Triad foundation preserves the art of blues music
Blues musician Willie Dixon once said, “The Blues are the roots, and other musics are the fruits. It’s better to keep the roots alive because it means better fruits from now on.”
One nonprofit group in the Piedmont Triad is trying to do just that. The Piedmont Blues Preservation Society works to not only keep blues music alive but also to preserve blues culture, and it’s with the help of a community foundation.
“Preserving blues culture is important, and I think the word preserving gives people a certain definition that kind of lives in the past, but preservation is an active thing,” says Atiba Berkley. “We’re preserving ourselves every day, right? So that we can get up for the next day, and that’s really what we look at preservation as we do have an archive and we have documents from 1985 when we started and old instruments and vintage things, but we also look really far forward and that preservation means supporting a future for something as well.”
The Piedmont Blues Preservation Society has worked for 40 years to keep the roots of blues music alive by engaging and educating people. Berkley, the President of the Board of Directors, says the nonprofit has retooled itself in the last few years to go beyond the music to the blues culture.
“But we also are very intentional about recognizing it as the traditions of black folk community,” he says. “So, we teach people a working definition of culture and teach them about all the aspects of culture related to blues, which include food, things like film, literature, visual art and all the things that make culture what it is because by the time you get a musician on stage, they have perspective and that perspective comes from all of that, not just from their ability to understand music.”
Programs such as the Carolina Blues Festival help with community outreach. There’s also a Blues in Schools program to reach the younger generation and a Blues and Foods market. Volunteers have championed the efforts for four decades. Now, a $60,00 grant from the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro is allowing the Piedmont Blues Preservation Society to hire its first paid staff. The additions will help get the message to more people.
“We serve a 150-mile radius around Greensboro. So, that means if you aim in any direction, we’re willing to drive 150 miles to provide a physical service for someone, and sometimes that’s sending a band somewhere, attending a meeting, doing education programs for school systems and summer camps and things like that,” says Berkley. “We really believe that we have a responsibility to not only preserve this culture, but to also secure its future.”
The society helps send local musicians to the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, and it also helps musicians connect with festivals and events here in the Piedmont Triad.