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Interview with Lee Knight

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  • Lee Knight Interview Interviewer #1 – Kaitlyn Putnam Interviewer #2 – Sarah Wallace Interviewee: Lee Knight Interview Date: May 29, 2018 Interview Location: Cullowhee, NC Length: 46:36 Interviewer: So, we’re going to get started. Just for the recording we need your name, your birthdate and your place of birth. Lee Knight: My name is Lee Knight. My birthdate is August 18, 1945 and I’m adopted. I don’t know where I was born but in Upstate New York. Interviewer: (1) Cool. (2) Sweet. Can you tell us about, where you grew up at all? LK: I grew up in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. Montreal was our big city. Je parle un français peu. And I lived up there. Graduated from high school in Saranac Lake, New York. That was my hometown. 1963, a long time ago. (laughter). And as I’ve already mentioned to you, I love baseball and also love being outdoors. Hiking, snowshoeing. I still go up every winter and snowshoe up there. I love being on the rivers, canoes. We have a special boat in the Adirondacks called a guide boat and we had one of those and I did that. Waterskied and all kinds of stuff. In fact, my friend Walter Klimper and I would go waterskiing when it was still ice in the other part of the lake but in our bay, it was open, so we waterskied among the ice flows. (Laughter) Interviewer: That’s awesome: So, compared to where you grew up how does this area, does it remind you of where you grew up or…? LK: It’s very similar, yeah. I wound up, the Adirondacks is still my favorite place as you probably know from interviewing people and probably the way you feel assuming you’ve lived here all your life. Home is special, so the Adirondacks are still special to me. Interviewer: Yeah. LK: But here I make my living playing the banjo, guiding rafts and teaching weeklong courses on Appalachian History and Cherokee’s and the National Park. If I went home, I’d have to get a job. (laughter) But it’s mountains, and mountain people are very similar in many ways. Small towns, I was raised in a small town and I’ve always lived in small towns here in Western North Carolina. We also have summer people which are a godsend and a plague both. (laughter) So, there were a lot of similarities. I never planned to, to stay here. Sometimes you think you’re in control of your life but you’re really not. Interviewer: Yeah. LK: Things happen that wound up with me staying down here. Interviewer: Okay. Can you tell me what made you leave your hometown? LK: When I grew up I graduated from high school I wanted to be a Methodist minister so I wanted to go to a Methodist school and I wanted to go out of the Northeast because I’d been raised there and so I wound up at Wofford down in Spartanburg and by the halfway through my sophomore year me and the church realized I was not going to be a minister. Mutual agreement. And when I graduated from Wofford, had a degree in history, I went to NC State School of Forestry. The day I graduated I went up there and started the next day. But it was economic forestry. They wanted to cut down trees and I wanted to put them up, so I didn’t stay very long. And then I got a call from my advisor at Wofford and he said, “we need white teachers in the black schools. We’re getting ready to desegregate.” Schools were still segregated in those days. “And are you interested?” And I said, “Where do I sign up?” And so, I taught and lived and taught in the black community in Sumter, SC for six years. I taught in all black schools for four years and newly desegregated schools for two years. One of the most exciting periods of my life. I had come from a very white region. The Adirondacks has not got a whole lot of black folks in it. I didn’t have any black classmates or anything. When I look back over the classes around me there was one black woman there and that was it. So, it was a whole new world but, you guys listen to music, right? Interviewer: Uh huh LK: Music has a big influence on you? Interviewer: Yeah. LK: Yeah. This was during the folk boom. And folk music was being played and a lot of it was dealing with civil rights. They were singing about the conditions that black people had in the Southeast. I’d never seen them, never experienced them. When I went to Wofford my dorm was across the railroad tracks from this black community. And they were tar paper shacks. A lot of the houses didn’t have floors in them and then the way my classmates talked about black people like they were animals. You know, they weren’t human, sub-human kinds of things. And that rubbed me the wrong way. And so by the middle of my freshman year I was volunteering in black community centers helping the middle school kids with their English and just got involved in all that and that became really central part of my life and again a lot of it influenced by the music I’d been listening to as I was growing up. Interviewer: Can you tell us a little bit about your teaching days? Like when you taught at those schools. LK: Sure. It was, it was fascinating. Most of the time I was the only white