An era of North Carolina music and arts ended early Friday morning with the death of John Dee Holeman, Durham’s last great blues elder. Holeman had turned 92 years old on April 4 and passed at Person Memorial Hospital in Roxboro. The official cause of death was a heart attack, following a prolonged period of ill health.

“We’ve lost the last North Carolina blues musician who actually grew up with it as the popular music of both the countryside and the city,” said Wayne Martin, executive director of the North Carolina Arts Council. “I think he was the last one who connected the present day to the time when the blues reigned supreme in African-American culture. It’s not the end of the blues, but the end of the generation shaped by that. I sure will miss him.”

Born in Hillsborough in 1929, Holeman was already coming over to Durham to play music as a teenager. By the early 1950s, he was living in Durham and playing regularly with Arthur Lyons, an older bluesman who had been part of the Blind Boy Fuller/Rev. Gary Davis scene in the city two decades earlier.

In Fuller’s day, blues players had made a living busking around Durham’s tobacco warehouses during the harvest season. Holeman and Lyon played house parties as well as joints where people of color had to order food from the back door in those Jim Crow days.

As the years passed and Durham’s older generation of blues players died off, Holeman aged into the role of elder statesman. A series of albums paired him with everyone from Taj Mahal to the Australian folk-rock group The Waifs, and he kept the old style of Piedmont blues alive with signature songs including the speak-easy ode “Chapel Hill Boogie” and Blind Boy Fuller standard “Step It Up and Go.”

He was a regular performer at festivals including Eno and Bull Durham Blues, with enough of a nationwide reputation to earn a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988.

“When white Durham finally began to recognize its blues musicians, very few of them were still alive and active at that point,” said Glenn Hinson, associate professor of folklore and anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. “John Dee was the youngest. He was a gentle artist and a gentleman, always someone who downplayed the versatility and depth of his artistry. In the midst of all the accolades, he very much stayed himself.”

Holeman’s legacy extended beyond music and into dance, too, mostly through his longtime performing partnership with pianist Quentin “Fris” Holloway. At shows, Holeman and Holloway would dance as much as they played—mostly “buckdancing,” an old style involving lots of stomps and slaps. Indeed, he was every bit as influential in dance as he was in music.

“He was our elder buckdancer, and this is the end of an era,” said Junious Brickhouse, a choreographer and urban dance culture educator, for whom Holeman served as mentor. “Buckdancing is something a lot of our communities have abandoned because of its association with slavery and Jim Crow.”

“But John Dee helped me undo that shame of where we’re from,” Brickhouse continued. “He helped a lot of people in the street-dance community reflect where we come from. He was a guiding light, and so loved. I don’t think he realized how much he impacted our lives. He was someone very special, the last of his kind.”

John Dee Holeman’s funeral will be held on Thursday, May 6, at Obies Chapel UHC. His family has a fundraiser for burial and funeral costs, which can be found here


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