Hello, I'm Tonya Terry and I'm Jed Davis and we're here at the 2026 Celebration of Alabama Arts Exhibition at the Georgeine Clark Alabama Artist Gallery in Montgomery and we're excited to honor seven brilliant individuals with you.

Yeah, every other year the Alabama State Council on the Arts shines a spotlight on exceptional Alabamians and their contributions to arts and creativity.

This is a tradition dating back to 1971 when the council first recognized individuals for significant contributions to the arts.

Now called the Celebration of Alabama Arts, this biennial program highlights our appreciation for the artistry in our state and the people who make it possible.

Our honorees reflect the breadth and richness of creativity, commitment, generosity, and leadership.

The Alabama State Council on the Arts gets to do what they do so well thanks to generosity and support of the Alabama Legislature and the efforts of other state agencies and departments willing to work together to support the arts.

In May 2026, the Council on the Arts, along with hundreds of art supporters, artists, and community leaders gathered to honor seven outstanding Alabamians for their contributions to creativity in our state and beyond.

Held at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery, the Celebration of Alabama Arts illuminated the state's vibrant cultural landscape.

From music and dance to opera and theater, the evening was filled with captivating performances honoring each award recipient.

The honorees also shared their own stories through short documentaries produced by Birmingham-based filmm.. which we look forward to showcasing right now.

Our first three honorees received the Alabama Arts Impact Award, which honors individuals who made unique and meaningful contributions to arts in Alabama.

Up first, singer, guitar player, and songwriter Debbie Bond.

She'd been paying her dues in Alabama for more than 40 years.

She toured in the U.S.

and abroad with many well-known traditional Alabama blues musicians.

Since 2003, Bond has worked in close collaboration with her British-born husband, musician Radiator Rick Asherson.

Bond co-founded the award-winning Alabama Blues Project, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting and preserving the state's blues heritage through educational programs.

As an Alabama Blues archivist, Bond has consulted on many films, books, and museum projects, including the only museum exhibition on Alabama blues in the world, located at the Maison des Blues in France.

She's the recipient of numerous awards, including a Keeping the Blues Alive Award from the Blues Foundation, and a prestigious Coming Up Taller Award for her education work with the Alabama Blues Project.

She's been recognized by the Alabama Music Hall of Fame and the National Blues Hall of Fame.

Her album, Live at the Son.. included in the E-U Jazz and Blues Federation's 10 Best Blues Albums of 2025.

Here's a look at Debbie's impact on Alabama Blues here at home and abroad.

My name is Debbie Bond.

I was born in California.

I was raised in Europe and West Africa.

And I've been living in Alabama for the last 47 years, but I like to think I'm a citizen of the world.

My mother says I started singing before I talked.

And she did buy me my first guitar.

So I was singing very early.

I remember a moment when I just thought, I wanna be a singer, you know.

My father was a Baptist minister and my mother was the choir director when the story started.

And so it was really music in church from an early age.

But my parents ended up splitting up.

My father came back to America.

My mother stayed in Europe and she remarried someone who was West African.

So I was raised by a Nigerian.

So just had a really very unusual background that exposed me to many cultures, which is a blessing.

We ended up living in West Africa.

There I was exposed to African traditional Sierra Leonean music and also to American Soul.

I heard "Midnight Hour" by Wilson Pickett.

I didn't even know where Alabama was.

I remember being like 13 years old and going to a disco in Sierra Leone.

And that music, that soul music and African music just pumping over this big PA system.

I was just, I was hooked.

I did my first performance in Sierra Leone in 19, like 68 or so.

And they had one television station in the whole country.

And they had a show called "The Go-Go Show" which was kind of like Soul Train.

And had my first and probably my last of a nationwide notoriety.

So I would go down to the market with my mum to go shopping and the kids would shout, "Go-Go Show!"

"Go-Go Show!"

So it was very funny.

I had the chance to come to America, ended up in Alabama.

The first thing that happened was I met Johnny Shines who is a world renowned blues player.

And he took me under his wing.

He was my first mentor.

But the next big influence was after Johnny passed away, I connected with Willie King.

He was always proud to have a diverse band and have a woman in his band.

And he really encouraged me.

He pushed me to take solos.

I was always like, "Oh, I'm so lucky to be playing with Willie'' just really try to hold my own as a guitar player and make sure I could give him the feel that he wanted.

Because this music's all learned by ear and it is passed on by one person to another like that.

It's not written down.

