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Tommy Wildcat

Tommy Wildcat (at left) is an award winning nationally promoted performing artist, flute player, flute maker, lecturer, and historical story teller.  He is a full blood Cherokee from Tahlequah, Oklahoma.  He has traveled throughout the United States, and is a featured artist at festivals, pow-wows, historical sites, and major college events.  He is self taught in both the art of flute making and playing.  His musical performances and credits include the film industry, television, and publications.  This performance of “The Wolf Clan Song” honors one of the seven Cherokee tribes of the same name.


To learn more about Tommy Wildcat, click here.

Ken Masters

A graduate of Rice University, Ken Masters (at left) continues to educate the world about Cherokee culture through his creation of pottery and music.  Both his pottery and music help to explain the Cherokee mythology of the past and how it is has shaped the views of the Cherokee culture.  This is a haunting song that has its origins and its name with the "Trail of Tears." The song describes renewal and hope in the wake of the devastation wrought by the relocation of the Cherokees from their in the Appalachian / Blue Ridge Mountains to the area now known as the Cherokee Nation in Northeast Oklahoma.

Walker Calhoun


Walker Calhoun was born about 1915 in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina, near the town of Cherokee. For the first 12 years of his life, Calhoun heard only the Cherokee language spoken and sung. In addition to playing the banjo, Calhoun is committed to perpetuating Cherokee music and dance. As a child growing up in the 1920s, he danced to the ceremonial singing of his uncle, Will West Long, a singer, medicine man, and leader of ceremonial dancing.  A few of Calhoun’s ancestors Cherokee families avoided the 1830 removal by hiding in remote hollows of the Great Smoky Mountains. In the 1980s, Calhoun founded the Raven Rock Dancers with his family members to keep the traditional dances a part of his community's life.  Calhoun is widely recognized as a keeper of ancient Cherokee traditions. He frequently travels to Oklahoma to share his knowledge with his Cherokee brethren, and in turn Oklahoma Cherokee have traveled to North Carolina to reintroduce the Stomp Dance that survived in the West. At a gathering of the Eastern and Western Bands of Cherokee in 1988 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Trail of Tears, Calhoun was presented the first Sequoyah Award in recognition of his contributions to the folk life of the Cherokee nation.  In addition to being a keeper of Cherokee music and dance traditions, Calhoun is a skilled medicine man.


The above interview and performance by Walker Calhoun was conducted by Milt Lee.  Visit his website by clicking here.