Sheila Kay Adams named 2013 NEA National Heritage Fellow
It is a great honor to share the news that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) recently announced UNC Press author Sheila Kay Adams as a 2013 NEA National Heritage Fellow. A native of Sodom Laurel community in Madison County, North Carolina, Adams was introduced to the tale-telling tradition by her great-aunt “Granny,” well-known balladeer Dellie Chandler Norton. Adams is a seventh-generation ballad singer and has been performing Appalachian ballads and telling stories for over thirty years. In a letter of support for her initial nomination to the NEA, the director of performing arts at the North Carolina Museum of Art, George Holt, says:
Sheila Kay Adams is the key figure in carrying forward to this day the tradition of unaccompanied ballad singing that has enriched her community for more than two centuries, promoting its beauty throughout our country and beyond, and insuring that it will be perpetuated by younger generations of singers well into the 21st century.
A former Public school teacher, Adams currently lives in western North Carolina and now pursues a career of sharing the music, stories, and heritage of her mountain culture. In this video, Adams sings her rendition of “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight,” but beforehand she tells a short story about her mother and emphasizes the importance of holding onto cultural heritage.
The National Heritage Awards were established in 1982 by Bess Lomax Hawes, then director of the Folk Arts Program at the NEA. It is a lifetime achievement honor modeled after Japan’s “National Living Treasures” and seeks to highlight folk artists and their continued contributions to the nation’s diverse cultural background. The NEA selects approximately ten to fifteen fellows annually and on their website provides biographies of all current and previous honorees.
For more on Sheila Kay Adams and the community she grew up in, UNC Press has two books that might be of interest:
Richly evocative images are interlaced with stories of the people of Sodom Laurel and with Amberg’s own candid journals, which reveal his gradually growing understanding of this world he entered as a stranger. The book also includes a CD featuring Dellie Norton, Doug Wallin, and other singers of traditional Appalachian music. Through words, photographs, oral histories, and songs, Sodom Laurel Album tells the moving story of a once-isolated community on the brink of change, the people who live there, and the music that binds them together.