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The 2009 Appalachia in the Bluegrass concert series is generously supported by the Office of the Provost, the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music, the Appalachian Studies Program, and the Appalachian Center of the University of Kentucky.
Over the last few years the Niles Gallery Series has included an exceptional series of noontime performances by traditional musicians and scholars. The series in 2008-2009 highlighted the talents of old time and bluegrass musicians, including J. D. Crowe, Lee Sexton, Kentucky Wild Horse, Gloria Belle, Tim Lake, Carl Jones & Beverly Smith, and the Red State Ramblers.
This season, the Niles Gallery Series focuses on “old time music” both old and new with a strong Kentucky heritage. Featured performers include, Sparky and Rhonda Rucker, Alice Gerrard with Carl Jones and Beverly Smith, Don Pedi, the Appalachian Association of Sacred Harp Singers, the Berea College Bluegrass Ensemble directed by Al White, Carol Elizabeth Jones with Rayna Gellert, George Gibson, Matt Brown, and the Red State Ramblers.
The Fall 2009 Series
Matt Brown
September 4. Matt Brown is an engaging performer of traditional Appalachian music. An accomplished multi-instrumentalist and singer, he performs toe-tapping square dance tunes and a variety of songs from the blues to ballads. With fiddle, banjo, and guitar, he delights his audiences with a sound that is both authentic and inventive.
Matt has performed with many great artists including Paul Brown, David Holt, and Alice Gerrard. He has toured with Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble and Rhythm in Shoes, opened for April Verch and Old School Freight Train, and appeared as a guest artist with Tim O’Brien, The Wilders, and Uncle Earl. Matt is also a producer, studio musician, and partner in 5-String Productions, an independent record label based in West Chester, PA.
Nora Ben and Eli
September 18. The musical trio Nora Ben & Eli features 16 year-old multi-instrumentalists Nora Grossman, Ben Scruton, and Eli Kleinsmith playing an exciting and eclectic mix that includes jazz, Irish and Appalachian folk, old time music, and original tunes. Their own unique arrangements incorporate a variety of instruments including fiddle, guitars, banjo, accordion, percussion, ukulele, and tin whistle as well as vocals.
Nora Ben & Eli began playing music together as members of the Louisville Leopard Percussionists where they were exposed to an array of musical styles and were introduced to improvisation and composing. After graduation from the LLP, their compatibility as friends and musicians led them to form their own group. They are constantly evolving as an ensemble, adding new styles of music, new instruments, and even some traditional dance elements into their performances.
Nora has been involved with folk music and dance for most of her life. She plays guitar, mandolin, percussion, ukulele, and piano. Nora also performs with the Angleterre Morris Dancers, Samovar Dance Theatre (experimental belly dance), and her school's Salsa Club. Nora is a sophomore at du Pont Manual High School.
Ben plays a range of folk instruments that includes banjo, guitar, ukulele, mandolin, accordion, tin whistle, and recorder. He also plays piano and is a trombonist with the Youth Performing Arts School bands and Louisville Youth Orchestra. Ben also participates in cross country, ultimate Frisbee, math competition, and folk dancing. He is a junior at du Pont Manual High School.
Eli began Suzuki violin lessons at the age of 8. In addition to being an outstanding fiddler, he is an accomplished classical violinist. Eli performed with the Louisville Youth Orchestra for three years. Eli also plays guitar, piano, banjo, mandolin, and percussion. His other interests include film and visual arts. Eli is a junior at St. Francis High School.
Lee Sexton with Rich Kirby, Roy T. and Jack Adams
September 25. A master of the drop-thumb and two-finger banjo style, Lee “Boy” Sexton has lived his whole life near his birthplace in Letcher County, KY. Born in 1927, he acquired his first banjo, a homemade wooden fretless model with a groundhog skin head, for a dollar when he was eight years old (he worked to clear a field for a week to earn that dollar), and with instruction from his father and uncles (one of whom was banjo player Morgan Sexton, winner of the National Heritage Award. Sexton soon mastered the instrument, and the fiddle, as well. As a young man he would work all week in the mines and then play music all weekend at house parties, bean stringings, and corn shuckings. June Appal issued an LP of traditional material, Whoa Mule, in 1988, and an expanded CD version in 2004 with an additional 40 minutes of music. One of the most respected and revered folk musicians in East Kentucky, Sexton garnered a brief scene in the 1980 film Coal Miner's Daughter, where he appears playing at a square dance. In 1999 he was presented with the Kentucky Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.