teacher. Sometimes I’d go by a mirror and see myself and say, “Oh that’s right.” (laughter). Because I lived in a black community too, I wouldn’t see white people and white people weren’t particular happy with me. I got shot at three times while I was there. Interviewer: Oh my gosh! LK: By white people. (laughter). Yeah, they weren’t happy with me being there. And the other thing that was fascinating too was that I was like 21, 22, 23 and my kids were not that much younger than me. I think the combination that I really cared and that I was close enough in age to them that we could understand some things in a way and that they knew that I wanted to learn about them. It helped us to bond and I taught history for one year and then I switched to English because I love history. Still read a lot of history but I preferred teaching English because you could change things. You could do grammar for a while and you’d get tired of that and pull out a novel and we’ll do the novel. You’d get tired of that and let’s do some writing, you know, and you can. And in those days you were free to… and of course in the black schools they didn’t care what you were doing anyway. It was just required that they be there. And so, I enjoyed doing that. I helped out with the football team. I kept score for all the basketball games, and in those days we had JV boys, boys and girls and I was the baseball coach. (laughter). Because of my sterling career at Wofford (laughter). And I chaperoned at dances and I went on field trips and, you know, just did as much as I could. It was a great experience. Interviewer: You talked a little bit about it, but what was the general mood about the desegregation in the schools while they were desegregating? LK: It was very mixed. In the black community where I was there were people who really wanted to do it. They felt this was a, as long as we’re stuck in this situation, we’re not going to be able to move ahead. But desegregating, living with a different people is going to progress us. Others were afraid of it. They thought that they might get lost in the shuffle. For example, we went from two high schools to having one. So, everything was doubled in a sense. So, some people embraced it. Some people were afraid of it. Everybody was sort of let’s see what’s going to happen? (laughter) Everybody was sort of curious about how it was going to happen. In fact, one other thing. When we desegregated in the two years that I taught in the desegregated school, they made me the soccer coach. We started a soccer program because now we were having instead of two schools, we were having one. So, we got one football team, one basketball team, one basketball team, one basketball team, one baseball team. So, they wanted to do other sports so more people would participate, and I was the only one on the faculty that had played soccer. And I played soccer in the Adirondacks because it was our fall sport to get in shape for hockey. I was an ice hockey player up there. So, I also was the soccer coach after we desegregated. It was the desegregated years were very stressful because they used me as kind of a go between. I lived and worked in the black community, but I was white. And so they kind of used me as a mediator in some places. And I’m a kid. I’m still in my early twenties. (laughter) It was very taxing but as I said just so satisfying to be a part of that kind of change. Interviewer: During your time of teaching, obviously we already talked about getting shot at. (Laughter) Was there any other acts of hate or violence over the process that you can remember specifically? LK: Not toward me other than that. Well I, I do remember, one of the leading black teachers in the school saying that I was being followed and that they were getting hate mail about me, but I didn’t get any of that. Went to the black people for some reason. That was the only thing there that went on. As I say because I was the only white guy around I just, I felt very normal because I didn’t see things. And I was young, probably naïve. (laughter) There were probably things going on that I didn’t notice. Again, it was exciting, and I loved the teaching. I really enjoyed being with the kids and I learned as much from them probably as they learned from me. (laughter) Interviewer: Can you tell us the name of the school that you taught at? LK: Yeah It was Lincoln High School in Sumter, SC. And then we turned into Sumter High School. I had a couple interesting things happen there. While we were still an all black school, during one of the political campaigns Jackie Robinson, the baseball player, came down to talk at a rally for George McGovern. And I was the only white guy at the rally. (laughter) And I asked him a question and he took it wrong and he thought I was attacking him, and he let me reword the question, and so he saw that I was not. But the thing that was neat was the next day he was coming to the school to speak to the students and he asked the principal to have me come into the student lounge. He wanted to meet me. He apologized for what had happened the night before and we sat in the teacher’s lounge talking for about fifteen minutes. I was raised a