IBMA is proud to announce the recipients of the Distinguished Achievement Award, an honor which recognized individuals in the bluegrass music industry who have fostered the music’s image with developments that will broaden the genre’s recognition and accessibility. The following people will be honored at the Special Awards Luncheon on Thursday, October 4, 2007, at the Renaissance Hotel Ballroom in Nashville, Tenn. during IBMA’s World of Bluegrass Business Conference:
- Mike Auldridge
- The Bluegrass Breakdown
- Marko Cermak.
- Warren Hellman
- Happy & Jane Traum
A recognized master of the Dobro, or resophonic guitar, Mike Auldridge, from Kensington, Md., picked up the guitar at 12, added banjo at 16 and settled on Dobro at 17. Auldridge was inspired to learn the Dobro after hearing the legendary “Uncle Josh” Graves play, and also purchased his first resophonic guitar from Uncle Josh for $150. Mike’s first professional gig from 1967-70 was with Cliff Waldron’s band, The New Shades of Grass, in a line-up that also included Bill Emerson.
Auldridge joined the Seldom Scene in 1971, remaining with the influential D.C.-based band through 1993 and re-joining on a part-time basis in 2002. The group became pioneers of the contemporary bluegrass sound which incorporated elements of jazz, folk and rock into traditional bluegrass vocal harmonies and instrumentation.
In addition to solo and band recordings, Mike became a sought after session musician who played on albums by Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Jonathan Edwards, James Taylor and Hank Williams, Jr., among others. In 1993 he left the Scene to co-found Chesapeake, which recorded three CDs for Sugar Hill. After touring with Lyle Lovett in 1998, Auldridge and Jimmy Gaudreau joined forces the next year with guitarist Richard Bennett to form a new trio, recording two albums for Rebel Records.
Mike owns and operates Mike Auldridge Productions, specializing in merchandise and instructional materials for the resophonic guitar. He currently performs with The Good Deale Bluegrass Band featuring Mike Auldridge, the Auldridge-O’Dell-Walls-Simpkins Band and Emmylou Harris with John Starling & Carolina Star—the latter which has a new CD out on Rebel Records, Slidin’ Home.
The Bluegrass Breakdown, the monthly publication of the California Bluegrass Association, has been in continuous publication since the spring of 1975. The newly formed CBA held a contest that year to name their newsletter, first edited by Burney Garelick. Additional editors over the years have included Steve Pottier, Don Powell, Suzanne Denison, Zeke Griffin and Mark Varner. Denison, who edited the Breakdown for 18 years beginning in 1988, developed a staff of talented writers and promoted advertising, bringing the publication from a four page stapled bi-monthly newsletter for 683 members, to the current monthly tabloid format with 48 pages.
The Bluegrass Breakdown has a monthly press run of 5000, which includes around 3500 CBA members who live in more than 30 states and half a dozen countries overseas. An online version of the newsletter is also available at www.cbaontheweb.org.
Although The Bluegrass Breakdown focuses on California artists and events, they also make an effort to publicize tours through the West and bluegrass events held anywhere from Colorado, to points west. For more than 30 years, The Bluegrass Breakdown has been a model for bluegrass association newsletters, as well as the primary print voice for promoting bluegrass music on the West Coast and surrounding regions.
Marko Cermak, a musician and watercolor artist who lives in the mountains of Bohemia in the Czech Republic, is widely regarded as the “father of the five-string banjo” in the Czech and Slovak Republics, dating back to late 1960s when Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule.
Born in 1940, Marko picked up the classical guitar while a student in art school, later adding banjo and mandolin. His first gig at 15 was playing tenor banjo with a Dixieland band, but during the 1950s Cermak heard a new banjo sound coming from U.S. Armed Forces radio broadcasts out of Munich. Never having seen a five-string banjo, Marko thought Earl Scruggs was making that sound with a flat pick and a tenor banjo. After seeing a photo of Pete Seeger playing a five-string banjo in Prague in 1964, Cermak built his own banjo since none were available in his country.
Marko wrote a five-string banjo instructional book called Petistrunne Banjo in 1975, and from 1978-1987 he was a contributor to Banjo Newsletter as an artist and writer. His book, Banjo Z Mlznych Lesu, published in 1998, includes a history of The Greenhorns, The White Stars and the Paberky band, along with banjo instruction, tablature and the lyrics to many of the songs Marko's bands have made popular.
In addition to inspiring the work of current Czech luthiers like Jarda Prucha, Rostislav Capek and Pavel Janiss, Cermak introduced bluegrass music to his country through live performances with two bands: the Whitestars and the Greenhorns. The latter group recorded and performed 1967-94, playing bluegrass, country music and cowboy songs. The year before the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, Cermak grew weary of increasing government restrictions and left the Greenhorns to spend more time on his art career and a new group, Paberky—a band he still performs with today.
San Francisco-based investment banker/banjo player and philanthropist Warren Hellman will produce the seventh annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival October 5-7 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Last year’s crowds were estimated as high as 500,000, making it one of the largest events in the world to showcase bluegrass and Americana music. In addition to the huge turn-out the event attracts every year, the most surprising thing about this festival is that there is no admission charge, thanks to Hellman’s generosity.
Sixty-seven acts on five stages at last year’s event included Hazel Dickens—whose music inspired Hellman to plan the first festival in 2001; Earl Scruggs; Emmylou Harris; Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder; The Nashville Bluegrass Band; The Del McCoury Band, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver; The Alison Brown Quartet; Jerry Douglas & Best Kept Secret; Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands; Dry Branch Fire Squad; Tim & Mollie O’Brien and Daley Ann Bradley, and more.
Hellman produces the festival with Dawn Holliday of Slim’s & The Great American Music Hall. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Business School, Hellman spent 18 years with Lehman Brothers in New York before founding his own firm, Hellman & Friedman, LLC in San Francisco. Hellman has established funds that will guarantee the future of the Hardly Strictly event. “The festival is my gift to the city,” he notes in an mp3.com article, “but what could be better for me than to have a weekend of music I love to listen to and to get to share it with tens of thousands of people?”
Happy and Jane Traum, owners of Homespun Tapes based in Woodstock, New York, have been directly responsible for teaching thousands of musicians to play their instruments better, with the largest catalog of music lessons on video, DVD and CD available anywhere. The dynamic and growing company Happy and Jane founded in 1967 has a catalog of more than 500 music lessons on DVD, videotape and CD, and their products are sold around the globe. Taught by top professional performing musicians, the lessons cover a wide variety of instruments and musical styles for all levels, including a heavy concentration on bluegrass and folk music.
Happy Traum began playing guitar and banjo as a teenager, and was an active participant of the legendary Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1950s and ’60s. During the past 40 years, Happy’s interest in traditional and contemporary music has brought him recognition as a performer, writer, editor, folklorist, teacher and recording artist. He has performed extensively throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Japan, and has appeared on recordings as a featured artist or member of various ensembles. He has played and recorded with Bob Dylan, Maria Muldaur, Rory Block, Jerry Jeff Walker, Levon Helm and others.
Happy is the author of more than a dozen best-selling guitar instruction books, has written numerous magazine columns and articles, and for three years was editor of the folk magazine, Sing Out! He and his brother, Artie Traum, have been playing as a duo since 1968.