Library brings musician Jon Hill to campus as our new Music Library Manager. We want to introduce him in his own words.
Jon with his 1919 Gibson mandolin.
I started as music library manager in November 2015, bringing over 10 years of experience working in libraries and a strong musical background to Davidson College. I come to Davidson from Durham and have been an employee of the Chapel Hill Public Library since 2006 where I started in the circulation department and most recently managed the periodicals collection. A native of West Virginia, I attended Marshall University in Huntington where I studied classical guitar performance with Dr. Leo Welch and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, graduating magna cum laude in 1997. During my time at Marshall I also worked in the music library and helped manage the recording studio. Besides being a competition winning guitarist, I was a member of the distinguished Marshall University Chamber Choir and performed with the group at many prestigious venues including the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC.
In 1998, I accepted a graduate assistantship at Illinois State University in Normal and resumed my classical guitar studies with Dr. Angelo Favis, graduating in 2000 with a Master of Music degree. As a student at ISU, my personal musical interests took a turn toward bluegrass and traditional Appalachian music and I began playing banjo and mandolin in earnest, much to the detriment of my final master’s recital. Soon my interest in the music developed into devotion and I looked for a place where I could study both the history and music of my home region while honing my skills on mandolin and banjo. I found the perfect home in the Appalachian Studies department at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC where I received a graduate assistantship in 2001. While in Boone, I flourished in the study of the Appalachian region, focusing on the fiddle tradition of central West Virginia and an array of influential musicians including Bill Monroe and Doc Watson. After losing all of my thesis work on Doc Watson (and pretty much everything else I owned) in an apartment fire, I took a necessary break from academic life before returning to ASU and finishing my thesis to earn a Master of Arts degree in 2009.
My musical interests encompass not only classical music, bluegrass, and old time but I am also knowledgeable about blues, jazz, country, rock, and metal. Since my high school days and throughout my academic career, I played in bands ranging from rock to jazz to bluegrass in practically every type of venue and engagement imaginable. Finally, I am an experienced and devoted teacher, giving private music instruction on banjo, guitar, mandolin, and ukulele for more than twenty years. Currently I am the mandolin player and vocalist in the Chapel Hill based bluegrass band Big Fat Gap. I am excited not only for the opportunity to work at Davidson College but to also collaborate with the faculty, staff, and students.
