The National Endowment for the Arts will honor nine 2023 National Heritage Fellows later this month, including Louisiana folklorist Nick Spitzer and Mississippi blues singer R.L. Boyce. This award is one of the highest in the country for folk and traditional arts.
Spitzer and Boyce will receive a $25,000 prize as part of the NEA’s Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship at a ceremony on September 29 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The Hawes award honors those who “made a significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of cultural heritage.”
Spitzer has aired the well-known radio program “American Routes” for the past 25 years, most recently from a studio at Tulane University in New Orleans. Spitzer is a professor of anthropology at Tulane University’s School of Liberal Arts. Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, Dolly Parton, Fats Domino, and 1,200 other icons of American music and culture have been interviewed for the program.
On 380 public radio stations around the country, each two-hour broadcast reaches nearly three quarters of a million listeners.
In these trying times, Spitzer stated, “‘American Routes’ is my way of being inclusive and celebrating cultural complexity and diversity through words and music.”
Spitzer’s involvement with roots music in Acadiana, Louisiana, has permanently bound him to the state. He established the Louisiana Folklife Program, constructed the Louisiana Folklife Pavilion for the New Orleans World’s Fair in 1984, and helped establish the Baton Rouge Blues Festival. He also produced the five-LP Louisiana Folklife Recording Series. At the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, he also serves as a senior folklife specialist.
Spitzer claimed that when he learned that he had won the Hawes award, he was taken aback.
Spitzer remembered in an interview with The Associated Press, “I was astonished. “It feels good to be acknowledged. I do it because I enjoy giving back to the world.
Boyce is a blues performer from the hills of Mississippi. His northern Mississippi style of playing and song structures are historically based and incorporate customs including drums and cane fifes created by hand. However, according to Boyce’s biography on the NEA website, his music is particularly modern.
“There wasn’t much when I was growing up in Mississippi. You see, whenever there was a chance for survival, you seized it. 50 years of performing the blues. All I know is how to play the blues, declared Boyce in a statement.
There are many talented blues musicians out there, he continued. But you see, I play the traditional method, and nowadays, only I can play that way.
Boyce has been performing northern Mississippi blues for over 50 years. He has performed on venues alongside legendary blues musicians Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, an NEA National Heritage Fellow in 1983. He also recorded with Jessie Mae Hemphill and served as her drummer.
The other 2023 heritage fellows are: Ed Eugene Carriere, an Indianola, Washington-based Suquamish basket maker; Michael A. Cummings, a New York-based African American quilter; Joe DeLeon “Little Joe” Hernandez, a Temple, Texas-based Tejano musician; Roen Hufford, an islander from Waimea, Hawaii, who makes kapa (bark cloth); Elizabeth James-Perry, a Dartmouth, Massachusetts-based
