[piano intro] -[Heather] It's all made in North Carolina.

Join us as we travel across North Carolina and meet the people whose hands and hearts create some of the most amazing craftsmanship and design.

Is it unique for someone just to make a snare, like he does?

- [Jeff] Out of the whole drum set, probably the snare is used the most.

-[Heather] It's all on My Home.

Coming up next.

[mellow music] All across the state, we're uncovering the unique stories that make North Carolina my home.

♪ Come home ♪ ♪ Come home ♪ - Well, my artwork is a part of the tradition of our people.

There's quite a few mask makers through the years that's been well known.

And I hope to be one of those that keep the art alive.

Osiyo.

I'm Billy Welch, from Snowbird Community.

I'm a teacher and a wood carver, and I own the shop Hunting Boy Wood Carving, just off 143 in Graham County.

The name comes from where I live.

We live on Hunting Boy Branch on up the Creek, on the reservation.

And it's where I grew up.

Means a lot to me for the cultural side of it.

Some people may not understand that, but it's kind of like a home.

It's your home.

That's where it's based with me is it's my home.

My ancestors walked here, camped here, hunted here, fished here, all the way back to the beginning of time, from what I understand.

All the traditions were handed down.

For my part of it, my grandmother and her family made baskets.

All summer long, they would work and gather their materials to make the basket, and then they'd weave all winter along by the fire.

And that would be what you would produce for a product for the spring to sell.

They were made from white oak, split, quartered, scraped.

We used the natural dyes.

And that influence probably brought me to where I am today with what I do.

So we're here at my home place on Hunting Boy to collect a little bit of bloodroot.

A little early in the spring, but we'll see what it looks like here.

If it works, we'll have some orangish red tint to put on the mask.

This is what it looks like in the woods.

And here's a young one.

This is what you look for.

You can see, like the toes, print of a hand.

That one's not too bad.

So we're gonna break this off.

You see the red blood coming out of the root?

That's what we're looking for.

This would've been used for the basket making too.

They require a lot more of it.

For me, it don't take as much.

That's why I have the little patch, and it'll come back every year.

Well, I work for Graham County schools through the tribe.

The program is called the Graham County Indian Education.

And we have been making different various crafts and the kids go out and we learn to gather, make and give them the history and background of it.

We found a walnut tree here that the power company had cut.

So we're gonna get some of the bark, see if it'll work for the dying of the mask.

It may be too dry, the block says.

We're gonna try to take some bark off the stump.

Yeah, this is really good.

See the yellowish looking, still has the sap and you can see here, it's pushing it up?

So this is the part we're looking forward to dye with.

That's where we're gonna get the color from.

And some of the life from this tree is going to go live on through the mask.

[wood splitting] Gonna look good on the mask, and we didn't waste nothing from the Earth.

Why I have my store out off the, I guess you could call it the beaten path, and not in town, it being on tribal land, this is as close as I could get to town.

I gather the wood around the area.

It comes from reservations but the piece is made here on the land, on the piece I own.

It's satisfying, to me, for the soul, not the hip pocket.

This is a different version of the medicine mask.

Used the black walnut stain made from the husk, leaves, bark or root of the walnut tree, and you would rub it on the mask to embed the color.

The red was from the Indian Paintbrush, the red flower you see in the woods.

Sometimes you just see the way it is.

It comes to mind and that's the way I rub the stain in.

That would be a version of the medicine mask, the traditional way.

Been carving for about 30 some years, and I have a lot of various accomplishments in my carving, from speaking at Smithsonian and having pieces in the Smithsonian.

I don't even know how many masks I've made.

How to carve them and the look of it is something that I don't think you can train anyone.

The feeling of the wood directs me to carve the different masks that I make.

You throw the block of wood up, you open the log up, and it leads you.

It does me.

It's like following a story through the wood.

It's calling to you.

All I'm doing is cutting in just straight through.

Now you see the first ring.

A lot of that comes from years of experience just looking at it.

You can actually see two eyes looking at you.

So you see that line, we'll start right here.

It's still gonna reveal itself here.

If you look at one of the masks and you see it might be following you around the room, you look at another one and it's real bold, standing strong.

It should draw you.

If it don't, then it's not for you.

And if it does, then you know the meaning of what I've done through the wood.

The power, the strength that you see in the mask, it came from the reservation, and you can say I picked it up in Snowbird, on the reservation.

That's a whole lot of meaning to me.

My art is hanging out there where you can see it and hopefully influence someone to take it on and take it further, and I get to live through that mask.

[upbeat music] - Originally, the reason I did this was for a friend that owned a place called the Black Pearl Lodge, and he wanted me to create a duck call for him that he could use for that lodge.

[duck call quacks] Sounds good.

- [Heather] Yes, it does sound good.

Just like he's right here with us.

[bright guitar music] ♪ - My name is Ralph Jensen, and my home is Wilmington, North Carolina.