And it's a creative process that is not like classical music, where you read the notes.

You have to feel it and have to be who you are.

But honoring the tradition.

I was just so hungry from the blues.

So coming here and seeing all these really cool blues musicians and nobody seemed to appreciate that if these guys were in Europe, they'd be superstars because people really recognized the blues as an art form in Europe.

And here in Alabama, they just really didn't seem to realize at their own backyard, what a treasure trove of talent that was then and still is in this state.

So in 1995, my then partner of Mike McCracken and I founded the Alabama Blues Project to teach children a more educational mission and also to try to promote it and preserve it into the future.

When you see kids know that this music is a part of heritage, and it's transformed the world's music, it makes us all feel better.

So that's why we founded the Alabama Blues Project and its mission continues to this day.

I turned it into a nonprofit and then it just evolved over the years.

And now it's still carrying out under Ashley Wheat, the new director, but the work continues.

I met my now husband, Rick, through the late great Willie King and Rick is from London and he's a fantastic musician.

And since 2002, we've been together and he has been trailblazing right alongside me in all my shows and all my work with kids and all the grant writing.

And I've just been very blessed.

He's really part of this whole award too.

There's a lot of power in raw and real music and perhaps the blues will get a bigger comeback.

And I'm seeing that some even in Europe, we're play some gigs where there's a lot of young people and they're really digging on the blues.

But the blues is alive and well.

There's a lot of great players all over the United States and the blues, like all great art, communicates our stories heart to heart, soul to soul, and makes people realize our common humanity and helps build community.

And these are all things we need now more than ever.

Gary Chapman is a prolific artist and a dedicated educator.

He's an extensive career marked by more than 90 solo exhibitions.

His paintings have been purchased for the collections of numerous museums across the southeast, as well as for many corporate and private collections as well nationwide.

In addition to his own art, Gary has been supporting art students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham for more than 30 years, helping them develop their own styles, mantras, and artistic voices.

He was recently named Professor Emeritus of Art, and his legacy continues through students who went to become on artists, teachers, and leaders in the arts, carrying his lessons with them.

In 2013, Chapman was named a Creating a Living Legacy artist by the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

He is the recipient of numerous grants and artist fellowships, including a painting fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in South Arts, and two visual arts fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

Let's learn more about Gary's depth and breadth of work.

My name is Gary Chapman.

I was born in 1961, Xenia, Ohio.

I grew up in Xenia.

In junior high and high school, I had an interest in architecture.

And I did take one art class in high school, but I really wasn't thinking art.

And my mom knew I needed to go to college, and she knew about Berea College, which is a very special liberal arts college in Kentucky, where students basically pay no tuition or room and board.

And in turn, they do some labor.

So it was when I was at Berea, it was actually my junior year.

I took a painting class as an elective.

And it just clicked.

Something really, it was just notable, I knew.

And so I changed my major, stayed a fifth year and got a double degree.

And I saw myself getting better and better the more I did.

But to be honest, there were plenty of people around me who were painting much better than me.

And I knew I needed to set some sort of system for me to kind of learn to paint better, to observe better.

So I just set up a structure for myself where I started doing portraiture and started doing figurative paintings because I was pretty bad at it.

And but what was wonderful about it was the more I did, I saw it get better and better.

I really saw the improvement.

And I knew that if I was going to be an artist, that I didn't want to just paint.

I wanted to make my art meaningful, sort of milestones in my life.

Content is really important in my work.

I was always a bit obsessive compulsive.

And I think that's why art really took off for me, because it allowed me to channel that energy into something.

My work is inspired by ideas and experiences, by things that I love, things that I hate, things that worry me, things that compel me.

I think I don't think I was born an artist, but like I said, I was obsessive compulsive.

And so art gave me that thing to obsess with.

I remember one of my instructors once told me, "You don't kiss your lover just one time."

In other words, once you've found something that you enjoy and that is yours, then you attack it from every angle.

You do it in every way that you can feasibly imagine.

And so lots of my work is in series, The Helmet Project, The Anatomy of Reality, the Borrowed Body Parts series, my Conversation series.

And so the ideas kind of feed off of themselves.

I also knew that I wanted to be a professor because I thought, what a great job to be working with other people who were living and breathing art, challenging them to be better, and just having art being a part of my every moment.

Well, I went to Cranbrook Academy of Art for my MFA and then spent four years on the East Coast between Baltimore and Philadelphia.

And I landed a job at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

I think when people see my work, they know something's going on.

