Poss frequently acknowledged that he didn’t have a very conventional career path. “I used to joke that I had the perfect qualifications for being in the music business,” Poss once wrote. “I had no business training; in fact, no formal music background either but I teach Sociology of deviant Behavior.”

After graduating from Duke, he took a position with County Records in Floyd, Virginia. Poss and its owner, Dave Freeman, launched Sugar Hill Records in 1978, embracing what Poss called “contemporary music grounded in traditional music roots.” A self-described “wayward academic in an entrepreneurial role,” Poss assumed full control of the label in 1980, and moved it to Durham. He operated the label from there until its sale to Welk Music Group 20 years later. He became the group’s chairman in 2002. It’s now part of Concord Music, which also owns Rounder Records.

Among the many artists of note who recorded for Sugar Hill Records during Poss’ tenure were Pat Alger, Byron Berline, Ronnie Bowman, Sam Bush, Guy Clark, Mike Cross, Rodney Crowell, Jerry Douglas, Sara Evans, Cathy Fink, Butch Hancock, Hot Rize, The Infamous Stringdusters, Chris Hillman, Wanda Jackson, Sarah Jarosz, Robert Earl Keen, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, Lonesome River Band, Lyle Lovett, Nashville Bluegrass Band, Nickel Creek, Tim O’Brien, Dolly Parton, Dirk Powell, The Red Clay Ramblers, Peter Rowan, Ricky Skaggs, Darrell Scott, Marty Stuart, Bryan Sutton, Chris Thile, Townes Van Zandt, Doc Watson, and Jesse Winchester.

“The identity peg for Sugar Hill is having that traditional connection to contemporary music,” Poss Told Blue ridge Outdoors in 2008. “Some have taken to describing a ‘Sugar Hill Sound,” but I am not going to try to define that. To me, it’s what connect Doc Watson to Chris Thile, ricky skaggs to Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt to dolly Parton. They all exhibit a rootedness in their contemporary expressions of music. I like it because the music comes from a place. It’s not prefabricated or manufactured.”

Douglas and Skaggs had been part of a bluegrass group called Boone Creek, whose One Way Track album was Sugar Hill’s first release in 1978. In a May 18 Facebook post, Douglas wrote of Poss: “His dream was to have a label that mirrored the same idea as Sam Phillips and his famous Sun label, which catered to a specific audience and created a new genre, Rockabilly Plus. Barry knew an audience was there for a specific form of music (bluegrass) and there were certain bands who could grow that audience and the music would evolve with the growth of that audience.”

Douglas, who also produced a number of recordings for Sugar Hill Records, noted that he and Poss were “very close friends. Confidants really. He was like my wingman and brother at any event we collided with. We would spend hours talking about the direction of the music and the parameters he wanted his label to maintain no matter the current climate.” Poss was also godfather to Douglas’ daughter Nola. “Barry loved my family, and Jill and I, along with our children, will forever press his memory closer to our hearts.”

In addition to spending many years at the helm of Sugar Hill Records, Poss was a founding board member of the Bluegrass Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky and helped to launch the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA).

“Barry Poss was not just a champion of roots music and the artists that made it, but he was instrumental in the founding of our organization,” Ken White, IBMA’s executive director, said in a statement. “For that and so much more, we will always be grateful.”

Poss was a recipient of the IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 1998. The Americana Music Association also honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 in recognition of Sugar Hill’s pivotal role in both preserving and reinvigorating traditional music, while he was inducted into the Oak Ridge Music Hall of Fame in 2023.

Closer to home, Poss also served on the boards of the Carolina Theater, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, MerleFest, the North Carolina, Folklife Institute, and WUNC-FM.

While many artists and others have shared tributes to Poss since his passing, for his part Poss once said: “It’s the artists who make the music to which I’m the most indebted. They had something important to say. They needed to be heard. And I wanted to be part of their creative lives – because it mattered.”

As previously reported on AcousticMusicScene.com (click here), winners in the 2022 Americana Honors & Awards were recognized during an awards show in Nashville, Tennessee on September 14 that is a highlight of AMERICANAFEST, a six-day festival and conference celebrating American roots-inspired music that is hosted by the Americana Music Association. Outside Child by Allison Russell was named Album of the Year, while “Right On Time” performed by Brandi Carlile (and written by her, Dave Cobb, Phil Hanseroth and Tim Hanseroth) won Song of the Year. Billy Strings was named Artist of the Year, while The War And Treaty was tapped as Duo/Group of the Year. Sierra Ferrell took home Emerging Act of the Year honors, while Larissa Maestro was named Instrumentalist of the Year.