The duck call stuff came as just a fluke.

I bought a basket at a flea market.

In the basket was a duck call.

And I'd been duck hunting but I never had blown a duck call.

So I took it apart.

I said, "I wonder what in the world makes this thing work."

[duck call whistles] And then I started taking it in and thought, well, why don't I just carve this in there?

Or let's do a check ring on this one.

And so it just became another medium for art for me, and pretty soon people were collecting them.

- [Heather] So what's this gonna sound like?

- This one is more for pintails and teal- - Okay.

- ... and wigeons.

I mean, it can do so many different things.

It can do wood ducks or ... [duck call whistles] I bought Misty when she was seven weeks old from a friend of mine in Greensboro.

So I had her trained and she went through all the different hunt tests.

Look at her, see the difference what's happening now with her?

Gonna see Jerry, huh?

And Jerry Simmons, the trainer said, "Isn't she the dog you always dreamed of?"

I said, "I didn't even know to dream this high."

- I'm a professional dog trainer, specializing in labs and pointers.

And through the years, you learn the tones of the ducks and all, and Ralph's is way up there, mimicking all the sounds a duck makes.

[duck call quacks] - I mean, as soon as you blow a call, she's just insane.

She's ready, ready to go.

- So what is she doing right now?

Just getting warmed up for- - Yeah.

Whenever Jerry's working with her, he'll do maybe two or three different places out there.

So you might get her going one way and then make her stop and go get another one.

- When it comes to duck calls and dogs, they're pretty synonymous.

I mean, you gotta have a good duck call and you gotta have a good dog.

Is that right?

- Yeah.

Somebody's gotta have a good dog.

And a lot of hunts I get on are because, "And bring that good dog with you."

It's a day and age where everybody's all about the beards and shoot, I'm all about the stache.

So I tried to come up with a motto, if you want to call with class, go with the stache.

- Won't you sign this for me?

- Okay.

- Means a lot.

I finally got a Ralph Jensen duck call.

[bright music] - I like walnut a lot.

But the burled walnut, it's really basically a cancer on a tree.

It's like an old walnut tree that's out in the middle of the field.

The wind just rips it back and forth, and then it's like God takes and just stitches it up.

And it's what makes the most beautiful of the woods.

It's a little bit like life.

If you don't have anything happening in your life much, it's just straight wood.

There's no character in it.

And I grew up pretty rough.

And it was God that stitched me back together and gave me this gift, 'cause I never had it before.

- So I shear once a year.

And so that means there's a whole year just in growing the material, and then there's a whole year in using the material.

And so there's all of these secret layers of story that end up embedded in the cloth.

Like little tragedies, like what lambs died that year?

What was hard?

Whatever it happens to be, all of that is held in the fiber.

So it's like writing all these tiny little stories.

Early on in my weaving, I had come to Penland, and immediately fell really in love with these mountains.

I had done some farming and homesteading on land that didn't belong to me.

And there was always the understanding of, oh, but eventually, all the work I've done here I'm gonna have to leave.

I was really wanting to find a place where the work I put in would stay with me.

[kettle whistles] I did production work for a long time, and working as a production weaver, I really was just a machine at the loom.

So basically, making the same thing over and over again.

And it's not even necessarily like I out burnt out, although maybe I did.

Part of why I stopped production was realizing that so much of what I loved the most was what took the most time.

And that's what I was cutting out of the work in order to make it more affordable.

So over the past couple of years, I've become less and less efficient.

I have just been thinking a lot about the slowness and care that can go into every step of something.

[soft music] Right out of college, I lived at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery for two years.

So mindfulness and embodiment have always been really important to me.

And actually my background is as a performance artist and contemporary dancer.

And a lot of my work was just slow.

Nothing more.

It was just slow.

Actually, probably because I have a lot of fire and I can be really big, what feels most compelling to me is being able to take that and really sit in the container of myself.

I feel like when I started my business, it was very much the next step in a tradition of colonial American weaving.

And why the work of Frances Goodrich and people like Lucy Morgan who started Penland was so important to me, was being able to see directly what was happening here 100 years ago.

And I wanna feel like I'm directly connected to what came before, as opposed to living in the world of escapism that we're so profoundly presented with on every moment to moment basis of how to escape.

I don't really want to escape.

[bright music] ♪ My sheep are so essential to me.

They know what's happening.

They help me live my life in the way that I want to live it.

They help me get outside every day.

We move them across, not just my land, but a bunch of the neighbors' land.

How they benefit the pasture, it's incredible.

And so having the sheep as a part of the process doesn't just mean that I'm extracting resources from the world around me in order to create some sort of product.

There's actually a reciprocal relationship between me and the sheep and the land, and we're all connected through that.

That then makes the work and my life completely integrated.

Sometimes I'll dye the wool before it's spun, often, I'm dying the wool after it's spun.

