More Winners

Amma D. McKen, of Brooklyn, New York, has been a lifelong member of a community called Yoruba traditionalists or Lukumi, practicing a way of life and religion of West Africa. She has sung traditional sacred Yoruba music since she was 14 and now holds several roles and titles in Yoruba, including the title of akpon, a lead singer and officiator for the drumming and dancing celebrations. She became the first African American female akpon to produce a musical recording of traditional songs, titled Alaako Oso: Owner of the Songs Is Eloquent. She is the director and co-founder of Omiyesa, a cultural music group and offers apprenticeships, workshops, and lecture-demonstrations in Afro-Cuban and Orisa songs, dance, and music. Hear some of her music.

Joel Nelson, of Alpine, Texas, is a cowboy poet who pursued work on Texas ranches after working for the US Forest Service and serving in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. He was instrumental in founding the Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering, the second-oldest such event. He is known throughout the West for his delivery of the classic cowboy repertoire, and his poems are rapidly assuming the status of standards. His The Breaker in the Pen is the only cowboy poetry recording ever nominated for a Grammy. He and his wife work side-by-side horseback operating the 24,000-acre Anchor Ranch near Alpine, where they raise Corriente cattle. Read some of his poems at the Cowboy Poetry Web site.

Teri Rofkar (Tlingit name, Chas’ Koowu Tla’a), of Sitka, Alaska, is a weaver and basketmaker who was born into the Raven Clan. She learned her skills from the elders in her community. Today, she weaves all the time and harvests her materials in the forest. She is known worldwide as a teacher and researcher and as a weaver of the once-lost art form of the Raven’s Tail Robe. In 2003, she came to the National Museum of the American Indian to study and analyze cultural material used in basketry and robes. Recently she has been exploring Web technology to verify the age and authenticity of weavings. Visit her Web site to learn more.

Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, of Long Beach, California, is a dancer and award-winning choreographer in the Cambodian classical dance form. A master artist of the 1,000-year-old tradition, she was a member of the first generation to graduate from the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. After coming to the United States in 1991, she created training workshops in classical dance and music for young people living in Southern California’s large Cambodian refugee community. In 2002, she co-founded the Khmer Arts Academy, dedicated to fostering the vitality of Cambodian arts and culture. Her recent work in Cambodia has helped restore classical dance to the once exalted place it held before the Khmer Rouge holocaust. Watch a video of her.

Mike Seeger, of Lexington, Virginia, is a musician and cultural scholar who is part of a family of prominent scholars and performers. During the early 1950s, he began recording traditional musicians, focusing on old-time solo and duet music, along with the string band music of southwest Virginia. He eventually co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers, which performed music rooted in the repertoire of Appalachia and the upper South. While recognized for his mastery of the guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and autoharp, he continued to seek out and record musicians who were not known except in their own communities. He has produced more than 30 documentary recordings and performed on another 40 recordings, and he continues to perform and tour. Watch a Smithsonian Global Sound video on him.