Brooklyn Dodgers fan which was the team he played for and of course he’s a major icon of the Civil Rights Movement and, I can still see him sitting there, leg hung over the arm of the lounging chair. Interviewer: Oh, my goodness! LK: I also got to hear Duke Ellington’s orchestra. You folks may not know about Duke Ellington but he was one of the early pioneer jazz musicians and he was a very major figure in black music in the early 1900s and one of the concerts that he did was the sacred concert and he came down and, he and his orchestra did their sacred concert at what was then South Carolina State College. It’s now South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. So, I got to hear that while he was still alive and this was, again, one of the great musicians of the twentieth century. And I also got entrée onto one of the Sea Islands below Charleston. The Sea Islands are a string of islands running off the coast of Charleston, off Georgia and into Amelia Island, Florida and at the end of the Civil War they were settled by basically freed slaves and out of that emerged a culture called the Gullah culture and I got to go down there several times and meet with them. It was as close to Africa as any culture we’ve had in North America because of their isolation and I got to work with them and, and learned a lot about that particular aspect of the culture because of course like any cultures, the African-American experience has many, many different ways and shades of things. Interviewer: Yeah. How did your family feel about you doing all this? Did they support you? (laughter) LK: That’s a good question. My father, first of all I’m adopted. I don’t know if I mentioned that yet, but I’m adopted. And, My dad was, he, he encouraged me in everything I did. When I wanted to play baseball, he coached little league. When I got interested in music, he bought me my first guitar and my first banjo. My mother, they both came through the Depression and they had opposite ways of reacting to that. My dad wanted me to enjoy life. My mother wanted me to be secure and successful. I remember she said, “You can’t make a living playing music,” which I’ve been doing for years. (laughter) And she was really upset. I was living in a black community. I was in a one room apartment. My apartment building was right next to the school, so I had one room and then my kitchen was down the hall and then the bathroom I shared with the people at the end of the hall. It was owned by the woman next door who also owned the funeral parlor. (laughter) When I went to pay my rent, I would go through the funeral parlor and whatever corpses were there. (laughter) My dad was supportive, and my mother was…wanted me doing something else. She always wanted me doing something else. (laughter) Yeah. Interviewer: Yeah. When did the desegregation process end in your teaching? LK: Oh, it never ended actually. After the six years I was exhausted because I’d been a mediator the last two and then I was asked by the South Carolina Arts Commission to come on board as a folk singer. I was ready for the change and then went on board as a folk singer and a lot of that work was in schools and that’s what ultimately brought me up to North Carolina. And we used to have a program called Artists in Residents at the community colleges that was sponsored by the North Carolina Arts Council and I got stationed out in, out in Murphy at Tri-County Community College and the rules those days were you could stay at one school two years and then you had to move on and at the end of two years the only positions they had open were in the Piedmont. I don’t do Piedmont. (laughter) I’m a mountain boy. (laughter) So I left that and became a radio DJ in Murphy, NC. WKRK “And now here’s Conway and Loretta with ‘With This Ring.’” And they carried my obituary column of the year advertisement for years after I left. (laughter) Any other teaching I’ve done since then has been like a visiting artist or a folk music thing. When I do those things, I try always to incorporate the American Indian, African-American, the various white cultures, and only in recent years have I been able to anything with Asian cultures. But I try to do my programs that represent various cultures depending on what’s asked of me. If I’m asked to do a Cherokee program, then that will be Cherokee. Yeah. Interviewer: Yeah. I don’t mean to go back… LK: That’s okay. Interviewer: Before you left the schools were there still, obviously there was still people acting out because of the desegregation. But do you remember any major events because of this? LK: No, I don’t. There were little things that, you know were relationships kind of stuff and occasional fights and that kind of stuff but nothing more than you see today. Actually, the big demonstration was my first year in an all-black school. The students organized. We had a brand-new school building but we had hand me down text books from the white school. The only magazine we had in our library was the Ford Times which was given by Ford Motor Company. It was a little promotional thing. And so the kids organized a boycott, a protest. And they asked me to help them out with