Folk Artist Directory

Visit any musical function in Warren County—say, the Friday-night Norlina Jamboree or the Ridgeway Opry House on a Saturday night—and you’re likely to find Alan and Betsy Reid at the core of the house band. Alan Reid was raised in a musical family in Warrenton—his mother a...

Alan Ralph Stallings is known in Halifax County––where he was born and raised––as a musician’s musician. He possesses a broad, powerful vocal range like that of gifted singers such as Roy Orbison who can alternate between silky low and keening high registers in a single song. ...

Alice Sallins’ talent for communication is an integral part of the varied ways in which she serves her community. A gifted singer, she teaches music at a Henderson elementary school. She is the minister of an independent congregation and the author of a column on faith in the ...

Arlene Bice’s interest in ghost stories began some years ago in her native New Jersey. She and her family members were all visited—independently and unbeknownst to one another—by the same apparition in the old house in which they lived. When word got out in the community that ...

At the age of 13, singer Arnetta Yancey moved with her family from their home in Brooklyn, New York, to the small community of Wise, North Carolina. While Yancey was no stranger to the area—her parents had both grown up in the region, and she and her siblings often spent summe...

A native of Gaston, Northampton County, North Carolina, Bishop Dready Manning played a guitar for the first time at the age of seven. “It was probably 1941 or so, and I had a cousin named Doc Mangum; he and I grew up together. He had started playing just a little, and he start...

Carolyn Long remembers the Ridgeway of her childhood as a place with strong traditional values of community life and mutual support. Families and neighbors were close, and church and school knitted the community together. She fondly remembers Ridgeway’s Christmas traditions, w...

It seems fitting that Chambergrass—a Roanoke Rapids-based duo consisting of banjo player Kim Terpening and bassist Dave Schwartz—formed while the pair were fishing for shad on the Roanoke River in 2004. Remembers Kim, “We met, and after discussing our musical backgrounds, Dave...

Shirley and James Lisenby of Robeson County have a salve for what ails you. Between the two of them, the couple has years of experience using herbs to heal everything from arthritis to earaches. “We don’t tell you not to go to the doctor,” explains James, “we just tell you, ‘t...

Tillery native Delores Amason is a gifted pianist, singer, and unofficial regional historian with a deep understanding of the place that she calls home. Tillery, a small community in Halifax County, was founded as a New Deal resettlement community for African American farmers ...

Tillery native Doris Davis is known in Halifax County for her leadership at the Area Wide Health Committee, her work with the Concerned Citizens of Tillery, and her craft as an expert seamstress. She shares the skills gleaned from many years of sewing professionally and privat...

For many years, Halifax County native Ellis Vaughan and his wife Margaret were proprietors of the antique shop Treasures and Trash in Weldon. During their years in the business and their many antique-hunting sojourns, they gained a deep knowledge of old forms of furniture. ...

North Carolina history—Robeson County, in particular—has always played an important role in Gloria Barton’s life. Growing up in Pembroke, her family understood the importance of agriculture and food in southeastern North Carolina. They worked as migrant laborers and harvested ...

Gloria Lowery has always been an artist. She grew up in a sharecropping family that focused much of their free time on creative pursuits; her grandparents were both skilled painters. Though she did not grow up making the baskets which are now her expertise, art was all around ...

A multi-talented artist, Hayes Alan Locklear has dedicated his life to tribal customs and Lumbee and Tuscarora traditions. Born in the Union Chapel community in the township of Burnt Swamp in Robeson County, the young Locklear was intrigued by his community’s traditional craft...

The small farming community of Ridgeway has, for more than a century, had a wide reputation for the excellence of its Ridgeway cantaloupes. Smaller and vastly sweeter than the cantaloupes one might find in a store, the melons used to be shipped north by the trainload for sale ...

Norlina native John Earl Alston remembers that, 30 and 40 years ago, there were more beekeepers in Warren County than there are today. “A lot of the older folks, they had bees,” he says, but “they got too old to manage the hives and they just stopped doing it . . . [but] it’s ...

When Haliwa-Saponi artist Johnnie Ray Francis was a child, he and his siblings learned to work hard and be resourceful. He started helping with farm work when he was four or five years old and recalls that “When we grew up, we had to build our own toys.” Today, Francis uses hi...

