Ernie Hawkins - Acoustic Blues

Ernie Hawkins will be bringing the blues home in a sense when he plays the this year's Art of Sound. His inspirations for learning to play this music and learning it well enough to be considered one of the most sought after teachers of the style include the great Piedmont blues players from the Carolinas. It was Rev. Gary Davis more than any other who was his teacher and connection to the music. Davis was born in Laurens SC and played on the streets around Durham NC (where he met Blind Boy Fuller) as a singing gospel preacher. He got to New York in about 1940. Check out "In This Land" (Death Don't Have No Mercy) here on youtube or this gospel number on Pete Seeger's television show. Gary Davis influenced everyone from Bob Dylan to Jerry Garcia to Peter Paul and Mary and David Bromberg. "In the liner notes to Davis' album Say No to the Devil, critic Larry Cohn compared his instrumental virtuosity in this regard to that of classical guitarist Andres Segovia and banjo player Earl Scruggs." - Paul Andersen Contemporary Musicians, April 1997

Besides Gary Davis, Ernie helps keeps alive the music of several artists from several states including Mance Lipscomb from Texas and Blind Willie McTell of Georgia. Mance Lipscomb from Navasota, Texas was the son of a slave from Alabama and took the name Mance from a friend named Emancipation. His father was a fiddler and his uncle a banjo player, another piece of evidence that blacks played the basically the same old time string band music that whites did. He considered himself a "Songster" because of the diversity of styles he played. His easy loping style can be witnessed in some of the video and other recordings made after he was "discovered" and brought to a wider audience in the 1960's. See and hear "Night Time is the Right Time". Playing the jacknife slide on "Jack of Spades".

Check out this amazing 1927 video of Blind Willie Johnson, another of the great acoustic blues players. Apparently the film is a reenactment or pantomime with the song, but powerful just the same.

Ernie's performance which will probably be a survey of all the great blues players from the tradition and a few of his own, is at 1 PM on Saturday at the Arts Center. His workshop at Shelby Music Center is at 3:00.