BLUESMAN & BUCK DANCER
JOHN DEE HOLEMAN
(APRIL 4, 1929 – APRIL 30, 2021)
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| Tintype photography by Timothy Duffy / Music Maker Relief Foundation |
John
Dee Holeman was the epitome of what it meant to be a Piedmont bluesman
in the tradition of pioneers such as Blind Boy Fuller. He had a great
saying about how he learned to play the blues: “I caught it from my
cousin who caught it from his uncle.” That uncle he speaks of played
with the masterful Blind Boy Fuller in the early twentieth century.
“I
was born in 1929,” he says in his lilting, soft-spoken manner. “My
father was Willy Holeman, and my mother was born Annie Obie near
Roxboro, N.C. Her daddy moved to Hillsborough and ran a flour mill.
James Obie was my uncle; there are still Obies in Hillsborough. I lived
on the Sam Latta place at first – he was the High Sheriff. There were
three sisters and one brother. My parents are planted in the cemetery of
Obie’s Chapel Church in Person County.
“In
about 1935, we moved to a 100-acre farm on Gray Road in northern Orange
County,” Holeman continues. “We would walk four miles to the store at
Timberlake to get us some candy. We could play on Saturday or Sunday,
you know, fix a swing in a tree, swing in a tire and things like that.
One time I took a fender off a Model T Ford, got on a bank, put water on
the bank, and slid right down to the bottom! I completed the fourth
grade, then stopped; we weren’t compelled to attend then. I cut short my
education because Daddy needed me to farm. I had to do what my Daddy
said. I missed my education, but I’ve made a living so far.”
When
he was 14, he bought a new Sears Silvertone guitar for $15. “I thought I
had something!” he says. His uncle and cousin taught him a few chords.
“I listened to 78s like ‘Step It Up and Go’ by Blind Boy Fuller, the
Grand Ole Opry, and heard others play at pig-picking parties. I was good
for catching on. My guitar kept me company when I tended to tobacco in
the barn so I wouldn’t go to sleep. You had to control the tobacco as it
cured – you ran one heat to get the green out, then another to dry it
out for cigarettes.”
With
the farm struggling, he moved to Durham in 1954. “The government took
over the farming and gave you an allotment of how much you could raise,”
Holeman recalls. “Before that we raised as much as we could handle. If
you went over the allotment at harvest time, they’d make you cut it
down. In 1954, I got $200 for my portion of tobacco for the whole year. I
went to the Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company for work. You could get a
three-room ‘shotgun’ house for $6 a week. I also operated heavy
equipment, like hauling dirt.”
In addition to playing, he worked construction as well as at the tobacco warehouses.
The
great University of North Carolina folklorist Glenn Hinson was the
first to bring John Dee’s music to wider public attention in the late
1970s. Then, in the 1980s, John Dee finally began touring, playing the
National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap in Virginia, Carnegie Hall in New
York City, and abroad as part of the wide-ranging musical revues staged
by the government’s now-defunct United States Information Agency. Those
tours took John Dee to more than forty countries around the world. In
1988, he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts, still proud of the certificate signed and given
to him by then-President Ronald Reagan.
Music
Maker has released four albums, most recently 2019’s ‘Last Pair of
Shoes,’ booked countless performances in the U.S. and overseas, and
provided emergency assistance when Mr. Holeman needed to relocate.
Holeman has recorded on the Music Maker label, backed by such artists as
Taj Mahal and Cool John Ferguson. Taj Mahal said, “When John Dee and I sat down and played together the experience was like coming full circle back to my roots! His music took me straight back to a gentleman named Lynwood Perry in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only person I ever learned to play guitar from. As it turns out, Lynwood was also from Durham, North Carolina. It was like meeting up with an old friend! John Dee Holeman is a carrier of the southeast guitar tradition.”
He passed away the morning of April 30, 2021 of natural causes at his home in Hillsborough, NC.
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