Dynamic Dixie Traveler

A musical memorial service will be held this evening for Harry "Highway" Holt, founding member of the Nashville gospel group the Dynamic Dixie Travelers, who died Tuesday morning after a long bout with cancer. He was 66.

The Travelers were among the many groups who received new attention as a result of the Country Music Hall of Fame's 2004 "Night Train to Nashville" exhibit and its accompanying CDs. The group performed several rafter-raising shows downtown in the secular environs of B.B. King's Blues Club, where tenor Levert Allison (brother of late Nashville R&B great Gene) brought the heat that made the Travelers a powerhouse live. Holt was the last remaining member of the original Travelers lineup, which he formed with Morris Pollard in Dickson in 1957.

Travelers guitarist Slayden "Cotton" Evans, who grew up with Holt from grade school on in the community of Worley Furnace, remembers his longtime friend as "very quiet, soft-spoken—but very mischievous." So fast as a kid he could catch rabbits with his bare hands, Holt grew up to become a nature lover (he had a special fondness for raising snakes) and a hard-hitting linebacker in high school football. "You did not want to get hit by Harry Holt," Evans said, laughing. "If you tried to run out of bounds, tough luck—because he was going to run all the way across the field and hit you anyway!"

Evans started playing with the Travelers in 1959 and made several records with the group for Nashboro and producer Ted Jarrett's T-Jaye label. Through the years, he said, Holt was unfailingly generous, loved by all the singers he performed with over the years—even when he tried to share his pet python and boa with some of the more skittish Travelers. "If you started out as his friend," Evans said, "you were not going to change your mind."

The group will continue with new members, and Evans says the Travelers are seeking a producer who can help them hone their new sound for their next record. (If you're interested, call 227-8922.) Tonight's musical memorial, though, will be in honor of the man who started it all. It starts 6 p.m. at the Taylor Funeral Home in Dickson, 446-2808. The funeral service will be held there tomorrow at 1 p.m.

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