getting it organized and stuff and when it happened, I was blamed for organizing it which I did not do. The students did it themselves. They just needed somebody who was simpatico who was willing to take a risk and help them out. It was an organized walk out by the students asking for better conditions in their school. Interviewer: That’s awesome. LK: And of course, there was some students who took advantage of it but for the most part what they were wanting was, we want a better education. Interviewer: Yeah. LK: I thought that was pretty neat. Interviewer: That is pretty cool. What do you think about the state of race relations today? LK: Seems to me like we’re regressing again. And I don’t know how much of this is overt from covert. I mean there’s always been as you know, there’s always been racial tensions, people who don’t like people of different ethnic groups. And when I was doing the things that we’ve been talking about it was basically black and white and now we’re doing black and white and Asian and Muslim and Hispanics and you know, just so many different cultures and they’ve always been here, but especially as you know the Hispanic numbers are growing. More and more people are coming into our communities and then I don’t know how political you want me to get, but the current political atmosphere very definitely encourages I think racism and is in some ways dedicated to it. The body supporting the president right now is basically racist, and as we saw with Charlottesville and that kind of stuff. And it hurts. It hurts. It does. (sighs) I think we’ll be able to overcome it. I hope so. Interviewer: Yeah. We hope so too. LK: Yeah. Again, I think my choking up now is coming out of the white community and living in a black one and gosh just woke me up. Just woke me up. Interviewer: Yeah. You experience it firsthand. LK: Yeah. And it made me angry. Poverty still makes me angry. We don’t really need to do that. Discriminating against groups of people for whatever, gay/lesbian. Um, you know I don’t care how you live. (laughter) It’s not my business how you live. It’s my business how I live. It’s my business to try and make the area that I live in better and stronger. That’s pretty amazing coming from a pretty racist mother and a very racist grandmother. (laughter) But I think one of the things that was going on as I was growing up that I, and you guys seem like kind of an exception to it, but it seems like we’re moving away from teaching people how to think. I hear so much from teachers now and they’re wanting to get out. That they’re teaching to test. Teaching to test. Interviewer: True. LK: When I was growing up, they would teach us to think. The best teacher I ever had was at Wofford. He was a geology teacher. Sometimes when you fail you don’t fail. True story. When I was at Wofford, I took chemistry and I flunked it. And I had to have a science, so I took geology and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t fail. I got a, I met somebody I needed to meet. Interviewer: Yeah. LK: And my geology professor taught us to think. On our test we could have our books, our notebooks. We could bring anything in. What he wanted us to do was take this information that was there, didn’t have to memorize it, it was there. But be able to use it. Be able to think about and use it. John Harrington was his name. Best teacher I ever had and a major influence on my life. And he infected the way I taught in the school systems you know. I wanted my kids to think. Interviewer: Yeah. LK: Yeah. That bothers me with current education that I don’t know... Interviewer: Yeah. It’s definitely followed, follow the guidelines and wait until the end of the year... LK: Somewhere you guys started. You’re independent thinkers. Do you know where that came from? Interviewer: I mean it’s definitely certain teachers that taught us that. Yeah, are there to teach you but then there are teachers that you know they are just following that end of the year. They’re just looking at the piece of paper that says you have to cover this, this, this and this and there’s going to be a test on this. Interviewer: They are just there for the paycheck. Interviewer: Yeah. Like I can tell you Ms. Shuler, the one that organizes all this stuff. She actually cares that you learn about what’s going on. She has all these different classes you can take. Like we’ve taken World Religions, like all this stuff. Interviewer: We’ve learned so much. Interviewer: You actually learn stuff. You know like, it’s not about all this testing. We didn’t even have that many tests in there. But… Interviewer: She wants you to know stuff so you can succeed in life. Interviewer: Yeah. She actually cares and so I think there’s just a few teachers that have impacted us that made us, you know… Interviewer: Mostly history teachers. Interviewer: Yeah. It is mostly history teachers actually. LK: Yeah. And English teachers with me as well. And it really surprised me because, I, every science class I had and every science class and every math class I had in high school I took twice. Summer and Winter. I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it. History and English. I