What sad news. Art was a dear friend and a great Old Time musician. So many of us Old Time players learnt from Art's recordings and his eye and ear bending instruction book Old-time Mountain Banjo. Sadly it took years, and is still not fully appreciated by many Old-time banjo players in the UK, and the US that, as Art demonstrated, there are many ways to play Old-time banjo other than the overwhelming clawhammer style. Two-finger, three-finger, up-picking, etc., all have an honourable pedigree in the Appalachians and Art was adept at all of them. I was privileged to spend some time in Georgia with Art and Margo, and was proud to be asked to play with him in Liverpool at the opening of an exhibition of his powerful paintings of musicians, black and white.

We also toured around a bit in Belgium visiting some of Art's artist friends. It was a trip that nearly didn't happen because when we arrived at Dover to catch the ferry I realised I'd left my passport in Tunbridge Wells! Art refrained from calling me a fuckwit and returned with me to T.Wells without complaint. He was a lucky man in that he successfully managed to combine his two passions (or maybe two of his passions) Folk/Old-time music and painting. Banjos,, guitars, fiddles, even when not the main subject of a drawing or painting, more often than not, sneaked into a scene. Played by powerful, large, working-class hands. Two of my prize possessions are a painting he did for me for the cover of one of my early Old-time albums, 'Return Journey', and a portrait of me he dashed off in a few minutes to clean his brushed while I waited for him at his studio.His studio at Univ of Georgia in Athens, where was Professor of

Art was a huge, aircraft hanger-type room, large enough to allow him wall space for his vast paintings of working class men and women, many of the faces of whom belonged to some of his students whom he commandeered to sit for him. Not that they needed much encouragement. Alongside his playing and painting, he was still finding and recording Old-time ballad singers and musicians right up to a few years ago, pre-Covid. His box sets 'Art of Field Recording' show just a fraction of his collecting in and around Georgia. His books with his photographer wife, Margo, 'Folk Visions and Voices' and 'Shout Because You're Free - African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia' are perfect examples of the combination of love of the music and people, erudition and art.

For years Art had played with the latest incarnation of Gid Tanner's 1920s group the Skillet Lickers. Along with a number of other young northern academics and intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish, who discovered and promoted Old-time music from the 1950s, Art helped lay the foundations for the current widespread interest in Old-time music here in the Uk and in the States. For the last four or five years we have written to each other with me promising a return visit to Art and Margo's lovely house in the woods outside Athens, Georgia, within earshot of a tumbling river in which we went canoeing. Not quite white-water, but exciting for a guy from Tunbridge Wells! Sadly, Covid, lockdowns, travel bans etc., prevented the promised visit, and now it's too late to sit with him and absorb just a fraction of his vast folk music knowledge. It's true, one should never leave till tomorrow what one might be able to do today. Yet another inspiring and delightful friend has been taken from his family, friends and the music and art world at large.