There's sumac and iron just from rusty nails, and weld, which is just a little plant that I grow, and indigo.

Something that I spent a lot of time giving myself permission to do is what part of my brain wants to call sloppy.

But actually I think that there's so much heart when something isn't perfect.

[soft music] ♪ In my early twenties, was the first time I sat down at a loom.

And it was a complete watershed moment of homecoming of ineffable rightness.

So you have just a bunch of loose thread, gets wound in a really organized fashion onto the back beam.

And so the thread slowly comes off of the back beam back through the heddles, back through the reed, and that's where you start to make the cloth.

It's such a sophisticatedly simple technology.

It's so beautiful.

[soft music] ♪ I throw the shuttle, close the shed, beat the beater to pack down the threads, and then change the shed, open it up, throw the shuttle.

So depending on what shafts are raised or lowered, that is what creates the language of the pattern.

It's completely magical to me.

[loom sounds] [soft music] What I am interested in and the way that I'm interested in living is with a rooted understanding of what contributes to my own survival, and I have a reciprocal relationship with the world around me.

So everything that's dying to give me life, I'm also offering back to it by putting in the work to make it all happen.

I mean, I'm not a purist, I'm not subsistence oriented.

If the deer come and eat all of my corn, which they did last year, I have 18 kernels to replant, then I can go to the store and buy corn.

I am not looking to create superficial struggles for myself.

But the more that I can depend on the system less and less, and depend on me and my neighbors and what is directly contributing to my life more and more, that's very invigorating and intriguing to me.

Because it's not really about the cloth for me, it's more about the living.

[mellow music] [upbeat music] ♪ - How important is the snare drum?

Is it unique for someone just to make a snare like he does?

- Out of the whole drum set, probably the snare is used the most because it's in charge of the basic beat, the back beat.

May I?

- Yes, you may.

- Yes?

- [Heather] Please.

[drums play] ♪ [mellow music] - My name is Britt Boyette, and my home is Wilson, North Carolina.

[mellow music] ♪ I got my first drum set in 1987 and that was a jumping off point for me.

And I've loved the instrument ever since.

In 1989, I really got into woodworking, and then eventually it just progressed and progressed and it made sense to start making drums.

I did it for my myself at first.

And a couple of my buddies saw one and were like, "Man, I want one," some of my drumming friends.

And they were like, "Man, you should really think about doing these and building them for people."

And so it escalated from there.

[upbeat music] This is cypress, and it was made from a tobacco barn.

Well, I was riding through Pitt County one day and they were tearing down this old barn.

And I stopped and asked the farmer if I could have a couple of the boards out of it.

I told him what I did with them and so he was really, really excited to gimme some of the wood.

- It's such a neat thing too, because you're you're preserving part of North Carolina history.

- [Britt] That's right.

- In a different way.

- It's neat when you cut it into it, you can smell the tobacco that was, it had been in there 100 years or more.

[bright guitar music] - Tell me about the reclaimed wood.

What are the different types of wood we're seeing here?

- Okay.

Mainly, we have reclaimed heart pine.

We also have red and white reclaimed oak, wormy chestnut and walnut.

- Okay.

- And some white pine.

- You like walnut.

- That's right.

- What's different about making a drum that's reclaimed rather than one that's with new wood?

What's the biggest difference?

- Well, mainly, it has a little more personality.

The wood seems to have been somewhere and it's got a little history behind it and it's just totally unique.

[mellow music] ♪ - We just traveled the state to see the drum and where it's landed.

So we're excited about that.

- I can't wait for you to see it.

- I can't wait either.

- I am Jeff Sipe.

I'm from Brevard, North Carolina.

I'm a professional drummer.

I am so glad Britt Boyette called me.

His Salem Street drum is just a joy to play.

And the fact that it's made here in North Carolina, I think it's special to me.

[drums play] ♪ - [Heather] Well, that's just awesome.

[band plays] - Tonight, I've got a gig with my trio.

Mike Seal is on guitar.

Daniel Kimbro is on bass.

The finer instruments, the best-made instruments, are always challenging you to be your best.

And it's as if they're calling to you, "You haven't mastered me yet.

Keep practicing, keep practicing."

In this day of so many instruments and instrument makers trying to find the cheapest way to do things, it's really refreshing to find a craftsman who's dedicated to the art and making the drum the best that it could be.

[band plays] ♪ [crowd cheers] - It's a personal thing, making one of them.

If you know the drummer and he's bought it and you know what kind of music he likes to play and you know what it's gonna be used for, you put your heart into it a little and it's very gratifying to have someone make music with it.

-[Heather] Next time on My Home.

We are capturing the beauty and character of North Carolina.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, we have millions of ways for you to see North Carolina in a unique and stunning light.

Join us as we tag along with photographers who capture subjects that are beautiful, groundbreaking, sometimes haunting, yet together, truly inspiring.

It's all on My Home.

[bright theme music] ♪ ♪