They're not just looking at pretty pi.. They want to ask questions.

They're really engaged.

So those are great shows.

I talk to students about why do you want to be an artist?

Because everybody wants to be an artist, you know?

And we often laugh.

My friends will kind of poke at me a little bit and say, "You don't really have a job.

You work two days a week and you make paintings."

And I say, "Yeah, not many people are doing that, huh?"

Well, actually right now we're sitting in the gallery at the Alabama Center for the Arts, which is in Decatur.

This is my exhibition called Salamandrina.

And it is an exhibition of paintings that are about my daughter, Sadie, and or simply she's modeling in them.

You know, growing up, Sadie was beautiful.

I loved her.

She was the perfect model and a cheap model.

So there were lots of Sadie paintings over the years.

Sadie was born in 1996.

After seven or eight days, we discovered that she had a serious heart defect.

Sadie had open heart surgery at eight months old.

And then again, open heart surgery at nine years old.

Lived a great life.

You know, was active.

Just an incredibly intelligent young woman.

A lot of energy, very stubborn.

But she went off to New York to Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

And after a semester, her heart began to fail.

We always knew that a heart transplant was probably something we'd be looking into at some point, but it suddenly happened.

When they found out that she was a UAB patient there in New York, they sent her back home.

We waited in the hospital for 108 days.

And that's when Sadie got her second heart.

Rebounded and went back to New York and finished her degree.

Lived another seven years with that second heart.

But she died just three years ago.

So this is a current piece that I'm working on.

It's a painting dedicated to my daught.. Before her heart transplant, she would, she had very deoxygenated blood.

And so often she asked me to carry her.

We spent a month in Italy and I carried her all over Italy as a child.

I think one of the things that I'm most proud of is that now I have 15 paintings in museums across the southeast and four of them are Sadie paintings.

So I feel like I've turned a new chapter in life.

A lot of things have happened the last three years, Sadie having passed.

I retired after 34 years of teaching at UAB.

And we have moved from Birmingham up here to Good Hope where I've moved my studio.

For eight years now, I've been running a company called GC Art Restore, restoring paintings and some sculpture.

And I'm kind of excited about the next chapter and where the art world is going to take me.

Our third Arts Impact honoree, George Culver, catalyzed his love for theater and his business acumen into a varied career in the arts.

Before returning to his home state, Culver had a career in theater production, institutional advancement and public affairs in New York City.

A notable achievement from his work as a producer was his involvement with the critically acclaimed off-Broadway production, "I Don't Wanna Be Zelda Anymore."

Culver has shared his expertise in arts administration with many organizations in Alabama, including Birmingham Children's Theater, Talladega's Historic Ritz Theater and the Homewood Arts Council.

In 2001, he was named Citizen of the Year by the Greater Talladega Chamber of Commerce and in 2007 received an Arts Administration Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

For more than 25 years, George Culver cultivated a living legacy at Talladega's Historic Ritz Theater.

Culver's leadership was instrumental in saving the Ritz Theater from demolition in the mid-90s, and now it is a thriving artistic hub.

He brought numerous renowned artists to Talladega during his tenure.

He also developed education initiatives, making arts experiences accessible to thousands of students over the years.

Let's learn more about George's leadership and vision.

Hello, I'm George Culver from a native of Munford, Alabama, a little rural town, North Talladega County.

Actually born in Talladega.

So I grew up in this little small town, which was perfect, one of those great little towns.

Back in the 50s, you didn't have to lock the door when you went on vacation.

Went to school at the University of Alabama, I was going to law school, but then it decided I'd have greater flexibility if I went to graduate school in business.

So somehow I g.. of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, which is a great experience.

I produced a musical at the Wharton School, which was again getting that experience.

It was business related because to produce something, you gotta know the marketing, you gotta know the fu.. you gotta do the accounting and what have you.

So that's where all that kinda happened.

My mother was very interested in the arts and she had a disability, had a deformity, only had one hand and couldn't play the piano and stuff.

So she really wanted me to play the piano, which I hated, because I wanted to be outside playing football with the boys, but I did it.

She made sure she took me to the Alabama, I think it was the orchestra.

Then I don't know if it was called the symphony at the time.

I would see Nutcracker, which she loved to see those kind of things.

In high school I did Macbeth or something, but I wasn't interested being the performer.

I was interested in seeing what happened behind the scenes.

How do you make that stuff happen?

How do you nurture that?

How do you produce that?

I didn't know at the time, but that all kinda worked into your soul.