In addition to the six awards that were voted on by members of the Americana Music Association, several lifetime achievement and other special awards were presented. Fairfield Four were the recipients of the Legacy of Americana Award, while lifetime achievement awards for performance and executive went to Chris Isaak and Al Bell, respectively. The folk-rocking Indigo Girls received the Spirit of Americana/ Free Speech in Music award, while the President’s Award went to the late country music great Don Williams.

Circle Network is included in many U.S. cable providers’ channel line-ups or via your TV’s digital antenna. Circle is also available on such streaming platforms as Peacock, the Roku Channel and XUMO. In addition, ACL Presents: The 21st Annual Americana Honors, a special episode of Austin City Limits featuring performance highlights, will air on PBS stations in early 2023. Check your local listings for dates and times.

AMERICANAFEST annually draws thousands of artists, fans and music industry professionals to Nashville. It features daytime panel discussions and seminars and evenings chock-full of showcases throughout the Music City. The Americana Music Association (americanamusic.org), which produces the event, is a professional not-for-profit trade association whose mission is to advocate for the authentic voice of American roots music around the world.

Born (Sept. 25, 1949) and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Taylor became a leading figure in the Texas singer-songwriter scene of the early 1970s after standing himself in Houston in 1970 while en route to California following a brief stint at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

“There were no lines drawn in the sand between musical genres back in those days,” recalled Taylor, whose contemporaries included the late Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. “You were just a musician. I believe so many great writers came out of that scene because you could learn from others. Just as Clark and Van Zandt influenced him and his narrative storytelling style of songwriting, so too did Taylor inspire others like Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett.

Although Taylor made his recording debut in 1976 as part of a Houston songwriters compilation entitled Through The Dark Nightly, and was a winner of the prestigious New Folk competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival in the Texas Hill Country in 1977, it wasn’t until 1981 that he released his first album, Shameless Love, which the Houston Chronicle named as one of the Top 50 Great Texas Singer-Songwriter Albums in January 2017. Following a hiatus of nearly 14 years, Taylor’s self-titled sophomore release came out on the Austin, TX-based Watermelon Records in 1995. He followed that three years later with Resurrect, which was named one of the “100 essential records of all-time” by the now-defunct Buddy magazine. Among his six albums to follow was Scuffletown, a 2001 release that prompted Taylor’s first headlining appearance on Austin City Limits. He previously appeared on the show a year earlier as a guest of on Lyle Lovett’s 25th season episode, during which Lovett paid tribute to Texas songwriters who inspired him.

Here’s a link to view a video of Eric Taylor performing “Hemingway’s Shotgun” with Lovett on Austin City Limits:
https://vimeo.com/396765167

In addition to these and other appearances on Austin City Limits with Guy Clark and Robert Earl Keen, Taylor also appeared on Late Night with David Letterman with Nanci Griffith, to whom he was married from 1976-1982 and who called him “the William Faulkner of songwriting in our time.” Griffith also recorded several of Taylor’s songs – including “Deadwood,” “Dollar Matinee,” “Storms,” and “Ghost in the Music” (which they co-wrote).

Taylor’s The Kerrville Tapes (2003) was his first live recording and captures performances during three years of appearances at the Kerrville Folk Festival. Over the years, he also played such notable U.S. music festivals as the Newport Folk Festival and the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, as well as a number of festivals in Europe and venues across the U.S. and Europe. He also taught at the Kerrville Song School, led songwriting workshops elsewhere, and created The Texas Song Theater in which he was joined by performing songwriters David Olney and Denice Franke on songs and spoken word.

The Great Divide, Taylor’s fifth studio album, reached #3 on the EuroAmericana Chart and was among the most-played releases on folk radio in 2006. That was followed in 2007 by the 10-song collection Hollywood Pocketknife and by Live At The Red Shack, a live recording before a studio audience and featuring some of his oldest friends and favorite musicians, in 2011. Among those who joined him on vocals during two nights of music at the Houston studio in May of that year were Franke, Griffith, Lovett, and Susan Lindfors Taylor.

Taylor’s 10th and final CD, Studio 10 (2013), also was recorded at The Red Shack. Among his nine original songs on it (in addition to a cover of Tim Grimm’s “Cover These Bones”) are two that were written for the Storyworks.TV documentary film Road Kid to Writer – The Tracks of Jim Tully, for which Taylor received an Emmy Award nomination for Music Composition in 2016.