recently saw my transcript from Wofford. I always thought I was a D/C student. I was a C/B student. (laughter) But I learned a lot. Interviewer: Yeah. LK: There’s just different ways of thinking and I didn’t fit into that, that kind of thinking. Interviewer: Can I ask you, how did you pay for your college? Did you get any scholarships? (laughter) LK: Well I had a partial scholarship because I was going to be a Methodist minister. So that got cut off sophomore year and I had to repay that. (laughter) Interviewer: Wait, you had to repay it? LK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And my parents paid a lot of it and I worked summers. Interviewer: Oh. LK: I understand you guys have after school jobs. (laughter) Where do you work? Interviewer: I work at Ingles and then I have a second job where I travel around a lot. Interviewer: I’m a CNA at Skyland Care Center and I work as a hostess at Granny’s Kitchen in Cherokee. LK: Oh! I bring Rhodes Scholars there to Granny’s Kitchen and you are being at Ingles in Sylva? I’ll look for you. Yeah. Interviewer: We’ll probably see you at some point. LK: Yeah. I hope so. Interviewer: So, kind of moving off this whole topic. LK: I’m good at that. LK: What made you want to start a music career? I mean, it probably has to do with this. LK: Yeah. It does. It does. I’ve always liked music and, again the influence of the folk music which was both civil rights and the war in Vietnam was going on and in regard to the war I was a conscientious objector and I got drafted and even had the famous army physical. I don’t wish that on anybody. But I appealed to my draft board and they let me do my work in the civil rights movement as an alternative service and I probably got shot at more than a lot of people in Vietnam. (laughter) And so that aspect of it affected me a lot and then at Wofford I made a friend, Ray McLeese. Still a friend of mine and he said, “Lee, if you’re going to sing these old folk songs you need to hear them done right.” And he started bringing me up into the mountains and I met people who sang these songs and their family and as a part of their family community culture and I decided at that point that I wanted to learn my songs from people who’ve had them as a part of their family, as a culture. I didn’t want to get them out of books and records and so I started doing what folklores call field work and that was going out and recording people and I knew I was going to get wonderful songs. What I didn’t know was that I was going to meet some really wonderful people. So I started doing field collecting. First person I recorded was a retired logger from my Adirondacks. He sang me logging camp songs and I learned a lot from him, Lawrence Older, In my concerts, I make a joke that he came to both of my weddings but neither of my divorces. (laughter) But I didn’t show up for the second one myself. (laughter) And one of my prize possessions is a picture that he signed for me to my son in folk music and it hangs in the living room in every house that I live in. Another one, Frank Proffitt Jr. his father was Frank Proffitt Sr., and he was the source of the ballad “Tom Dooley” which was a big hit in 1959 and it was recorded by him and Frank Warner who also became mentors of mine. They recorded that song in 1938 and they also recorded “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” from our North Carolina Outer Banks. I met them and they, when they heard I was interested in music they invited me down to their house in Long Island and they’d sit in their living room and listen to these recordings they made beginning in 1938 and make notes and go in and talk with them and ask them questions. Interviewer: That’s awesome. LK: And they introduced me to people like Ray Hicks, fascinating storyteller, and Frank Proffitt I met on my own. His father’s is one of my, still is probably my favorite Appalachian folk singer. He had a wonderful baritone voice. He played a homemade fretless banjo. I come bearing gifts by the way. Interviewer: We were hoping you would do this. LK: Yeah. So, that’s a fretless banjo. So, what I’m going to do is give you these and you can share them. You can digitalize them. I don’t care what you do with them. And on the front cover of that one, that’s Frank Jr. and that’s the day I got my first fretless banjo and he is showing me how it plays as opposed to a regular… Interviewer: Oh my gosh. LK: Yeah. You know, I’m not on that one I don’t think. Yeah but that’s me and then on the backside of that one, this is in the country of Georgia in central Asia and that’s me recording these girls. Interviewer: We’re listening to these on the way home. We’re going to put them in the CD player. Interviewer: I have never used my CD player (laughter) but we’re about to. LK: And like I say you can digitalize them and share them with each other. Interviewer: This is so cool. Thank you. Interviewer: Which one is, which one is your favorite to play? LK: This one. That one is songs I collected around the world and there’s a 12-page booklet in there and you’ll hear the voices of some of the people I learned from introducing the songs and those girls will actually