BOONE—The North Carolina Arts Council has awarded a $7,250 grant to Dr. Dave Haney, vice provost for undergraduate education and an English professor at Appalachian State University, and his former students Leila Weinstein and Emily Schaad.

The grant will be used to produce a CD recording featuring renowned banjo player Eric Ellis of Wilkes County. Ellis, who was inducted into the Blue Ridge Bluegrass Hall of Fame in January, has been extremely important to the preservation and perpetuation of a regional musical tradition that stretches to the beginnings of bluegrass music.

Larry Ellis, left, and Dave Haney trade a few chords prior to a history of bluegrass music class at Appalachian State University in 2007. Haney and two of his former students have received a $7,250 grant from the N.C. Arts Council to produce a CD featuring Ellis. (Appalachian photo by Jane Nicholson)

In fall 2007, Ellis was an artist-in-residence in Haney’s Appalachian Studies class “Bluegrass Traditions.” Weinstein and Schaad wrote the grant while they were in the class.

The recording of the CD will help further preserve and promote the high level of regional bluegrass banjo playing in the Wilkes County area and beyond.

In addition to Ellis’ banjo playing and baritone vocal harmony, participating musicians on the CD will include David Johnson (fiddle), David Haney (guitar), Nick Chandler (mandolin), Billy Gee (bass), Bobby Hicks (fiddle), and possibly Tony Rice (guitar).  The CD will be recorded at Horizon Music in Asheville.

The project will be directed by Haney, who has been a bluegrass performer since 1976. He played on and helped produced two albums on Rounder Records with Joe Val and the New England Bluegrass Boys in the 1980s, and produced an album with his own band, Bay State Bluegrass, in 1988. He has recently recorded with songwriter Lisa Baldwin and with the Dirt Road bluegrass band. He periodically teaches a graduate/undergraduate course on the history of bluegrass music and has contributed articles to Bluegrass Unlimited and other music periodicals.  Haney will sing and play guitar on Ellis’s recording.

Weinstein and Schaad will serve as coordinators and production assistants for the project. Weinstein has produced and directed the documentary films “There’s a Little Blues in Everything I Play: The Music of Roger Hicks” and “The Fingerpicking Guitar of Clarence Greene.”  Schaad plays Appalachian fiddle and banjo and is a classical violinist and educator.  She has produced recordings by fiddler Junior Daugherty and Strawberry Hill Fiddlers.

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