Born (ironically – see below) on a military base in Bossier City, Louisiana, Winchester grew up in rural northern Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee. Although he took piano lessons for 10 years and played organ in church, Winchester began playing guitar in bands while in high school. A 1966 graduate of Williams College in Massachusetts, where he majored in German, he also spent a year studying overseas and toured around Germany with a rock band. As the Vietnam War raged in1967, he fled the U.S. and moved to Canada to avoid the draft. “Yankee Lady,” one of his best-known songs and his first hit in Canada, was inspired by that experience and has been covered by Brewer & Shipley, Tim Hardin and Matthews’ Southern Comfort. Although President Carter granted him and many other war resistors amnesty in 1977, Winchester spent 25 years based in Montreal before returning to the U.S. and settling in Charlottesville in 2002.

Robbie Robertson of the Band produced Winchester’s self-titled debut album in 1970. The album, also featuring fellow Band-mate Levon Helm on drums and mandolin (with Todd Rundgren as engineer), reached # 26 on the Canadian radio charts and sported songs that have since been covered by a wide array of recording artists.. Winchester released several more albums during the 1970s. However, unable to tour in the U.S., the self-imposed exile with a light, honey-voiced southern drawl became known primarily as a songwriter.

Joan Baez, The Everly Brothers and Anne Murray, among others, recorded his song “Brand New Tennessee Waltz,” while Jimmy Buffett and Tom Rush have recorded “Biloxi” and “Defying Gravity.” Wynona Judd, Nicolette Larson, Reba McEntire, Michael Martin Murphey, George Strait and Wilson Pickett are among the other artists who have recorded his songs.

In a recent Facebook post, Baez called Winchester “A man who held the audience in the palm of his hand without moving an inch. One of the best songwriters on earth.”
The American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP) recognized him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.

Winchester released his tenth and final studio album, Love Filling Station, in 2009 and reportedly had recently completed another one called A Reasonable Amount of Trouble. He was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in 2011. In 2012, his friend Jimmy Buffett’s label released Quiet About It: A Tribute to Jesse Winchester. In a testament to how revered he was by his fellow artists, the album features Buffet, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Little Feat, Lyle Lovett, Mac McAnally, James Taylor and Allen Toussaint covering some of his best known songs.

Here’s how Winchester announced the news of the tribute album on his own website: “When I was sick last year, fixing to die, some friends decided to make a CD of various artists performing my songs. Jimmy Buffett wrote me around Christmastime with the news. I struggled out of my chair and did a little boogaloo around the living room. I guess I wasn’t that sick.”

Besides his wife Cindy, Jesse Winchester leaves behind a daughter, two sons, a stepdaughter, three grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, a brother and a sister. He also leaves a pantheon of songs and an indelible mark on the world of music.

Fromholz’ enduring, historically oriented classic, “Texas Trilogy” has long been recognized as the most definitive song ever written about the State of Texas. “Texas Trilogy” is actually a set of three songs portraying life in rural Texas during the 1950s and is meant to be played as one three-movement suite. Lyle Lovett also recorded it on Step Inside This House (1998), a loving tribute CD to his favorite Texas songwriters, with Fromholz singing harmony vocals. Set in the town of Kopperl, in Bosque County, — where Fromholz spent some of his childhood years before high school, living with his younger brother James and their widowed maternal grandmother following his parents’ divorce when he was 10, before reuniting with his mother and settling in Denton, TX — “Texas Trilogy” appears on Fromholz’ seminal first album, Here to There. The hard-to-find album was recorded in Colorado in 1969 with Dan McCrimmon, partner in his short-lived western fold duo, Frummox. It also is the basis for a play Fromholz wrote called Bosque County, Texas, the title of one of the books he later published, and the basis for one by two other authors entitled Texas Trilogy: Life in a Small Texas Town.

For a short time in 1971, Fromholz played guitar and sang backup for Stephen Stills in the group Manassas before embarking on a solo career. After marrying for a second time, he left Colorado and returned home to Texas, settling in Austin, where he became legendary not only for his songwriting, poetry and performing, but as a community activist.

According to his official biography, “In 1993, he organized a peaceful mooning of the KKK [that] made headlines all over the world, became a standard for opponents of the Klan, and has been repeated over and over in the ensuing years by many activist groups.” He and his late friend, writer Molly Ivins, also enticed a group of friends to stage a peaceful and apparently effective “sleep in” on the steps of the state capitol to protest the arrest of homeless street people of Austin who were sleeping under bridges. Fromholz also was a tireless advocate for Texas Parks & Wildlife and also devoted time and energy to charitable organizations in the state – particularly those benefiting children and the indigent.