start the song that they taught me. (Singing in foreign language….) Interviewer: Which one is this? LK: And it goes I met you. I fell in love with you. I love your brown eyes. I love your eye brows. (laughter) Interviewer: Is it number nine? I love your eyebrows. (laughter) How much do you sell this for? LK: $15. Interviewer: We looked at the website and we watched your YouTube videos. Interviewer: Yeah. We did! LK: Oh. Well then you know more about me than I thought. Interviewer: Yeah. We did a lot of research on you. (laughter) We have these class meetings for the program and we just blared the music really loud (laughter) Interviewer: It was awesome. Interviewer: It was really awesome. Interviewer: What did we listen to? Interviewer: It was one of the one’s about this guy. Interviewer: He was sitting on the rock. Interviewer: What was his name? Interviewer: I don’t know. In the music video you were like sitting on this rock. Interviewer: It was like a barn. Tall grass. LK: Oh, it’s about the miner boy. Interviewer: Yeah. LK: So (laughter) I don’t think you’ll be interested… well. The songs on there. Interviewer: We probably will be interested. This song is really cool. LK OK. Well I’ll give you that one to then. This is Adirondack folk songs, and do you know the market for unaccompanied lumber camp and iron mining songs. There’s no market (laughter). I sell two or three of every year (laughter) but I’m very proud of it. Interviewer: This is awesome. We’re definitely going to keep these. LK: And I did, somebody gave a copy of it to Pete Seager. Do you know who Pete Seager was? Interviewer: I think I’ve heard… LK: He was a well-known folk singer, singer/songwriter. He wrote Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Bells of Rhymney . Some songs you’ve heard. Anyway, somebody gave him a copy of that, and he sent me a note saying how much enjoyed it. Interviewer: Really? That’s awesome. LK: And he’s one of my heroes. You want to know my heroes? Interviewer: Yeah. LK: Jesus Christ. Interviewer: That’s always a good one. LK: Not the one in church. The one who is throwing out the money changers. The one who went to the prostitute and forgave her her sins. Interviewer: Oh OK. LK: The radical one Interviewer: That’s a good one. LK: Henry David Thoreau. Have you bumped into him? Not yet. Interviewer: No. LK: I think you guys might enjoy him. Yeah. And Pete Seeger. And Pete I got to meet…he died three or four years ago now I guess and got to sing with him and all sorts of stuff. Interviewer: Oh goodness! LK: Oh! This life has been blessed. Yeah. Interviewer: I think my dad might be one of the people that’s going to appreciate this (laughter) Interviewer: Definitely Interviewer: Yep. He loves that stuff. LK: Well, anyway. I do hope you enjoy it. Interviewer: Yeah. Thank you so much Interviewer: Are you working on another album? LK: Not right now. I had one that I was actually that has been recorded. The Kronos String Quartet and cello player. And uh… Interviewer: I love the cello. LK: I can’t… Cello is my favorite instrument that I don’t play. Interviewer: Yeah. It’s my favorite. LK: Anyway, some other people were supposed to join me, and it hasn’t worked out. It’s in the can. May come out because it’s a lot of social actions songs that were written in the 20s and 30s. Actually, some of them went back to the 1700s. They’re talking about voters’ rights. Yeah. The early days. The only people who could vote were white male property owners (laughter). So, I hope to get it out at some point but yeah. Interviewer: That’s awesome. You mentioned your book. What is your book about? LK: I worked with a…. people I’ve met are so awesome. I met, there was this woman named Marjorie Lansing Porter and some of our unsung heroes are local historians and she was the historian for two counties in the Adirondacks and the city of Plattsburg. In 1940, she began to realize that the Adirondack folk songs were disappearing and they’re actually English/Scottish ballads, lumber camp songs, iron mining songs, and she set about to collect them and record them before they disappeared. And she’s the only one that did that, and I met her in 1970 and we worked together for three years until she died. So, I’ve been editing the collection and it’s taken me a long time for various reasons. One of which… I don’t read or write music and I finally was able to get a grant about four years ago to hire someone to do the music and that unblocked it. It’s a collection of, very definitive collection of the folk songs from the Adirondacks where I was raised and the University of Tennessee Press has said they want to publish it. And… Interviewer: That’s awesome Interviewer: It’s just so cool that you’ve taken things that not a lot of people, generations dying that cares about this kind of stuff, made it, even published it. It’s there. Took a lot of time. Interviewer: Absolutely. I feel like you’ve been very unbiased about it too. LK: Well… Interviewer: Or at least tried to be. LK: One of the neat things, it’s funny. It came up today. I was talking with a guy up in Highlands. As I said I was adopted and whenever I’d ask my mother where did I come from