National Heritage Fellow John Dee Holeman, along with songster Michael Roach (pictured) and multi-instrumentalist Lighntin’ Wells, will present an evening of acoustic Piedmont blues at 7:30 pm on October 16 at Fort Worden State Park’s Joseph F. Wheeler Theater.

Tickets are $12 dollars; youth 18 and under can attend for free with advance registration. Tickets are available here or by calling Brown Paper Tickets at 1-800-838-3006. Tickets are also available at the box-office door beginning at 7 pm.  

Piedmont style guitar music is one of the earliest forms of blues guitar. The right thumb lays down the bass line, and fingers independently play the melody, chords, fills, and other treble voices—much the way ragtime pianists divided their right and left hands into different functions. The approach worked for Delta and country-ragtime blues as well, but reached it’s apex in the Piedmont style.

John Dee Holeman is a singer-guitarist from Durham, North Carolina, a tobacco town that has produced such talented and influential bluesmen as Blind Boy Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis. Holeman, who has been picking the guitar since the age of fourteen, is one of the last living links to these seminal musicians. He has a rich expressive voice and a guitar style that mixes the lilting melodic phrasing of Piedmont style with the more aggressive and hard driving influences from the Delta. Born in 1929 in Orange County, John Dee is a transitional player—he learned to play just as the electric guitar was replacing the acoustic as the favored instrument amongst blues musicians. He began picking guitar when he was 14, playing Piedmont standards learned from his uncle and cousin and from recordings of such area artists as Blind Boy Fuller. Raised on a farm, he made music primarily at house parties and community work-gatherings in the country.

“I'd sit around the barn, keeping the fire to cure the tobacco," he said. "For my entertainment—with this guitar, you know—I'd bang on it. I kept on doing that and picked up a few chords.” Holeman began playing publically at birthday celebrations, corn shuckings, wood choppings, and house parties.

Michael Roach, now living in England, sings and plays guitar in an East Coast style of blues that dates back to the 1920s. A lynchpin of the Washington, DC blues community in the late 1980s, he is a direct link in the Piedmont tradition, having spent many years learning directly from John Jackson, John Cephas, Archie Edwards, and Jerry Ricks. His repertoire draws from the rural music of the northern Piedmont where the black and white idioms meet—secular songs and ballads, blue and hokum, folk revival tunes, dance reels and church music of the eastern region.

Lightnin’ Wells, from Fountain, North Carolina, loves the music from the early part of the last century. He learned to play harmonica as a young child and taught himself to play the guitar as he developed a strong interest in traditional music. He has played his brand of Piedmont blues throughout North Carolina, the United States and Europe. Lightnin' remains an insatiable student and researcher, studying the various forms of American roots music from bygone eras. He plays a number of instruments besides the guitar including the harmonica, ukulele, mandolin and banjo.

Tickets are $12 dollars; youth 18 and under can attend for free with advance registration. Tickets are available here or by calling Brown Paper Tickets at 1-800-838-3006. Tickets are also available at the box-office door beginning at 7 pm.