That you appreciated that collaboration between the artists on the stage and the audience out there.

It's almost electrical that happens between those two entities.

When I graduated from the Wharton School, I went to New York and I was honored to be Director of Development of Public Affairs for The Actors Studio in those last years of Lee Strasberg.

Its an internationally respected institution because it nurtures the artists.

And it was spectacular.

And so there was another place where the artists and their skill and their craft and what was best for them was important to me.

We're sitting in the Historic Ritz Theater, probably 30 years ago, 35 years ago, this thing was about to fall in.

It was an eyesore.

And everybody said, we ain't getting rid of this thing.

It's so ugly and da, da, da, da.

This is a fairly significant building from the outside.

Because every inch of that outside was vitrolite glass, opaque structural glass, a very common construction material in the 20s and 30s, the Art Deco era.

We did a two year effort to raise money, but the key thing was we saved the front facade, and through the League of Historic American Theaters, we found this vitrolite expert out of St.

Louis.

And he had salvaged this historic glass when people were tearing down buildings from that era.

And what we had basically, we had saved the National Art Deco Landmark Theater because there's no other theater from that era that has that every inch of that vitrolite glass, which is magical.

And it was part of our claim to fame.

We were very proud of the public response to it.

We had to think outside the box in terms of sustainability.

And what we did was, again, thinking out of the box, we institutionalized two key annual fundraisers, which became hugely popular and are still going, by the way.

Now I've been retired a couple of years and they're still booming.

I was real proud of that.

So that was the work that really just begun, you know.

But then we were able to have the resources to do some substantial arts education programming, which is always a passion of mine.

We would have four to five thousand kids in this space every year who would get a professional first-class arts education experience.

And nothing thrilled me more than seeing those kids get off the bus and come in and get settled, but most importantly, seeing them leave the theater with their excitement, their bright eyes and bushy tail and what they had just experienced was transformative in my mind.

I produced this show, I commissioned a script called I Don't Want to Be Zelda Anymore by Marty Martin, who wrote Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein fine artist.

And we made this thing happen and it was a huge success.

It was a critically acclaimed show, which was a great source of pride for me.

But it was also giving me more of that producing.

I produced the background.

I made it happen.

I had to do the advertising.

I had to fill seats.

Butts in seats is always important.

It goes on and on and on some of the shows we were able to do here, the World Tour of Porgy and Bess on this stage, if you can imagine.

They left half the set on the truck, but we nevertheless had two performances of the National Tour of Porgy and Bess on this stage.

I had a world premiere of a legendary Diahann Carroll show that she was planning for New York to see a legend of her caliber, of her stature in a show at 70 years old.

And she hadn't done a cabaret in 40 years to premiere one right here on stage.

It was pretty amazing.

So, and we did really well.

I mean, more often than not, we were full.

I mean, I fueled.... you had to fuel these things.

I mean, you had to fuel people's interest in the arts to get them in the theater to buy a ticket.

You had to pour gaso.. light the fires, as it were.

And I think we did that.

I always have done that.

I've been known to know how to work a crowd you know.

I've been known how to get out there and say, "Hey guys, you gotta see this.

You gotta see this.

You can't miss this!"

The Albert B. Head Legacy Award recognizes public officials, arts patrons, or arts educators who have empowered the arts to thrive in their community, creating lasting importance for future generations in Alabama and beyond.

Third generation Alex City resident Ralph Froshin Jr.

embodies a family legacy of civic leadership that has left a lasting mark on his community.

Ralph took over the family business, Froshin's Department Store from 1970 to 1996.

In celebration of the store's 100th anniversary and as a thank you to the community for its support, the family created the Alex City Jazz Festival.

For more than 30 years, the free two-day event brought well-known jazz and blues musicians to Alex City, making the arts accessible to all.

Ralph's heart for service extends beyond his beloved hometown with board service for Russell Hospital, Childrens of Alabama, in 18 years on the Alabama State Council on the Arts Board where Ralph championed small communities and spearheaded international cultural exchange.

The Alexander City Chamber of Commerce honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021.

Ralph and his wife, Allyn, are avid collectors of glass art and outsider art as well.

And while Ralph would describe himself as an arts advocate and collector, he's an artist in his own right, growing award-winning roses.

Awarding Ralph the Albert B. Head Legacy Award is particularly special as Al Head, former executive director of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, worked closely with Ralph during his time on the council.

Let's take a look at Ralph's legacy.

I'm Ralph Frohsin Jr.

