MUSIC Garland Home Companion

THE YOUNG MAN FROM GARLAND

played his best guitar riffs and belted out evergreens like “Oh, Susannah” and “Goober Peas,” but the show clearly was not working. The 300 camel herders surrounding the makeshift stage laughed and pointed. Some 3,000 camels appeared indifferent. Whatever possessed the U.S. State Department, he wondered, to host an American folk concert here on the plains of western Somalia?

In frustration, the entertainer grabbed his banjo and improvised a one-handed paradiddle on the sheepskin head while he laid down a simple melody on the harmonica. The camels remained indifferent, but the Somali tribesmen began to shake and dance and holler their approval. The performer had won his audience, and a song was born: “Old Joe Clark Goes to Somalia.”

The musician was David Holt, a Garland native who, today, is considered one of the nation’s leading authorities on the indigenous music and folk tales of the Appalachian Mountains. Not only does Holt travel often for State Department programs, he records the works of rural musicians for the Library of Congress, conducts music workshops nationwide, produces records and television documentaries. He also is a successful, if not widely known, storyteller, actor, and musician.

Country music enthusiasts may recall Holt as a frequent “Hee Haw” guest and as the first (and only) person ever to play the paper bag on the “Grand Ole Opry.” Public radio listeners have heard his “Folkways” programs or the “Riverwalk” series he emcees from San Antonio. Subscribers to cable television’s Nashville Network have seen him on his own show, “Fire on the Mountain” and as host of the “Celebration Express” segments on “Nashville Now.”

Holt, forty-three, is an unabashed devotee of the dances and ballads loosely grouped under the “folk music” sobriquet. “We’re way overdue for another folk boom in this country,” says Holt. “Historically, we’ve had a folk revival about once every twenty years, but our last one ended in the Sixties. I think we’ll see a new surge of interest in folk music pretty soon, and if it happens, I hope I can be part of it.”

In fact, if a folk resurgence takes place in the Nineties, there is a good chance Holt will lead it. A new series for the Nashville Network and an upcoming thirteen-week continuation of “Riverwalk,” produced by the same team that managed Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” could well be the beginning.

Entitled “American Music Shop,” the Nashville Network program will premiere this month with Holt as host. Emmylou Harris and Ricky Skaggs will rotate as co-hosts, and James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt are among guests already lined up, but most of each program will feature traditional music performed by mountain folk.

Holt traces his interest in traditional music back to his childhood in Garland. His father, one of a long line of Texas bones players, passed the skill along. And country fiddlers were a part of life in what was then a rural community.

“I didn’t pay too much attention at the time,” says Holt. “Like most kids growing up in the Fifties, I was more interested in rock and roll. I think I filed what I was hearing away in my head and came back to it when I was older.”

A battered recording of cowboy songs that Holt heard while attending college in California triggered his return to traditional music. So enthralled by the simple, unadorned sound was Holt that he sought out the singer, Texan Carl Sprague.

“Sprague was the first cowboy singer ever to record, and when I heard he was still alive, I went to see him. He taught me to play the harmonica cowboy style-which is a very distinctive way of playing-and he taught me a lot of old songs and stories. I was incredibly impressed that he was willing to work with me and was so interested that I should learn.”

After studying with Sprague, Holt traveled to North Carolina to find old-time fiddlers, banjo players, and ballad singers. He picked up songs and learned to play guitar, banjo, Fiddle, zither, hammered dulcimer, and a collection of obscure instruments including Jew’s harp, spoons, the paper bag, the washtub, and the Indian bow.

In 1972, Holt collected an education degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara and accepted a job teaching in one of the nation’s wealthiest school systems. He never reported to that first job.

“I realized that if I took that job, I would be there until I was forty, and that wasn’t the way I wanted to spend my life. Then my grandmother in Texas died and left me $2,(KM) and a 1962 Chevy Nova with only 10,000 miles on it. I said, ’this is a sign.’ “

With his small financial stake, Holt packed everything he owned into the Nova and headed for Asheville, North Carolina. Days, he worked as a sign maker. But in the evenings and on weekends, he trekked into the mountains to collect songs and play along with Bard Ray, Doc Watson, and dozens of old-time singers and musicians.

In 1975, Warren Wilson College in Swan-nanoa, North Carolina, asked Holt to develop an Appalachian studies curriculum, the only one of its kind in the United States. For the next five years, he led students in a college-level version of the famous Foxfire program, archiving authentic mountain music and studying nearly forgotten crafts.

Holt gave up teaching in 1981 to record and perform full time. He also helped a North Carolina Public Broadcasting System station produce a nine-part series on mountain crafts. The programs were picked up by PBS and broadcast nationwide.

When the Nashville Network formed in 1983, Holt was asked to host one of the new cable channel’s first series. “Fire on the Mountain,” which showcased the work of old-time musicians, was an immediate hit-Vogue magazine called it “The Best of TNN”-and it ran through 1986, a total of ninety-one half-hour shows.

In the years since “Fire on the Mountain” premiered, Holt has turned American folk music into a minor industry. His 1986 album, Reel and Rock, has become a blue-grass cult classic. He also recorded with Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and Dolly Parton on their Trio album.

Holt and his wife, Ginny, recently formed their own record company. The mainstays of their business are cassettes of Holt’s songs and stories, popular with tourists along the Blue Ridge Parkway through North Carolina and Virginia. But they also record other artists. They are producing Pete Seeger’s first new album in almost ten years.

A two-man show featuring Holt and actor William Mooney, formerly Paul Martin on “All My Children,” tours the South and Midwest for about eight weeks each year. Called “Banjo Reb and the Blue Ghost,” the show is little more than David Holt’s musicianship wrapped in a thin, Civil War-era drama. It almost sold out at the Garland Center for the Performing Arts in November, but, Holt claims, “Most of the people in the audience were my relatives.”

Despite his appearances on stage, in concerts, and on television and radio, Holt does not think of himself primarily as a performer. He is first and foremost a musicologist and music historian, he says. Whenever he gets the chance, he still journeys from his home near Asheville into the mountains to scout out old-time musicians and listen to them play.

“I love getting jobs and being the center of attention and all that,” says Holt. “But what’s really important is preserving traditional music for my generation and for my kids’ generation. Getting with the old-timers and learning their art, that’s what it’s all about.”