Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation 501c3 was founded in 2011, and officially became a private foundation with tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code on December 14th, 2016. Founder and Executive Director Lamont Jack Pearley and co-founder Denise Pearley felt the urgency to raise cultural and ethnic awareness of African American Traditional music and the Black Experience in America.
As a Bluesman and Applied Folklorist Lamont Jack Pearley began using the methods of ethnography, genealogy, and archival research – in essence the tools of the folklorist – to more thoroughly trace his family’s lineage. Inspired by his discoveries, he began interviewing people outside of his family who had similar stories, including African American Blues musicians who played various forms of traditional blues. Over the last 12 years, Lamont Jack’s work documenting African American vernacular narratives, musics, and cultures resulted in an extensive collection of field interviews with historians, documentarians, blues and folk musicians, and the children of Black music legends. This body of work earned him an induction into the New York Blues Hall of Fame as Great Blues Historian and TV/Radio Producer (2017) and Great Blues Artist (2018).
Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation, which operates as Jack Dappa Blues Public Media, uses public media as a tool for research, broadcasting, and sharing original audio and video documentaries about historical African American Traditional Musics for today’s practitioners. From live-stream radio to live performances and panels, Pearley’s collaborations also include training younger audiences to perform research with elder family members to sustain tradition. We provide coverage of the relevance of the Black experience by tackling sensitive topics related to the past and present.
Our programming at “Jack Dappa Blues Radio” offers both video and audio documentary series with original content that raises cultural awareness of historical African American Traditional Musics for today’s practitioners. Some of our titles include: “The African American Folklorist,” “The Blues Narrative”, “Talking Bout The Blues With”, and “Northeast Blues Trail”. We also produce live performances and panels such as “Blues Music is Black History” and “Nama’s Blues and Poetry Series”.