I was born and reared in Alexander City.

I went to grammar school and high school in Alexander City.

And I went to the University of Alabama in 1958.

When I graduated from undergraduate school, I got my commission in the US Army.

I was deferred while I was in law school.

I served my two-year obligation and then came back to Alexander City.

I was the third generation in our family busi.. which was Frohsin's, a retail apparel business.

My grandfather started the business in 1891.

So in 1991, when we celebrated our 100th anniversary, I was in New York on a buying trip and had the opportunity to go to the Blue Note, which was a jazz bar in New York.

And we enjoyed the jazz so much, we decided maybe we'd have a jazz festival for our 100th anniversary.

My family and I wanted to do something to give back, say thank you to the community.

And we first got permission from the city to have it right in the middle of town and in front of our business.

And we provided tables and chairs and invited people to bring a picnic supper.

My idea was it was just going to be a one-night festival.

And that kind of laid the groundwork for the way the festival evolved.

I guess the proudest moment was it was so well accepted that it had a life of its own.

And the other thing I should mention, we really provided named artists that performed in Alexander City and at Lake Martin that our local people, they could see it on TV and on a computer, but they couldn't be a part of a live performance.

And a live performance is so important and so much deeper than just seeing it on a screen.

It lasted until 2025, which was 35 years.

I have served on the Russell Medical Board.

Russell Medical is the local hospital.

And I've also been fortunate enough to serve on Children's Hospital in Birmingham on their board for over 25 years.

So that's been a way that I've enjoyed giving back.

This is associated with the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

And again, I was appointed to the council and served 18 years, having spent 18 years with the Art Council.

And I must say that those were 18 wonderful years because not only the staff, but the members of the council itself were wonderful people that I have thoroughly enjoyed knowing and being a part of.

And that made it very special and made those 18 years special.

I have a warm and fuzzy feeling for Alabama artists, and we've got a lot of not only Alabama artists, but family art.

My sister was an artist.

My wife needlepoints, and her mother before her also.

We've got a lot of work in our house that she needlepointed.

So even though I've never been an artist myself, I've always enjoyed both music and flat art.

And my wife, Allyn, and I have collected art.

Most of it is artists from the state.

We've been fortunate enough to travel, and in those travels, we've collected a lot of glass art, and that's kind of how we've expressed most interest in.

Art is a part of my lifestyle and the community's lifestyle and the state of Alabama's lifestyle.

And it is... It fills a wonderful gap in our life that not only is it a form of entertainment, but it's a form of education.

The Jonnie Dee Riley Little Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes individuals who have devoted a lifetime of energy and service and contributions to the arts in Alabama.

The award is named in remembrance of former Council Board Member Dr.

Jonnie Dee Riley Little Lifetime, who exemplified the spirit of this award in every respect.

Our 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient truly has spent a lifetime in the arts in Alabama.

Growing up in Birmingham, Scott Wright saw his first opera at age nine and knew then he wanted to be a conductor.

He achieved that goal and then some as a conductor, singer, composer, actor, patron, arts advocate, and currently serves as the director of Mobile Opera and the General Director Emeritus of the International Performing Arts Institute in Bavaria, Germany.

Wright has performed in more than 100 operas, operatas, and musical theater productions, as well as innumerable oratorio and concert presentations.

He has performed in concert with his wife, Sarah Bliss Wright, and they have produced two albums of love songs from the World War II era for the National World War II Memorial Commission.

Scott Wright began his artistic career at a young age here in Alabama, and even though his artistry took him to Europe and beyond, he spent decades cultivating the performing arts in the state that fostered him.

Let's learn more now about Scott's lifetim.. to the arts.

I'm Scott Wright and I was born in Tennessee raised by a family that was very musical and moved to Birmingham when I was school age.

I think artists are born not made so I believe that probably that art interest began with my DNA.

My parents both sang.

They sang in the church choir.

I sang in every church choir you could sing in starting with The Sun Beams and at one point I was even sitting before my voice changed sitting next to my mother and singing alto.

I learned to read music from a hymn book and developed as I went to high school and found a really fine program there at Banks High School, a high school that is no more and I think just developed it from there.

I think everyone should have a music education.

It doesn't matter what that consists of.

In my day everybody took piano lessons but you don't find out that you're a great pianist or in my case that you're not until you try that, until you're exposed to it.

Same way with choir.

The choirs that I was in gave me an opportunity to develop discipline, cooperation, being a part of something that was larger than the sum of its parts.

