Fender Electric Acoustic Guitar

Where: International Civil Rights Center & Museum, 134 S. Elm St., Greensboro

31.12.69

For many a country boy, the woodshed was a place of punishment and pain. But for a young Clyde Ferguson, it was an escape.

There, with his guitar, two cats and a dog, he would hide, picking out blues notes and chords that would have angered his father and set him to praying had he heard them.

Out there, nothing mattered but the music.

Everything would slip away, Ferguson said. “I’d find that note, the sound.”

It was the late 1930s in the rural foothills community of North Wilkesboro. And the boy with the guitar and the secret would become a virtuoso guitarist and one of the last practitioners of traditional blues in North Carolina’s foothills, according to the N.C. Folk Life Institute.

Clyde “Pop” Ferguson, 84, is a living link to the past, a witness to the birth of a new style of music. He is among the last generation to have learned and played Piedmont blues music during the height of its popularity. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture will include recordings of his music and his stories when it opens in 2015.

Source: Greensboro News & Record