Like many North Carolinians of their generation, Karen Lynch Harley’s parents, Nannie and Almorris Lynch, moved north in search of work. They settled in the Washington, DC area, where Karen was born and raised. Karen and her siblings absorbed much of their heritage as members ...

Kaya Littleturtle has been active in the Lumbee Tribe his entire life, and his family has been right there with him. His grandfather, Ray Littleturtle, was a wisdom keeper and his grandmother is a talented native storyteller. It was in that family-centered environment that Kay...

A guitar player and singer as good as he is young, Lakota John has been playing music with his family throughout his life. His father and mother encouraged him through early frustrations and it did not take long for him to blossom. At 19, he’s prolific on guitar and resonator...

Warren County native Andrew Marlin began his musical education at a very early age. “Mom used to tell me that in order to get me to quit kicking when I was in the womb, she would sit down and play the piano; I guess I would just sit back in my little lounge chair in her womb a...

Halifax County native Margaret Person is widely considered one of the preeminent performers of traditional church hymns in the region. The singer and pianist has been intimately familiar with old meter hymns—such as those that appear in the National Baptist Hymn Book—since she...

Marty Richardson is a founding member of the Stoney Creek Singers and a leader in the Tutelo-Saponi language revitalization movement. “I’ve been involved in American Indian culture since I could walk,” says Marty. “My parents pushed me out into the dance arena; I started out a...

Matt Nelson raised 51 crops of flue-cured tobacco on the land where he was born and raised near Vaughan, North Carolina. As a boy, Nelson was drawn to the blues music played by African-American laborers on his father’s farm. “There was a black guy that lived not too far from m...

Melvin Morris, originally from Peoria, Illinois, is a painter who has made Robeson County his home. Morris initially moved to North Carolina to serve at Camp LeJeune and wound up marrying and settling down in Robeson County. Unlike most newcomers, though, Morris has made south...

Debbie Powell grew up in Epsom, observing just about every kind of needlework but quilting. Her mother was skilled at knitting, crocheting, tatting, embroidery, and needlepoint. She did not care greatly for sewing, though, and taught her daughter––then a young teenager––how to...

Henry Lynch—who also goes by the Native American name Moka, which means Snake—retired after 35 years in the construction industry and embarked on a second career as an artist. He had always wanted to pursue his artwork full-time, but had not had the opportunity to do so while ...

Nannie Lynch’s earliest memories of quilts date back to her childhood in the 1940s. The family farmed tobacco, corn, and peanuts near Hollister, and during the winter months, Lynch’s mother and aunts would meet every so often at one or another’s house to quilt patchwork tops. ...

“I’ve tried to quit the accordion two or three times, but everyone says ‘Otha, you can’t quit. You’ve got to play,’” laughs Otha Paul Wilkins. Born in 1926 and reared in the North Henderson section of Vance County, Wilkins grew up farming. “I didn’t know about anything except ...

Pastor Brenda Peace, nee Gale Jenkins, is minister of the congregation at Greater Little Zion Holy Church in the Flint Hill section of Henderson, North Carolina. Peace remembers her childhood as a good one, particularly when the mills and tobacco factories were operating. “The...

Patricia Brayboy is a Lumbee artist who is proficient in beading—particularly peyote-stitches—and is knowledgeable about not only the history of the Lumbee but also their connection to Robeson County and the Lumber River, the “lifeline and life source” of the tribe. “We are ve...

Patrick Draffin says of his Norlina upbringing, “I was raised to understand that stories are our history, and that’s how you learn it. [I] was told at a very early age, ‘Listen to your elders.’” Draffin grew up in a long-time Warren County family immersed in the heritage of th...

Peggy Stocks cannot remember a time when she did not know how to sew. Growing up in Wilmington, she learned from her grandmothers, who were both skilled seamstresses. Of her paternal grandmother, she says, “I remember sitting in the swing with her, and she would let me make my...

Portia Harris Hawes’ roots in Warren County run deep. She lives in the same house in which she was raised. Her mother, Portia Jenkins Harris, was a seamstress and homemaker, and her father, Richard Harris, was a mechanic and one of the first African Americans in North Carolina...

Henderson native Raymond Strum was born in 1939. Growing up, he and his nine older siblings learned to plow the family’s tobacco fields with a mule. “Back in those days,” he remembers, “everybody was farmers.” “We just came up raising tobacco. We had a little cotton…You had...

