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Whole South Heritage Works
Who We Are
Founder and Executive Director
Sarah Bryan | North Carolina
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Sarah Bryan has worked in the field of folklife and community history documentation for twenty-five years, designing and executing many large-scale documentary initiatives. She has served as the Executive Director of the North Carolina Folklife Institute, Old-Time Music Group, and Association for Cultural Equity, and is the former Editor-in-Chief of The Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal and of The Old-Time Herald, a magazine about traditional string band music and related traditions. The co-author of Lead Kindly Light: Pre-War Music and Photographs from the American South (with Peter Honig, Dust-to-Digital, 2014) and African American Music Trails of Eastern North Carolina (with Beverley Patterson and Michelle Lanier, UNC Press, 2013), Sarah is currently collaborating with potter and historian Hal Pugh on a cultural history of Southern folk pottery, forthcoming from UNC Press. Her writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Southern Review, and Boulevard, among other publications, and her work has been named among the “Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2018” in Best American Essays, and received a Special Mention in the 2017 Pushcart Prizes. A native of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Sarah grew up in South Carolina and Virginia in a family of Carolinian and Cuban-American heritage.
Contact Sarah: sarah@folkhistorysouth.com
Dr. Ebony Bailey | North Carolina
Dr. Ebony Bailey is a writer, educator, artist, and researcher. She earned her doctorate in African American Literature, Folklore Studies, and Narrative Theory from The Ohio State University. In her research, she examines the racialization of “the folk” in 19th century American folklore studies and how African American writers philosophize, politically activate, and speak unacknowledged truths through their narrative techniques. She has recorded, developed, and shared stories for museum audiences, serving as an intern for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the National Gallery of Art, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Currently, she is a Researcher at Kera Collective, a museum research and evaluation firm.
Board of Directors
Beverley Evans | Virginia
Beverley Evans is a historic preservationist, scholar of traditional craft and decorative arts, particularly in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and Executive Vice President of Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates, Inc. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Virginia Quilt Museum, and she and Jeffrey Evans curated the exhibition "Counterpanes and White Work of the Shenandoah Valley" at the VQM. Beverley directed the restoration of the historic Sites House, a circa-1800 stone house and homeplace in Broadway, Virginia, which is on both the Virginia and National Historic Registers. For her work on the Sites House she has received the Frederick Doveton Nichols Award, presented by the Preservation Alliance of Virginia, and the Great American Home Award, presented by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Jeffrey Evans | Virginia
Jeffrey S. Evans is President of Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates, Inc., a licensed auctioneer, and a scholar and educator focusing on the decorative arts of the Shenandoah Valley. Jeff has served as guest curator and authored the accompanying catalogues for a number of exhibitions, including "Safes of the Shenandoah Valley" with Kurt Russ, as co-director of the Virginia Safe Project, at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia; “Come in and Have a Seat": Vernacular Chairs of the Shenandoah Valley, at the MSV; and “A Great Deal of Stone & Earthen Ware”- The Rockingham County, Virginia School of Folk Pottery with Scott Hamilton Suter at the Shenandoah Valley Folk Art & Heritage Center. Evans and Russ also authored “The Kahle-Henson School of Punched-Tin Paneled Furniture” in Chipstone’s 2012 American Furniture journal. Jeff and Beverley have worked closely with the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA), where he currently serves on the Advisory Board. He serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts. Jeff has lectured widely on decorative arts and Shenandoah Valley material culture, at, among other venues, Colonial Williamsburg, MESDA, Winterthur, the Corning Museum of Glass, and Old Sturbridge Village.
April Ledbetter | Georgia
April Ledbetter is a Grammy Award–winning producer and co-director of Dust-to-Digital, an Atlanta-based record label and publishing company she co-founded with her husband, Lance. Her work brings rare and historic recordings to new audiences through carefully researched and designed archival projects, including the Grammy-winning Voices of Mississippi. She is also co-founder and vice-president of the Dust-to-Digital Foundation (Music Memory), dedicated to preserving rare recordings in collaboration with collectors and communities.
Nathan Salsburg | Michigan (Kentuckian)
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Nathan Salsburg is a guitarist, composer, and historical audio collector, researcher, and producer. He worked for the Association for Cultural Equity's Alan Lomax Archive for 24 years, half of that time in the capacity of curator, compiling and producing album releases of the renowned folklorist's recordings and managing the Archive's online audio, photo, and video catalogs. He has compiled and/or produced over 20 reissue projects of historical audio recordings and has been nominated for Grammy awards in the Best Historical Reissue and Best Liner Notes categories. As a guitarist he's made eight solo albums and contributed to records by Shirley Collins, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, the Weather Station, Jake Xerxes Fussell, and Joan Shelley, among others.
Nicka Smith | Tennessee
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Nicka Smith is a host, consultant, and documentarian with more than 25 years of experience as a genealogist. She has extensive experience in researching the enslaved and their communities and is an expert in genealogy research in the Mississippi Delta. Nicka has appeared on TODAY, Good Morning America, CNN, MSNBC, and Who Do You Think You Are; was featured in the groundbreaking short film, A Dream Delivered: The Lost Letters of Hawkins Wilson; and has been interviewed by National Geographic, TIME, USA Today, and New York Times. She is the creator and host of the innovative web show BlackProGen LIVE. Nicka is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, a member of two lineage societies, Sons and Daughters of the Middle Passage (SDUSMP), and the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). Nicka is also active in the descendant community movement, serving as a member of the board of the Descendants of Enslaved Communities at University of Virginia (DEC-UVA); as a genealogy advisor to the Descendants of St. Louis University Enslaved (DSLUE); and as a genealogy researcher for Justice for Greenwood’s We Are Greenwood™ Genealogy Project, which seeks to identify living descendants of those directly affected by the Tulsa Race Massacre. Additionally, Nicka has a current role as a senior story producer at Ancestry™.
Dr. Langston Collin Wilkins | Wisconsin (Texan)​
Langston Collin Wilkins, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Folklore and African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Wilkins is the author of Welcome to Houston: Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town, which was released through the University of Illinois Press in August of 2023. His research interests include African American folklife, African American music, urban folklore, car culture and public folklore. Before moving into academia, Dr. Wilkins served as the State Folklorist for Washington State. Dr. Wilkins is a native of Houston, Texas and received his PhD from Indiana University's Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology in 2016.