“Steven Fromholz and his work will be remembered, enjoyed and studied as music and literature forever,” Lyle Lovett told the Houston Chronicle. “His insight into human nature was equaled only by his ability to write about it in such detail that he made his listeners feel as if they were standing in the shoes of his characters, seeing what they saw, feeling what they felt.”

In addition to Lovett, Fromholz recorded with Willie Nelson, whose rendition of Fromholz’ ”I’d Have to be Crazy” rose to #2 on the Billboard country charts. Hoyt Axton, John Denver, and Jerry Jeff Walker, among others, also recorded his songs. Fromholz was inducted into the Texas Music Hall of Fame in 2003, while the Texas State Legislature named him Poet Laureate of the Lone Star State in 2007.

Several days after his unexpected death, a folksy holiday message from Fromholz still graced the home page of his website:

“We’re blessed here in the Fromholz camp. – Everybody’s healthy and happy and it’s been an absolutely super year. For us ranchin’ folk we’re doubly blessed. It’s been a year with RAIN – kinda like manna from heaven – and makes for real happy cows, too!…

Our daughter, Dear Darcie, is engaged to be married to her sweetie, John, and daughter, Felicity, now has her Master’s Degree (and we’re bustin’ our buttons with pride). Grandson, Zoe, visited us here at the ranch recently and he’s growing like the proverbial weed… Y’all stay warm, happy and… keep lovin’ Texas!”

Besides recording half a dozen albums of his own — including The Good Life (1992) and A Letter from The Open Sky (1994) for the Shanachie label, Meyer was engaged in producing concert and radio programs, was a lighting and set designer for theater productions a painter and a sculptor, wrote reviews for All Music Guide, and edited the Fast Folk Musical Magazine, a combination publication and recording that the late singer-songwriter Jack Hardy had founded in 1982 to help document serious, noncommercial songwriting in the U.S. and provide an outlet for many singer-songwriters to release their first recordings. Over the course of 15 years, Fast Folk, which also served as a performing songwriters cooperative/community, published 105 issues and featured compilation recordings of more than 2000 songs by more than 600 writers – including notables like Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman, Shawn Colvin, John Gorka, Lucy Kaplansky, Lyle Lovett, and Buddy Mondlock as well as numerous other performing songwriters who never became well known. Meyer also was the prime mover and visionary behind the successful effort to have Smithsonian Folkways maintain and preserve Fast Folk’s 100+ back issues.

“Fast Folk Musical Magazine would not have survived for all those many years without Richard keeping it going,” recalled NYC-based singer-songwriter Judith Zweiman, who recorded and played some duo gigs with him, joined him in the group Folkano, and shared many private jokes and puns. “One of the most creative people I’ve ever known, Richard Meyer quietly kept the Fast Folk home fires burning… The Smithsonian project was Richard’s idea and he made it happen,” she continued, expressing thanks to him “for having the vision to permanently preserve not only your own music but an entire folk scene.”

Referring to Meyer as “a librarian and archivist at heart,” Zweiman said “Richard was about documenting an era. This was not about him but about the collective work of a group of people.” Describing him as quiet and unassuming, she continued: “Richard was not a person who tooted his own horn, yet he was the underpinning of what kept Fast Folk going. If Jack Hardy was its public face, Richard was the worker bee. He was the one who organized the recording sessions and put the magazine together. He was a quietly loyal and devoted person who was really supportive of people in very intangible but direct ways.” She noted that Meyer also was a “one guitar guy, who was loyal to his Goya guitar and played it his whole life.”

In a post on his brother’s Facebook page announcing Richard’s death yesterday, Ted Meyer acknowledged the “long, slow and debilitating decline of both his physical and mental acuity from the days when he was singing and writing songs, while noting that “Richard remained Richard pretty much until the end. Though he had terrible trouble getting his thoughts out, on occasion he would gather all his strength and roll out a typically bad pun, and he still loved listening to music.”

Richard Meyer spent the past several years at a New York area nursing home after a rare and advancing form of Parkinson’s disease left him unable to perform and made it impossible for him to live independently. His family has donated his body to Yale Medical School and the National Institute for Health for research, expressing hope that in death he can help others. There will not be a funeral, although Meyer’s family plans to hold a memorial at a future date. “We hope everyone will show up with guitars and be ready to sing one of his songs, or at least one of Dylan’s,” Ted Meyer posted on Facebook. “Either would have made him happy.”