Reuben Palmer says that ever since childhood, “I just had a passion for wood.” That interest led him to become a master in multiple fields of wood-working, including carpentry, furniture making, and wood-turning. Except for a carpentry class that he attended in the 1990s—by wh...

No two pieces of Ricky Jones’s and Tammy Jones’s art are alike. Both were born and raised in Robeson County, a community both consider their true home. “This is where I’m from,” says Tammy, the daughter of a local pharmacist and a beautician from Baltimore. Ricky was “born a L...

The way she tells it, Frieda Harlow had no choice but to purchase the crumbling Ridgeway Opry House. A native of the Ridgeway section of Warren County—she grew up approximately a mile and a half from the beloved venue—Harlow says the building that became the Opry House played ...

“I just love to sing; I don't know of anything that I love in this world better,” says Otis Jones, lead singer for Roanoke Rapids’ Royal Jubilee Singers. Jones has been singing with the Royal Jubilee Singers—an a capella group modeled on early quartets like the Golden Gate Qua...

Sandra Whittemore is a Lumbee artist who sews, braids, and creates celebration regalia for Lumbee powwows and dances. She also creates traditional medicines, which she learned along with other traditional skills from her mother and grandmother, all of which are part of her fam...

Anyone interested in learning about Warren County’s musical culture would do well to talk to Sherman Johnson. A longtime DJ with an encyclopedic knowledge of music, Johnson explains that his life and work in the region were “predestined.” Following his graduation in the mid-19...

Guitarist Sparkie Watts was born and raised in Roanoke Rapids, where his parents both worked at the local textile mill. “We were poor,” Watts explains, “but everybody else was too…We stayed out of trouble because of Mama and Daddy.” Watts spent what little free time he had ...

In Warren County, regional musicians are likely to mention Macon’s St. Sing Family among those of whom they are most proud. “[Robert St. Sing is] one of the best country guitar players I've ever heard,” says harmonica player Matt Nelson. “He could have been a professional if h...

Potter Chris Joyce has deep family roots in North Carolina, in the pottery-rich south-central section of the state. Joyce grew up in Northern Virginia, but his mother was a native of Stanly County. His grandparents had a collection of pottery which included early pieces from t...

Gospel musician Hugh Carroll was born and raised in Brunswick County, Virginia, 25 miles from his longtime home of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. He picked up his first instrument––a mandolin––as a child and learned to play alongside his brother. “He bought a guitar,” Carroll...

In the fourth grade, Scotland County actor and storyteller Tyris Jones realized two things: that he loved to read, and that he was a natural teacher. “We would literally get in those big blue dumpsters, and go through there and dumpster-dive all the library books,” he recalls....

As a six year-old in the small Warren County community of Oine, Wade Schuster could tune his family’s radio to Chicago’s WJJD just in time to catch the Suppertime Frolic show. It was then, the Henderson musician explains, that he became transfixed by country music. Says Schust...

Wallace Evans grew up on a farm in Granville County where he learned to tack quilts with his mother and siblings. Tacking, which is less labor intensive than quilting and has its own unique aesthetics, involves tying layers of fabric together with individual stitches of thick ...

“If there was a group around town that anyone talked about or said anything about when I was growing up,” remembers bassist Julian Smith, Jr., “it was the Warrenton Echoes.” Founded in 1957, the Echoes have long been celebrated performers on the Upper South’s gospel circuit. ...

Although he grew up in Northern Virginia, Wayne Hermann has a lifelong connection to Warren County. Throughout his childhood and adult life, he and his family returned again and again to Lake Gaston for vacations, and in time he made it his permanent home. Hermann’s family ...

“A lot of people own guitars,” laughs Henderson native Wayne Reid. “But everyone that owns a guitar is not a musician.” A veteran of the European country music circuit—he played guitar for 28 Grand Ole Opry tours between 1968 and 1972—Reid understands what being a musician dem...

Minister Roy Burroughs is a Vance County native, born and raised in Henderson. Burroughs’ parents both worked in area textile mills, and his grandfather farmed. As a child, the musician earned pocket money working in the fields. “My grandfather would say, ‘If you want money fo...

X-Generation bandleader Cameron Eaton remembers his first day as a member of North Carolina A&T’s marching band. As the director signaled for the band to begin, Eaton recalls that the first downbeat “was like a wall of sound flowing through my body…It hooked me. I felt like I had a reason and purpose in life at that point.”