Masters of Traditional Music

Directed by Alan Govenar and Bob Tullier

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Details: Masters of Traditional Music 1991, 58 minutes, color, Producer: Documentary Arts, Inc., Directors: Alan Govenar and Bob Tullier

The National Heritage Fellowships are presented each year by the National Endowment for the Arts through its Folk Arts Program to bring to greater attention the talent and diversity of some of America's best artists working in traditional styles. Five of the National Heritage Fellows are featured in this video, produced at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in conjunction with the 1991 Dallas Folk Festival: Bua Xou Mua, a musician and spiritual leader of the Hmong, who performs traditional texts and melodies for sacred and secular celebrations; John Dee Holeman, a singer, guitarist and dancer born in North Carolina, performing the Piedmont style of blues and the traditional buck and tap dances; Joe Cormier who combines the fiddle traditions of his native Acadia with Scottish traditions of his fishing village of Cheticamp on Cape Breton Island; Valerio Longoria who is credited for reshaping and preserving the Mexican American conjunto repertoire through his distinctive style of accordion playing; Kevin Locke singing in the Lakota Sioux language and performing the hoop dance as an expression of the Plains Indian world view; and pianist Alexander H. Moore, who was the first African American in Texas to receive a National Heritage Award, displaying his distinctive improvisatory piano style that includes elements of blues, ragtime, barrelhouse, stride and boogie-woogie.