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This year’s inductees in Wilkes Heritage Museum’s Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame are the Krüger Brothers, Dock Boggs, Riley Baugus, Sheila Kay Adams, Rouder Records Founders, Gerald Anderson.
Steve Kilby of Wilkes County is the 2025 Dr. T. R. Bryan Wilkes County Heritage Music Award recipient
The Wilkes Heritage Museum will host the 17th annual Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on March 22. Doors open at 6 p.m. and the ceremony begins at 7 p.m.
Tickets for the ceremony are on sale at the museum gift shop or website for $20 per person. Seating is limited, said a museum spokesman.
The Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame exists to showcase and preserve the musical heritage of the greater Blue Ridge Mountains, from northern Georgia to northern Virginia. “The Hall of Fame educates, defines, and interprets the history of music and musicians in all genres from the region with exhibits and an annual celebration of inductees. Centrally located at the Wilkes Heritage Museum in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame increases the visibility of and support for the museum,” said the spokesman.
Steve Kilby was born into a Wilkes County, North Carolina musical family and at the age of twelve started playing guitar. As an adult he worked at American Drew Furniture in North Wilkesboro and met his life-long friend, Bill Williams, whom Kilby taught him to play upright bass and some rhythm guitar. He has played in numerous local bands with some of the finest regional musicians. After twenty-six years, Kilby and his wife Penny, a fine musician herself, moved to Mouth of Wilson where he continued to play music, teach, and was a weekend studio engineer for Heritage Records in Galax, Virginia for a time.
When Helen White founded Junior Appalachian Musicians (JAM) in Alleghany County, North Carolina, he was one of the original teachers. He taught in a local JAM organization and at the Steve Kaufman Acoustic Music Camp at the John C. Campbell Folk School. Considered one of the area’s finest flatpickers, he has won numerous ribbons and trophies throughout Virginia and North Carolina. A special memory was in 1980 when he was named the Best All-Around Performing at Galax Old Fiddlers’ Convention.
Jens and Uwe Krüger grew up in Europe and by the ages of eleven and twelve were performing regularly and by their early teens were professional musicians. The Krüger Brothers trio formed after they met bass player Joel Landsberg, a native of New York City, with an extensive classical and jazz background. The three relocated to Wilkes County, North Carolina, in 2002.
They have received acclaim for their live performances and recordings and are also known for their original works and collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets. August 6, 2024, they made their debut on the Grand Ole Opry stage. Jens Krüger (banjo and vocals), Uwe Krüger (guitar and lead vocals), and Joel Landsberg (bass and vocals) embody the musical exploration and innovations forming the basis of the American musical tradition.
Dock Boggs was a singer, songwriter, and banjo player who, from the age of 12, worked off and on in the coal mines of western Virginia and eastern Kentucky. He followed African American musicians from camp to camp while learning clawhammer banjo from his family and friends. In 1927 he auditioned for a record contract with the Brunswick record label and was selected to record in New York City. The album sold well regionally but he turned down other opportunities to record for Brunswick. Returning to Virginia he formed a band, Dock Boggs and His Cumberland Entertainers. They earned three to four hundred dollars a week playing for parties and events but had broken up by the end of their first year.
Boggs performed and recorded sporadically after the advent of the Great Depression but finally put his banjo away returning to the mines full time until 1954 when he was replaced with mechanical upgrades in the industry. With the folk music revival, Mike Seeger located Boggs in the mid-60s. Soon he returned to the stage and studio, including an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. Boggs is best known for his singing and unique banjo playing, merging Appalachian clawhammer with African American blues.
Riley Baugus is an old-time banjo player, guitarist, fiddler, singer, banjo maker, and teacher with a love and appreciation of old-time music. He was blessed to visit and learn from older traditional musicians such as Tommy Jarrell, Robert Sykes, Verlin Clifton, and Benton Flippen. After twenty years as a certified welder, fabricator, and blacksmith, he turned to the music world full-time. He played and sang on the Academy Award winning movie Cold Mountain and built the antebellum-style banjoes used in the film.
He has performed and toured with numerous artists such as Old Hollow Stringband, Dirk Powell Band, and Tim O’Brian, and played on the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss Grammy winning album, Raising Sand. Today he performs and teaches banjo, guitar, and fiddle privately or at music camps throughout the United States and abroad and builds banjos when not traveling. His performances of old-time songs, ballads, and turns reflect the Round Peak style of music and the best of clawhammer banjo from Blue Ridge roots music.
