Louisiana folklorist Nick Spitzer and Mississippi blues musician R.L. Boyce are among nine 2023 National Heritage Fellows set to be celebrated later this month by the National Endowment for the Arts, one of the nation’s highest honors in the folk and traditional arts.
Spitzer and Boyce are scheduled to accept the NEA’s Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship, which includes a $25,000 award, at a Sept. 29 ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The Hawes award recognizes individuals who have “made a significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of cultural heritage.”
Spitzer, an anthropology professor at Tulane University’s School of Liberal Arts, has hosted the popular radio show “American Routes” for the past 25 years, most recently from a studio at Tulane in New Orleans. The show has featured interviews with Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, Dolly Parton, Fats Domino and 1,200 other figures in American music and culture.
Each two-hour program reaches about three quarters of a million listeners on 380 public radio stations nationwide.
Source : AP News