All of those things that we say sports do and I tried that as well and choir hurts a lot less.

I went to Samford University and then Cumberland Law School when it didn't appear that I was going to make a living with my art so I did continue musical education.

I think that musicians, they have to learn.

They have to be educated in music for their entire lives.

Music is one of the most satisfying endeavors of the human spirit and nobody really knows why.

I personally believe that the .. in music, that it was created in beauty and that the bottom of all of that is a wave and that wave is music but it feeds something within your soul.

So there's no real looking back.

Once I started on that journey I wanted to see where, not where it would end, but just where it would take me.

I needed to make a living so I did that.

I practiced law for a living but that supported my habit and gave me the opportunity then to sing in operas and musical theater and to do the things that I wanted to do musically in composition.

And then later on in 2010 I was given the opportunity to take the job with Mobile Opera as General and Artistic Director and so I was able to at that point say goodbye to the law practice and hello to a full time work in music.

However, I don't think of music as a job.

I always thought of myself as a musician who practiced law for a living and I really recommend that approach to a lot of young singers.

I tell them don't think they pay you to sing.

Think that they pay you to leave your family, to go on, you know, live out of a suitcase, to travel, to do all of the things that you don't want to do because work is generally those things that you don't want to do.

Then you get to sing.

I originally wanted to be a symphony conductor.

I conducted some of the great symphony orchestras of the world in my parents' living room on 33 and a third RPM records.

When I was offered a job opportunity in Mobile, I came to Mobile for the job opportunity but the thing that made us want to move was the fact that there's such a vibrant arts community in Mobile, so much performing arts and Mobile Opera and the opera gave us an opportunity.

My wife is a singer as well.

She went to Samford and we met there in the Samford A Cappella Choir, wonderful soprano and so we had an opportunity to perform, sang dozens of operas with Mobile Opera, dozens of musical theater pieces with surrounding theaters, had some gigs outside of Mobile that gave me opportunities to travel and I've conducted dozens of operas and musical theater.

I've been music director for several different companies and the University of Mobile which has been a great blessing to me.

There's a wealth of things out there, a world of opportunity.

You just have to find it and also have someone that will help mentor you and develop that for you.

Every time I've been able to sing, every time I get to conduct, I've felt really fortunate.

Not lucky because you spend an awful lot of time, I think it's a little annoying to some musicians to say, "Oh, you're so lucky to get to do this."

Well, you spend an awful lot to try to get to the point where you can do this, but art is vital.

Art is part of our being, part of our makeup.

Everything in the world is connected somehow musically it seems.

That's what makes art so powerful as an expression of those human emotions.

The Alabama Folk Heritage Award was established to recognize exemplary folk artists who made outstanding contributions to their artistic tradition.

When 2026 Folk Heritage Honoree Gary Waldrep was just five years old, he started playing the mandolin under the guidance of his musical family.

Waldrip eventually mastered the fiddle, bass, and guitar as well, but is known for his skill as a banjo player.

He began teaching bluegrass and old-time music right out of high school and played with the "Woyah River Boys" and the gospel group "Wendy Bagwell and the Sunlighters" before forming the Gary Waldrip band with his sister, Susan.

Waldrip received a Grammy nomination in 1989 for his recording "Vintage Bluegrass" on old homestead records.

Waldrip was a long-time collaborator with the Alabama State Council on the Arts, working directly with students in the touring and collaborating artist programs.

He also received multiple grants as a master artist through the Council Folk Arts Apprenticeship Program.

He continues sharing the art of bluegrass and old-time music with students teaching lessons near his home on Sand Mountain.

Waldrep's dedication to preserving and performing the traditional sounds of the claw hammer banjo earned him awards from the Society of Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America and the induction into the Alabama Bluegrass Music Association Hall of Fame.

In 2017, he made his grand old Opry debut during a special tribute for late bluegrass artist Ralph Stanley.

As you will see, Gary has spent his life sharing his love of music and passing on the legacy of old-time and bluegrass music.

Hi, my name is Gary Waldrep.

I was born July 18th, 1963, in a little town called Albertville, Alabama, right outside of Boaz.

Me and my sister, she's the only sister I've got, Susan, and we grew up on our family farms.

And it was very nice growing up.

We had a nice childhood.

I started kind of playing around with the instruments when I was around five years old.

And my aunt and uncle helped me get started in music.

I started playing the mandolin when I was five years old in the farmhouse, up behind my house, where my grandparents lived.