she would act hurt. Like I’m not doing a good enough job, you know, and I learned not to ask. As I got older, I got to the point where I really didn’t care anymore. I have an adopted sister and she had health issues and she went and researched and actually found her mother, her birth mother and she got her birth mother and two half-brothers and a half-sister, but I‘ve just been really happy not knowing, you know? Am I German? Am I English? Am I Iroquois? Am I African-American? What am I? I don’t care. And I think that’s helped a lot. Plus my dad listened to jazz and got me interested in black music. Big interest in Indian populations and do I lot of teaching about Cherokee and team teach… Interviewer: Well you probably know Kevin Norris? LK: No, I don’t. Interviewer: You don’t? LK: No. Interviewer: He teaches…. Interviewer: He loves Cherokee. He’s so into it. LK: Yeah. I still work with Freeman Owle, who is the story teller on the Qualla boundary. I was friends with Walker Calhoun who was a major teacher of the Cherokee culture. He died maybe six or seven years ago and was friends with Jerry Wolfe who died maybe two years ago, two year, no two months ago. He just died recently. Jerry Wolfe was an amazing guy. He was, he got the title of Beloved Man. Interviewer: Yeah. We know about him. His daughter substitutes at our school. LK: Oh ok. One of the fun things was that you probably know he got an honorary degree from Western and every time I saw him after that I’d say, “Hey Doctor Wolfe.” (Laughter) And now I have memories of him I can, he looks up and he smiles (laughter) Interviewer: He was an amazing person. LK: Yeah. Yeah. So those are the people I learned from and then I do a lot of research. I still enjoy that. I’m getting further and further back and reading things that were written in the late 1600s, early 1700s. Of course, the hard part with the Indians is that it was all written by white men and they had different viewpoints. Some wanted to conquer them, and some wanted to reform them. Reform them? (laughter) Yeah. So anyway, those, all those adventures. Have you bumped into Wu Man and friends when you’ve been researching me? Interviewer: I don’t think so. LK: Ah! Okay. Wu Man and friends. Wu Man. Capital W-u…capital M-a-n. She’s a pipa artist from China and she plays with Yo Yo Ma’s ensemble. I went up to New York a couple years ago and listened to her. She was a soloist for the New York Philharmonic. She plays Chinese operas, all sorts of stuff. And a few years ago, she decided she wanted to do a recording of stringed instruments from different cultures and she had a guy from the Ukraine and a guy from Uganda and me and we did a recording and we’re on YouTube. If you look up Wu Man and friends, you’ll see us in YouTube playing in Santa Fe New Mexico. So, she plays the pipa which is a Chinese flute and James Makubuya is the Ugandan and he’s still with us. He plays basically African fiddles. I play my fretless banjo, dulcimer, mouth bone, Cherokee flute. And Wu Man plays the pipa and the fourth guy, (whispers) he’s a jerk. She doesn’t use him anymore. (laughter) But, anyway, yeah. You can find videos. Interviewer: Will you spell it again? LK: Capital W-u. Capital M-a-n and Friends. Interviewer: We’re definitely going to watch that. LK: Yeah and we’re playing Santa Fe New Mexico. But we played Carnegie Hall. Interviewer: Oh my gosh. Interviewer: Nice LK: And two years ago, we did a six week tour, two-week tour of China. Six cities. Interviewer: Oh, my goodness. That’s crazy. Interviewer: Dang. LK: Yeah. So. Again, I got interested in the banjo and you just never know. Interviewer: And it took you around the world. LK: Yeah. And with different cultures and of course this widens my view of things too and I’m playing with this wonderful woman from Asia and in China she’s revered. And James Makubuya just these varieties of instruments from East Africa, yeah. I know more about West Africa because that’s where the banjo came from. So, it’s been fascinating playing music with him. And then going to these different cultures. Just gets bigger and bigger. Interviewer: Wow. That’s crazy. Well I don’t think we have any more questions for you but if there is anything else you want to tell us about feel free. LK: Well another thing I’m proud of is I’m in my 39th year as a whitewater raft guide on the Nantahala. (laughter). Interviewer: Well done. LK: Yeah. I was working at the conference center in Highlands thirty-nine years ago and they said we’re going to run the Nantahala tomorrow. We need a guide. Can you do it? And I said sure. (laughter) First trip down the Nantahala I was in the back of a raft (laughter). I worked with them for several years and I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been with the Nantahala Outdoor Center. Interviewer: That’s awesome. We’ve done that before. Interviewer: Yeah. So much fun. LK: I still work for them. Probably done fifteen or so trips already this spring. My favorite all time trip on the Nantahala was two years ago in March. No leaves on the trees and it’s snowing to beat the band and the snow is sticking to the trees and it’s a winter wonderland. Just