2023 Steve Martin Banjo Prize winners Terry Baucom, left, and Cynthia Sayer
Two more banjo pickers have joined the prestigious ranks of winners of the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, now in its 13th year.
Steve Martin (photo by Danny Clinch)
The winners for 2023 are jazz banjo player Cynthia Sayer and bluegrass “Duke of Drive” Terry Baucom, who passed away last week at the age of 71. Each will receive a $25,000 unrestricted cash prize. The prize for Baucom, who was informed of his selection before he died, will go to his family.
“Once again, we are all honored to acknowledge these dedicated and highly-skilled musicians,” Martin said in a press release announcing the prize winners. Martin, a skilled banjo player himself who founded the prize in 2010, handed the prize’s administration to the FreshGrass Foundation, No Depression’s publisher, in 2019. The prize winners are chosen by a board that includes Martin as well as Alison Brown, Noam Pikelny, Kristen Scott Benson, Dom Flemons, Tony Trischka, and Béla Fleck, among others.
Past winners of the prize have included Pikelny, Benson, Jens Kruger, Rhiannon Giddens, Sammy Shelor, Jake Blount, and Danny Barnes. For a full list of past winners and current board members, visit the Steve Martin Banjo Prize page on the FreshGrass Foundation’s website.
Deering Banjo Company will introduce the winners, including interviews and performances showcasing their music, in its Deering Live show this evening at 6 p.m. ET with guest host Alison Brown. You can tune in here.
Sayer is an American Banjo Hall of Famer and a vocalist and bandleader in addition to her virtuosic banjo playing. She’s was founding member of Woody Allen’s New Orleans Jazz Band and her music on four-string banjo and other instruments has been heard in films and TV show soundtracks as well as with the New York Philharmonic and the New York Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and even in the White House.
Baucom co-founded influential 1970s bluegrass group Boone Creek with Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas, pioneering a driving style of 3-finger picking that gave bluegrass a more aggressive musical push. He later was a founding member of Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver and IIIrd Tyme Out, and in 2013 founded his own band, Terry Baucom’s Dukes of Drive. He received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Bluegrass Music Association last September.
