Eddie Bond & the New Ballards Branch Bogtrotters

Eddie Bond is a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship honoree. In this concert he plays Old-time Appalachian fiddling he learned growing up in Virginia with the New Ballards Branch Bogtrotters. The Bogtrotters are staples at Galax-area community dances and gatherings and frequent first-place winners at the Old Fiddlers' Convention, where Bond himself has won countless fiddle contests and twice been named Best All-Around Performer, arguably the highest honor in old-time music.

Speaker Biography: Eddie Bond hails from Grayson County, Virginia, which many consider the musical heart of Southwestern Virginia and Appalachian old-time music. Bond was raised in Fries, Virginia, a tiny town of 600 residents with strikingly rich musical tradition, producing such musical luminaries as Henry Whitter and Ernest Stoneman. Fries is six miles from Galax, home of the Old Fiddlers' Convention, the oldest and largest fiddlers' convention in the country. Bond was taught by a maternal grandmother who played guitar and sang music handed down for generations through the Hill family, musicians documented in the American Folklife Center's archival field recordings. His great-uncle Leon Hill took him to visit many of the local fiddlers from whom he learned. His paternal grandparents played guitar and sang, and his grandmother Bond, from North Carolina, taught him many of the old mountain ballads he sings today.

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