Sheila Kay Adams is a seventh-generation ballad singer, storyteller, and accomplished clawhammer-style banjo player. She has been performing since her teens at festivals, events, music camps, and workshops and taught for seventeen years in the North Carolina school system. A graduate of Warren Wilson College, she has been featured on NPR’s The Thistle & Shamrock, has authored two books, and recorded several albums of ballads, songs, and stories. Adams movie appearances include the Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Songcatcher (2000) for which she also served as technical advisor and singing coach. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded her a National Heritage Fellowship Award in 2013, the nation’s highest honor for folk and traditional arts. Throughout her life, Adams has carried and shared the tradition of unaccompanied ballad singing, clawhammer banjo, and storytelling with audiences ensuring the traditions will continue.
Rounder Records Founders, Ken Irwin, Marian Leighton Levy, and Bill Nowlin created the Rounder label in 1970 focusing on non-mainstream music. Their first issue was the release of an old recording of George Pegram, an old-time banjo player, and their second, a recording by a Union Grove band competition winning group, The Spark Gap Wonder Boys. One of the most important bluegrass albums ever released, J.D. Crowe & The New South, often referred to as Rounder 0044, set the future of bluegrass and the Rounder label and has been selected as a Grammy Hall of Fame recording.
Their roster of artists and re-released included the likes of George Thorogood, Alison Krauss, John Hartford, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, Etta Baker, Tony Rice, Vassar Clement, Jimmie Rogers, The Carter Family, Jim and Jesse, and Woody Guthrie. A pioneer in compact discs, their music genres grew to include traditional roots, bluegrass, folk, blues, gospel, country, rock, Cajun/Zydeco, reggae, African music, polka and children’s music. Under the leadership of the original founders the label had over 3,000 releases and won 54 Grammy Awards. One of their biggest hits was the certified platinum and multiple Grammy winning Robert Plant/Alison Krauss Rising Sand.
Gerald Anderson was a builder of fine mandolins and flat top guitars, musician, singer, and longstanding pinball champion. After graduating from Emory & Henry University and because of his music interests, he started sweeping Wayne Henderson’s Guitar Shop. There under the mentorship of Henderson, he started doing guitar and other stringed instrument repair while learning the Henderson picking style. With an instinct about working with different woods and various inlays, he built his first guitar in 1977 and first mandolin in 1981. Teaching workshops as a master craftsman about building bluegrass style instruments and as an early advocate of Virginia’s Folklife Program, he became a member of the foundation’s apprenticeship program.
Soon he was mentoring Spencer Strickland, and they opened the Anderson-Strickland String Instrument shop. Their collaborations grew to include performing and teaching instrument building to others regionally as well as internationally. Anderson built a total of 178 mandolins, 143 guitars, 3 fiddles, 1 autoharp, 1 banjo, and 1 ukulele, all sold to professional musicians. The Gerald Anderson Lutherie Studio is found in Marian, Virgina, at the Wayne C. Henderson School of Appalachian Arts where Strickland and other Anderson students teach and share his craft to those who follow.
The Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame house band, Virginialina, made up of David Johnson, Eric Ellis, Scott Gentry, and Scott Freeman, is scheduled to perform throughout the evening. Other performers to round out the evening include Sheila Kay Adams, Riley Baugus, Corbin Hayslett, Steve Kilby, and The Virginia Luthiers Band.
Art Menius, a 2008 Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame Inductee, will return as this year’s Emcee.
Sponsors for the induction event include town of Wilkesboro, Marilyn Payne/A-1 Self Storage, NC Arts Council and Wilkes Art Gallery, Arnold and Rebecca Lakey, Brame Huie Pharmacy, GUNTONFILM.com, Main Street Music and Loan, Art Menius Radio and Mailing Service, Craig Langston/Edward Jones, DonLin Counseling Services, Faw Insurance, R. G. Absher – Musician – Storyteller, Scenic Memorial Gardens, The Ayers House/Jim Trice, Jim Beaver, George Childers, Ann Showalter, and Nancy Watson. This project is supported by the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
For more information about The Wilkes Heritage Museum and the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame, call 336-667-3171 or go to www.wilkesheritagemuseum.com .
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