Trevor McKenzie

“Much of my ‘formal’ music training happened in between haircuts at Jim Lloyd's Barbershop in Rural Retreat, Virginia,” says fiddle, banjo, and guitar player Trevor McKenzie (he/him) of his first music teacher. Since moving to North Carolina to attend Appalachian State University, Trevor has immersed himself in the traditional music scene there. Among his mentors, Trevor names the late Watauga County banjo and dulcimer player Lonnie Ward and flatfoot dancers Rodney Sutton and the late Robert Dotson. In 2020, Trevor also began an apprenticeship with Paul Brown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, studying the unique fiddle tunes of the Virginia-North Carolina border.

Trevor plays regularly at dances and other events with various bands, including the Elkville String Band. He also teaches at the Junior Appalachian Musicians programs in Ashe and Watauga Counties and works to document and share music traditions with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s “Inside Appalachia” Folkways Reporting Corps and the North Carolina Folklore Society. In 2021, Trevor was named Director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at his alma mater, Appalachian State University.

With his strong foundation in traditional music, Trevor still likes to experiment and cultivate his own style. “While I have a great respect for these traditions and mostly play with techniques and styles learned from elders and mentors,” Trevor explains, “I have also tried to expand upon them and reach new audiences, such as collaborating with those with hip-hop influences… In recent years, I even experimented with presenting old ballads and tunes from Western North Carolina on electric instruments, which seems to catch the ear of those who would not otherwise give traditional music a chance.”

Trevor plans to use his Emerging Traditional Artists Program award to further his ongoing projects, such as producing an album of previously unrecorded traditional songs; creating a documentary on Galax, Virginia, fiddler Luther Davis; or researching a book on North Carolina balladry.