And my family would play music after chores were done, basically on the farm.

We would all just sit around and play music in the house, in the farmhouse.

And that's kinda my recollecti.. younger years of music.

And it was always usually old-time country music and gospel music.

My family was a big influence in what I do, and they still are.

They still perform with me today.

My sister, Susan, she joined the group in 94, and we toured as the Gary Waldrep Band, which we're currently, that's the name of the band now.

My mother taught us how to sing.

My dad wasn't a musician at all, but I got most of everything I've got as far as music on my mother's side of the family.

My dad ended up being my bus driver for 18 years when I got my band going.

When my uncle married into the family, he married my aunt Donna.

His name is Kenny Townsell.

He brought the first banjo into the family that we ever played or seen, actually, a real one.

And he also brought some old records, 33 records of Flatt and Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, and things like th.. So I started listening around my early teens because of him being in the family.

And he took me to my first fiddlers convention, and that kind of set me on fire for bluegrass and old time music.

My first professional job, I guess you would say, that we made money was the Warrior River Boys, and we toured bluegrass festivals around the country.

And played bluegrass festivals.

So right after I graduated high school the next year, which would have been 1982, I started touring with that band.

And that was really nice because it was pretty good money at that time.

And I thought, well, you know, I think I'm gonna do this for a living.

So that's when I started thinking about doing it for a living.

In 2012, I was inducted into the Alabama Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, which is an organization that was started in the early 50s, to document bluegrass music in Alabama.

And it was a big honor for me to get inducted into that.

It's an organization dedicated to what's going on in Alabama as far as bluegrass music, bluegrass festivals, and jam sessions.

So it's kind of an information center for bluegrass, the Alabama Bluegrass Music Association.

A good friend of mine, Jim Connor, was one of my mentors.

He worked with me on the Clawhammer Banjo, and he's the first one that ever told me about the Alabama State Arts Council, and the grants that I could get for teaching.

I have taught all over the mountain here in various forms in different places.

But I teach the students to read music.

I also teach them with tablature, which is a shortcut to reading music.

And then the third way is I teach them by ear, because I wanna be able to hear what they're playing.

And when they finally get it, that's rewarding for me.

It's when a student says, that's how it's supposed to sound, or that's how that's supposed to go.

That's the most rewarding part for me.

And teaching a lot of older students too, because a lot of older people think they can't do it.

They can't do it, they're too old, they can't do it.

But I have students well in their 70s and 80s now, they're doing great.

When I first met Gary Waldrep, I owned a mandolin.

It was an introductory mandolin, probably cost $60 or so.

And I learned one chord on it when I was about seven years old, and it hurt my fingers, and so I put it down and never picked it up again.

The summer of 2021, after meeting Gary Waldrep, I went and got the mandolin out of my mom's room, tuned it up as best as I could.

And then started learning fiddle tunes on it, so that when I eventually moved back to Alabama, I'd be able to get in there and kinda hang in a little bit with some of the popular fiddle tunes.

Music has a way of bringing people together in more ways than just sitting around in a circle playing songs.

And that's obviously something we love to do.

I mean, as you are getting all the lights and equipment ready, we're over there on the side playing music as much as we can in the little breaks.

But music does something deeper because it's a language of the soul, I think.

And so over this time that we've had playing music together, we started.. on the phone and texting outside of the lessons and hey, what are you listening to?

What songs do you have in mind for us to learn together?

But also it's more than that, it's a community.

Music has a way of taking people deeper than just surface level friendships, cause it's really sharing your soul with somebody, I think.

I can't think of anybody else who I believe this award should go to.

Gary, you mean the world to me as a friend, as an accomplice, as a fellow musician.

And I just hope that you will see this as a small testament to the amazing person that you are.

Our final honoree is the recipient of the Distinguished Artists Award.

This award recognizes artists with deep connections to Alabama who have earned significant national or international acclaim for their art over an extended period.

Led by his deep faith, guitarist and recording artist Eric Essix has maintained a prolific career in contemporary jazz, releasing 29 full-length albums and more than 40 million streams worldwide.

A graduate of Boston's prestigious Berkeley College of Music and an Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame inductee, Eric built his early career through releases on several respected labels before gaining international recognition with his breakout album Small Talk.

Beyond recording and performing, Eric has made a lasting impact as an arts leader and educator.

He served as director of programming at the Alice Stevens Performing Arts Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

And he founded the Preserve Jazz Festival and the Jazz Escape Festival to bring world-class jazz to Birmingham.

