Homer Council on the Arts recently presented 2026 community art awards to local individuals and businesses in seven categories. Mary Epperson Arts Lifetime Achievement Award was awarded to Dave Webster.
2026 Community Arts Awards
These awards not only recognize individuals who do SO much for the community, but also advocate for the arts as a powerful local force for community economic and educational development.
Dave Webster spoke with KBBI recommending listeners watch his autobiography, “A Life in 12 Bars,” a story of his musical journey, or as he puts it, “a retrospective of my entire life,” that showed at Homer’s Porcupine Theater in February of this year. A recording is available through YouTube and here are Dave’s opening comments from the show: My name is David Arthur Webster, so art is my middle name. I want to let you know, for all you non-musicians out there, that a bar in musical terminology does not always mean a place to go drink. It's the space between the bar lines in musical notation. In a typical blues song, there are 12 bars.
David started on his musical journey in the 4th grade in a small 4 room school house that happened to own a saxophone. Taking lessons from an Austrian immigrant who played in dance bands in the tourist town of North Conway, New Hampshire he gained some facility on the instrument that would become his primary musical outlet a couple of decades later.
“I took saxophone lessons as a kid. Was in a school band up through maybe freshman year and high school, sophomore year, and then, like all kids in the '60s, I got a guitar, and we would have parties where we'd all sit around and sing Bob Dylan songs and songs out of Pete Seeger's Sing Out magazine, old folk songs, you know, and so I ended up going to college in Ohio at Oberlin College, which had one of the first big music conservatories in the country, but I didn't get in the conservatory, and I, they were solely classical music, no popular music, no jazz.”
In his early 20s, after he left Oberlin College in Ohio, Webster found himself in a small town in Wyoming where he began his career as a bar musician. It’s hard to describe the life of a bar musician as “art,” but it’s a way to make a few bucks playing some dance music for a bunch of drunks trying to get lucky on a Saturday night, he said in comments to the Arts Council. Speaking with KBBI, he elaborated:
“I lived there long enough to get my residency in Wyoming. I was working as a big game guide and listening to country radio at night in this little bunkhouse, and I met a guy playing pool in the bar, who was a guitar player, and we started talking about music and said, "Well, let's form a band. So we formed a band, and I became the singer in a cowboy band at the Cowboy Bar in Pine Dale, Wyoming, and I had never thought about really being in a band since high school, you know, but I was singing every song Merle Haggard ever wrote, and I held a guitar, basically sold something between me and the flying beer bottles on the dance floor, you know, and not much of a guitar player, but for a couple years, I was playing regularly, you know, singing country song,” Webster said.
Fast forward to Alaska: David continued making music with Homer musicians. Dave’s wife Annie Whitney introduced him to the theater: Pier One in Homer, Alaska where he helped with various construction projects on the theater building while his wife Annie and daughter Susannah performed in the Drunkard, “the first play put on in the warehouse theater out on the Spit.”
“I got involved with the theater because Annie had been a theater major, and she and my daughter Susanna, who was I think seven at the time were in the first play put on in the warehouse theater out on the spit was the Drunkard of melodrama, and so I hung around with them, and I was hanging around trying to make myself usefulAnd I hung around, and I I would be in the pit band. Hal Spence used to do a cabaret every year. They called it a cabaret. It wasn't a typical cabaret. Today they would call it a jukebox musical,” Webster said.
Eventually theater director Lance Petersen asked Webster to direct a few shows. After directing the “jukebox musicals,” or Cabarets, Dave pointed out that they were not technically paying for the music rights, so he offered to write an original score for the following year’s show “On the Road” followed by 3 more original musicals. The most recent was “Pier 1.0: Staging Reality” an homage to community theater that closed Pier One’s 50th Anniversary season.
In his comments for Homer Council on the Arts, Dave also writes, “Somewhere along the way, while I was employed at KBBI, I was also convinced to serve on the Board of Directors at the Homer Council on the Arts. I was working in public radio, so I must know something about art, right? But I don’t consider myself an artist. At best, I’m a journeyman entertainer. But I’ve lived much of my life adjacent to art, which is good enough for me.”
He concluded in his conversation with the radio station: “the reason I got this award, I think, is because I am garrulous by nature, and in every room I'm in, I'll suck up all the oxygen and tell stories till people tell me to shut up.”
This week Dave visited KBBI to share details of his life history more directly, his full audio from that conversation basically follows this same timeline of events with far more details, local characters and descriptions and is available via the KBBI news website.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
