I learned, from a friend in England, that Keith Johnson, the founder of Friends of American Old
Time Music and Dance (FOAOTMAD), passed away on 2 May 2015.
In the late 1990s Dwight
Diller began traveling to England to teach banjo retreats and play at a variety
of folk venues in the company of fellow West Virginian Dave Bing, with whom he
produced the CD In England in 1999.
The annual trips to
England were important moments for Dwight.
The years of annual
travel to England to conduct workshops and from time to time concertize in
small pub settings were unique travel experiences and provided Dwight with
distinctive teaching opportunities and the chance to exert influence and shape
a completely different old time music community. Nick Pilley recalled:
Dwight met with Keith
Johnson who founded our organization, Friends of American Old Time Music and
Dance, FOATMAD, and came over both to give workshops (with Dave Bing) and also
to appear at the organization’s annual old time festival in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire,
Keith Johnson's hometown. The workshops
were held from 1999 to 2004. The one in
1999 was in December but others were November. He was unable to make 2005
when he was recovering from a car accident. With the exception of the
first one that ran from 4 to 7 December, these were two weekends apart, the
first for beginners and the second for intermediate. For example, in 2000
that would have been 18th-20th and 24th-26th November. In December 1999
Dwight performed at the Trinity Arts Centre in Gainsborough and he was a guest
at the Gainsborough Old Time Music and Dance Festival in February 1998, 1999,
and 2004.
FOAOTMAD organizer Keith
Johnson appeared to have sought the advice and guidance of several American
musicians in 1995 at the Galax Fiddlers Convention regarding old time musicians
in the United States who would be willing to commit to an annual banjo retreat
in the United Kingdom. Old time fiddler
Betty Vornbrock and her guitarist husband Billy Cornette, who themselves were
performing in England as early as 1996, recalled the difference Dwight made: in
the mid-1990’s, they heard a handful of banjo players capable of “good, clean
melody lines and timing, who knew their way around the neck.” Just several years later, after a year or two
of Dwight’s annual lessons, they began to hear more rhythm, push and drive in
the music of old time banjo players in England.
Vornbrock stated, sixteen years later, that after a couple of those
annual teaching gigs of Dwight’s in the England: “We could hear a vast
improvement. [. . .] it had become
obvious that Dwight's insistence on embodying the beat and bringing it into the
right hand had transformed the players - they were now striving for that
elusive thing about old time music: how to make it move.”
Dwight enjoyed
his teaching work in England. He was
keenly focused on way he had to quickly learn to read "cultural
messages," as he put it, and the adjustments necessary to interact
socially in England, and he remained acutely interested in those "messages"
and mused about them for many years after he was compelled, for reasons of
health, to end his annual trips to England.
He thought the teaching experience in England was vastly different than
the retreats he conducted in the US: highly collegial, much more relaxed, more
homogeneous student populations perhaps because of the unifying influence of
FOAOTMAD.
RIP Keith
Johnson.
Condolences
to the UK family and friends of Mr. Johnson.
V/R,
Lew Stern
1 comment:
Very well written...Such a nice information. Thank you....!!
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