gatherings such as the Mud City Old Time Gathering and the Portland Old Time Gathering, which is one of the largest gatherings of Appalachian musicians in the West.
APPRENTICE BIOGRAPHY - Shari Ame 2021
Shari Ame is a professional fiddler and music teacher. She has been a long-term practitioner of traditional Irish music for contra dance. Shari has been exploring and learning Old-Timey music for the past 4 years by collaborating with John Meade and getting involved with the mid-valley folk music community.
Q+A WITH THE MENTOR ARTIST - 2021
Describe your traditional art.
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The tradition John taught was the regional banjo and fiddle tunes from Appalachia. The majority of the tunes come from West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina. The tradition developed in this area in the 2nd half of the 19th Century and came out of a blending of musical traditions from two cultures i.e., Celtic, and African. This was in part due to the banjo’s roots in African American culture. Much of the repertoire was a shared one. It was also common for fiddlers to learn tunes from banjo players and banjo players from fiddlers in direct transmission as the tunes were not written down. The music was part of daily life and in part a reprieve from the difficulties of a hard rural life.
How did you come to learn this tradition?
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John’s father’s family came from rural Kentucky and his mother’s family from both Kentucky and Virginia. He grew up listening to his grandmother telling him tall tales from Appalachia. In 1964, at age 16, he became interested in learning the music of Appalachia and took up the banjo. John was self-taught which is also part of the tradition. He had some direct exposure to traditional musicians but most of his tunes come from listening to recordings made during the 60’s and 70’s of traditional artist like Tommy Jarrell, Fred Cockerham, Kyle Creed, Roscoe Holcomb, and Wade Ward.
Why is this cultural tradition important to your community?
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The tunes John played connected him to his family’s past and to much a larger music tradition in Africa. It also provided solace to the work he does as a clinical social worker, and he felt it had a healing element in it. John had a few banjo students who sought him out and he enjoyed teaching in a traditional way, by ear, with no written music.
Awards/Honors
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