Photograph by Kore Io Eliza McWhirter
1985
Guests of Honor
1985 Bruce Greene
Robert Bruce Greene is known worldwide as one of the finest living exponents of old time Kentucky fiddle music. He is also a skilled old time banjo player, singer, and collector of traditional Appalachian music and culture. Bruce has lived and worked among the people of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina for more than thirty years, bringing to his playing the profound intimacy and dignity he absorbed through his apprenticeships with musicians born as far back as the 1880’s.
"Bruce's repertoire includes a vast number of obscure and crooked tunes, as if opening a previously locked door to a room rich with old-time music most people didn't know existed...His playing never fails to transport me back to the lost and ancient world of Old Kentucky. His style is smooth as silk, his delivery exciting, his use of ornamentation harks back to the melding of Old World and New World that has occurred in Southern music a century and a half ago."
- David Lynch, Old Time Music Top Ten