absolutely gorgeous. Interviewer: Oh My gosh. LK: And I was just loving this trip and in my boat, I’ve got a group of six junior high school girls who are very unhappy. (laughter) Interviewer: Cold probably. LK: Yeah. (Imitates young girl voice) Why are we here? How much longer do we have to go? Why do we have to paddle? Well if you don’t paddle, you’re going to get colder and I’m sitting back there just loving it. (laughter) Interviewer: Why did they want to go in March? (laughter) LK: Well it was some sort of school program. They were actually from Ohio. We get a lot of different groups. School groups and things that come in the spring and the fall. (laughter) Interviewer: Gotcha. LK: That’s still my favorite trip. And then two years ago I did one with a French-Canadian family. Mom, dad and a little boy and girl. And I tried to sing some of my Adirondack folk songs that are in French. (singing in French). And the kids just have a great time laughing at me because my French was so horrible. I enjoyed them and we exchanged Christmas cards. Yeah, I love that family. The kids were just so open and free. “Oh, don’t laugh at him.” (laughter) “It’s ok. I know it’s bad.” (laughter) All those things, just all these little things happened. Open stuff up and just never know what’s going to happen next. Interviewer: Yeah. LK: Do you have to transcribe this? Interviewer: Someone else will (laughter) Interviewer: Somebody at Western gets the credit for typing all of this out. Thank God. LK: Whoever is typing this out thank you. (laughter) Well again when my folk… when I was collecting, that’s how I would record and in my day, it was cassette recordings and then I’d have to transcribe. Interviewer: Oh, that’s the worst. LK: I appreciate what they’re doing. Interviewer: Well you know this goes. Did they tell you what happens with this? LK: No. Interviewer: It gets put on like, on Western’s… Interviewer: UNC actually. Because they are sister schools. Interviewer: It gets put on UNC’s, like I guess, like a library online kind of thing. Interviewer: Their library database Interviewer: And like anyone can view it around the world. LK Oh? Interviewer: And they will use this one day. Probably. Interviewer: So, like sometime in the fall they will probably call you or email you and tell you how to access this. LK: Ah. Great. Interviewer: So, you’ll be on there. Famous! LK: Yeah. Well the Appalachian folks songs that I’ve collected, not my singing. But the Appalachian people I’ve collected from I donated that to Berea and it’s online at Berea. The people I collected from. Interviewer: Oh! That’s awesome. LK: Yeah. We want to keep it going and there’s always an interest. There’s thousands of people who like this kind of music now. Interviewer: There is. Yeah. Interviewer: It’s becoming more appreciated I feel like a little bit. LK: It goes in cycles. We get a lot of technology, everybody wants to use technology and after a while they just want to go back to basics. You see it in movies too. They’ll do a lot of high-tech stuff and then just stop and they’ll go on location and film live. On the CDs they are live. The first time I recorded the engineer at the end said do you want me to correct the mistakes and I said no. (laughter) Leave it. Interviewer: That’s so cool. Interviewer: I’m so excited. Interviewer: Me too. I’m telling you my dad is going to love this stuff. My papaw was a singer. Bud Putman. He did all kinds of stuff like this. He loved it. He’s going to love this. This is so cool. LK: Well like I say you are welcome to share them anyway you want to. Interviewer: Yeah. We will. And we have it on recording to. Interviewer: We do. Yeah. (laughter) Shout out your website online. LK: Don’t have one. Interviewer: Oh? Don’t have a website? LK: Nope. There is one but it’s out of date. Has the wrong phone number and the wrong…. Interviewer: I was about to say we saw a website (laughter) LK: You saw one, but it probably has me living in Cashiers. Interviewer: It does. (laughter) LK: Yeah. Well I live here in Cullowhee. Interviewer: That’s awesome. LK: I just never updated it. (laughter) Interviewer: It’s fine. Just leave it. Interviewer: It’s close enough. Interviewer: Maybe update the phone number (laughter) Interviewer: That’s awesome. Interviewer: Well do you want to say anything else. LK: It was a joy to meet you guys. Interviewer: Yeah. It was good to meet you too. Interviewer: This has been awesome. LK: Again, he introduced me to you in ways I was really looking forward to seeing you. Interviewer: Oh, how sweet. LK: He said I would enjoy you and he was right. Interviewer: Well thank you! We enjoyed you too. Interviewer: Definitely. LK: I hope so. Interviewer: I think you were the most interesting interviews. Interviewer: Yeah. It’s been like forty-six minutes and it feels like fifteen. LK: As I say I think I’m one of the luckiest people I know. Interviewer: You are. Hearing your story. Interviewer: You have some awesome stuff. Interviewer: Well thank you so much. LK: Well you’re welcome. I look forward to seeing you around the community. Interviewer: Yeah. We will see you.
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