In 2025, Eric added author to his achievements with the release of his book, "Southbound: My Musical Journey Home", which is a blend of autobiography, commentary on his recordings and his passion for photography.

Eric truly embodies the spirit of the Distinguished Artist Award, bringing hometown Alabama music to international audiences.

My name's Eric Essix.

I'm from Birmingham, Alabama.

I grew up in Birmingham in the Fountain Heights area.

I am a guitarist, producer, composer, and most recently an author and a photographer.

My entry to the arts is from my mother.

My mother was a bit ahead of her time.

She introduced me to the symphony, plays, ballet.

The thing that my mother introduced me to that impacted me the most was a couple of concerts.

I went to see Ella Fitzgerald with her, and I also went to see the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

And those two concerts with her made a profound impact on me as a musician and artist, especially for jazz.

It's the first two traditional jazz concerts that I went to were with her.

I picked up the guitar when I was about 9 or 10 years old.

Now, I wanted to play the guitar starting at age 4.

I saw the Beatles on television and that just blew me away as a 4-year-old kid.

I was so impressed with them and it made me want to play the guitar.

It's so much so that I think my parents said that I was walking around the house playing the tennis racket that my aunt had as my first, you know, stringed instrument, so to speak.

And later on, after years of begging, my grandfather finally broke down and bought me a guitar and amplifier when I was about 10 years old and that started the journey for me.

Now, when I really started to begin to think, "Okay, I'm getting pretty good on this thing," was when I was about 17 or 18 years old and I'd been playing for about 7 or 8 years at that point and I was really starting to make some progress.

I was beginning to play along with things that were fairly complex that I was hearing on the radio and on, you know, my albums and whatnot.

And so by that time, I started to realize, "Okay, I can probably, if I really work hard and stay at this, I could probably be pretty good at it."

I was at Berklee College of Music.

I was trying to find my way as a musician.

I was in school, I was studying.

I had gone to Berklee originally with the intent to be specifically a jazz musician.

I mean, that's really what I wanted to do in conjunction with learning production, learning how to work in the studio, make records.

Those were the two things that I wanted to do when I got there.

I quickly realized that being a jazz musician was not really what I wanted to do.

Because I love so many different styles of music and being from the South, you know, gospel music was so important to me.

soul music, blues, was already kind of ingrained in my voice as a guitar player.

So I figured out that I didn't want to just specifically hone in on one style of music.

And then I wanted to explore many different kinds of music.

Berklee really kind of helped me find my way as a musician.

And of course, their music production engineering program was one of the best in the country.

And so I learned a tremendous amount about how to make records and how to start a project and complete a project, which I think is one of my strengths.

I'm working on my 30th album now.

And I don't think that I would have had that kind of ability to be able to start a project and wrap it up if I hadn't gone to Berklee and learned how to make records, how to produce records.

So that, for me, was probably one of the most important things and the most important times in my life as an artist and had the biggest impact on me, you know, as an artist.

Well, the proudest moment for me as a guitar player, as an artist, was when I was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

I don't know what it would take for me to ever feel like I've earned my keep there.

The thing for me is to just continue to strive to be the best that I can be.

The only thing I can do is to just keep trying to do innovative things and things that I think people will appreciate.

And then when it's all said and done, somebody else will have to make that determination.

But I'm working at it as hard as I can.

I feel like it's so important to give back to our community and to our young people in any ways that we can.

And of course, with music, it's our gift and we try to share it with young people.

And in sharing the music, then we try to share information as well.

So with the dedication program, we are educating them about African Americans who have contributed in multiple ways to our culture and our community through the Civil Rights Movement, through music, through sports, through art.

And it's probably the most satisfying work that I do.

For me, working with young people and the stuff that we do with them with these programs is bigger than music.

It's bigger than just performing on stage.

It's life changing.

Thank you for joining us to learn more about these incredible honorees.

On behalf of the Alabama State Council on the Arts and Alabama Public Television, congratulations to 2026 Celebration of Alabama Arts honorees, Debbie Bond, Gary Chapman, George Culver, Ralph Frozen Jr., Scott Wright, Gary Waldrop, and Eric Essex.

Thank you for the artistic legacies you've established in this state and beyond.

We treasure you.

If you'd like more information about the Alabama State Council on the Arts or the Biennial of Alabama Arts, please visit arts.alabama.gov.

Again, thank you so much for joining us and for supporting the arts in your communities.

We'll see you next time.