John Dee Holeman (b. April 4, 1929 in Hillsborough, Orange County, NC, d. April 30, 2021 in Roxboro, NC) was a Piedmont blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter. His music includes elements of Texas blues, R&B and African-American string-band music. In his younger days he was also known for his proficiency as a buckdancer.
Holeman was born in Hillsborough, North Carolina. on April 4, 1929. He was raised on a farm in Orange County. He learned to play the guitar, and listened to traveling bluesmen from other parts of the South, as well as on the radio. Drawing inspiration from Blind Boy Fuller, he began singing and playing guitar at local parties and other community events by the time he was in his mid-teens. He went on to purchase his first electric guitar during his mid-twenties. Holeman relocated to Durham, North Carolina, in 1954, where he played with the pianist Fris Holloway. The duo became adept at the Juba dance, also known as the hambone or buckdance, which he had earlier learned at country dances.
During his working lifetime, Holeman had full-time employment as a construction worker, and music was a part-time pursuit. However, he was able to tour in the United States and overseas in the 1980s, including performances at Carnegie Hall, and abroad on behalf of the United States Information Agency's Arts America program. He played at the 42nd National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap, Virginia, in 1980. He performed yearly at the Black Banjo Festival, in Boone, North Carolina. His first album, Bull City After Dark, was nominated for a W. C. Handy award (a predecessor of the Blues Music Awards). He recorded the album Bull Durham Blues in 1988, which featured Taj Mahal. It was re-released on the Music Maker label in 1999. Also in 1988, the National Endowment for the Arts presented Holeman with a National Heritage Fellowship. Holeman was presented with the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award in 1994. A song Holeman wrote, "Chapel Hill Boogie", was featured on the 2007 Grammy Award–nominated album 10 Days Out: Blues from the Backroads, recorded by Kenny Wayne Shepherd. In 2007, Music Maker issued the album John Dee Holeman & the Waifs Band, on which Holeman was backed by the Waifs, an Australian folk-rock group. He played several shows in 2018 with Cajun/Zydeco musician Mel Melton in Durham.
Holeman was married to Joan until his death. He died on April 30, 2021, at the age of 92.
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By Richard Skelly
Fans of Piedmont blues as performed by the likes of the late John Jackson and John "Bowling Green" Cephas will like the guitar and vocal stylings of John Dee Holeman, who has several recordings that are readily available. Holeman has been based in Durham, North Carolina since 1954. Over the years, tobacco city Durham has been home to a prominent list of bluesmen, including people like Rev. Gary Davis, Arthur Lyons, and Blind Boy Fuller. Holeman has updated the older Durham acoustic Piedmont blues traditions to include elements of urban blues, Texas blues, classic R&B, and jazz. Holeman was born in Orange County in 1929 and began singing and picking guitar as a 14-year-old. He cites Blind Boy Fuller as the musician who taught him how to play -- he learned guitar from listening to Fuller's recordings and by performing with musicians who had learned first-hand from Fuller. Later, as a teen, he began entertaining at birthday parties, wood choppings, house rent parties, and corn shuckings. Once in Durham, he began performing with pianist Fris Holloway (born in 1918), and both men were also excellent buckdancers.
Holeman received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 and a North Carolina Heritage Award in 1994, and he still performs frequently in and around North Carolina on weekends. He toured nationally and internationally in the 1980s, giving concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York and Wolf Trap in Washington, D.C. He has performed abroad for the United States' Information Agency's Arts America program. In 1988, Holeman recorded the album Bull Durham Blues with Grammy Award-winning musician Taj Mahal, who played guitar, bass, piano, and hambone on the album. Holeman's other releases include John Dee Holeman & the Waifs Band and You Got to Lose, You Can't Win All the Time. He also has an album on the Washington, D.C.-based Mapleshade Records label, John Dee Holeman and Sunnyland Slim: Blues Legends Live. His Bull Durham Blues was reissued on Music Maker Relief Foundation Records, based in North Carolina, in 1999.
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Music Maker Foundation:
From Pig Pickings to the National Folk Festival
John Dee Holeman was the epitome of what it meant to be a Piedmont bluesman. He played in the tradition of pioneers such as Blind Boy Fuller, though his style was much broader, encompassing electric, acoustic, and fingerpicking. He could bring deep feeling in Muddy Waters' slow but hard motif. And he had a great saying about how he learned to play the blues: "I caught it from my cousin who caught it from his uncle." That uncle he speaks of actually played with Blind Boy Fuller in the early 20th century. John Dee grew up just a stone's throw from Fuller's home in Durham, North Carolina.
For most of his life, he worked in construction, looking at his music as a side job. The great University of North Carolina folklorist Glenn Hinson was the first to bring John Dee's music to wider public attention in the late 1970s. Holeman had often played his guitar at private functions — local pig-pickings and parties — while keeping his day jobs. But when Hinson asked him to play at Durham's Bicentennial Festival in 1976, John Dee wasn't so sure he could do it.
"WHEN JOHN DEE AND I SAT DOWN AND PLAYED TOGETHER THE EXPERIENCE WAS LIKE COMING FULL CIRCLE BACK TO MY ROOTS. HIS MUSIC TOOK ME STRAIGHT BACK TO A GENTLEMAN NAMED LYNWOOD PERRY IN SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS, THE ONLY PERSON I EVER LEARNED TO PLAY GUITAR FROM. AS IT TURNS OUT, LYNWOOD WAS ALSO FROM DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA!" (Taj Mahal)
"He said there would be 500 or 5,000 people," John Dee said. "I told him, 'I can't face that many people. I'm not that good.' He said to do the same thing that I do at my house or at a pig-picking, to do what I know. He just about begged me. I went out there, and everybody like to have a good time. It made me feel real good." Soon after, John Dee began his touring career, playing the National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap in Virginia and Carnegie Hall in New York City. He also went to more than 40 countries around the world as part of the wide-ranging musical revues staged by the government's now-defunct United States Information Agency.
Along the way, he won a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts And a North Carolina Folk Heritage award.
Everywhere he played, he presented himself in the style of his musical forebears like Fuller. He always dressed impeccably. He was always a great conversationalist. And he was never less than a stellar guitar player.
John Dee Holeman was born on April 4, 1929. He died April 30, 2021.
