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The Mike Seeger Traditional Fellowship
The History
Mike Seeger, a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers and recipient of a 2004 Folk Alliance International Lifetime Achievement Award, spent a lifetime sharing the traditional music of North America and celebrating its creators, most famously Elizabeth Cotten and Dock Boggs. Mike recorded the tradition bearers, got them on folk festival stages, and performed his versions of their music. For five decades the younger half-brother of Pete Seeger was a Johnny Appleseed of American roots music.
About the Fellowship
The Mike Seeger Traditional Fellowship (MSTF) continues in the spirit of Mike’s work by bringing tradition bearers (elders and younger practitioners who live in and share their cultural traditions) and exposing these master musicians to the folk music community at-large. They must be actively participating in their art form as practitioners, mentors, or both. Mike Seeger Traditional Fellows demonstrate significant contributions to living traditional arts, their source communities, or the transmission of traditional knowledge to future generations.
One Mike Seeger Traditional Fellow will be selected each year before the annual conference by an anonymous committee of experts in traditional music.
Fellows can be recommended at any time using the form below. Submissions received before October 15 will be reviewed and the fellow will be notified before November 1.
The fellow will receive a conference registration for the next upcoming conference, a travel stipend to cover their travel and lodging expenses, and a featured session in the conference’s daytime programming to demonstrate or teach their traditional practice.
Per the National Endowment for the Arts: the folk and traditional arts are rooted in and reflective of the cultural life of a community. Community members may share a common ethnic heritage, cultural mores, language, religion, occupation, or geographic region. These vital and constantly reinvigorated artistic traditions are shaped by values and standards of excellence that are passed from generation to generation, most often within family and community, through demonstration, conversation, and practice.
The MSTF honors and brings these types of unique tradition bearers within music to the annual conference. Mike Seeger Traditional Fellows can be recommended at any time throughout the year.
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