Rich Kirby is a virtuosic fiddler, bano player, and mandolinist who has served as news director for WMMT, Appalshop’s radio station. Rich has played and recorded with a number of bands including Wry Straw and Rich and Poor Folks, and has produced many albums for the June Appal label including a recent release of his grandmother’s music, Addie Graham: Been a Long Time Travelling.
Roy Tackett grew up in the coal fields of Letcher County and has played guitar at dances, festivals, and on back porches throughout the region for forty years. He is a member of Rich and Poor Folks.
Jack Adams is an 11-year-old banjo protégé of Lee Sexton’s. He recently won the banjo contest at the Seedtime on the Cumberland Festival at Appalshop.
Carol Elizabeth Jones with Rayna Gellert
October 2. Carol Elizabeth Jones sings, writes songs, plays guitar and has many albums to her credit including two with Jones and Leva on the Rounder Label, two albums of country and bluegrass duets with Laurel Bliss, and most recently, her solo project called Cataloochee. Rounder Records has featured Carol Elizabeth on several anthologies including the bestselling “O Sister Women In Bluegrass” collection. Carol Elizabeth was a regular on a Prairie Home Companion during 2006-07 as a member of the Hopeful Gospel Quartet with Garrison Keillor. She has toured Africa and Southeast Asia as cultural ambassador for the U.S. Information agency and has performed and taught at festivals throughout North America. Dave Higgs of Bluegrass Breakdown says “…Carol Elizabeth has one of the most haunting and honest voices in acoustic music.”
Rayna Gellert is an old time fiddler and singer with eclectic tastes and abilities. She grew up in Elkhart IN and learned much of her music from her father, traditional fiddler and banjo player Dan Gellert. Originally a classically-trained violinist, she took up the old-time fiddle in 1994, when she moved to North Carolina to attend Warren Wilson College. 
Gellert is a former member of the Freight Hoppers. Since 2003 she has performed and recorded with the all-female old-time band Uncle Earl. In 2003, she was a featured performer at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. She has also performed with the dance company Rhythm in Shoes and the West African-influenced band Toubab Krewe. She has toured the United States, Europe, and Chile. She formerly lived in Asheville, North Carolina and after a few lovely years in Lexington, Kentucky she returned to Asheville, NC with her husband, Jeff Keith of the Red State Ramblers. Rayna has been a finalist at the Appalachian String Band Music Festival in Clifftop, Fayette County, West Virginia several times.
Sparky and Rhonda Rucker
October 16. Sparky and Rhonda Rucker perform throughout the U.S. as well as overseas, singing songs and telling stories from the American folk tradition. Sparky Rucker has been performing over forty years and is internationally recognized as a leading folklorist, musician, historian, storyteller, and author. He accompanies himself with fingerstyle picking and bottleneck blues guitar, banjo, and spoons. Rhonda Rucker is an accomplished harmonica, piano, banjo, and bones player, and also adds vocal harmonies to their songs.
Sparky and Rhonda are sure to deliver an uplifting presentation of toe-tapping music spiced with humor, history, and tall tales. They take their audience on an educational and emotional journey that ranges from poignant stories of slavery and war to an amusing rendition of a Brer Rabbit tale or their witty commentaries on current events. Their music includes a variety of old-time blues, slave songs, Appalachian music, spirituals, ballads, work songs, Civil War music, cowboy music, railroad songs, and a few of their own original compositions.
Sparky and Rhonda have numerous recordings, and their 1991 release, Treasures and Tears, was nominated for the W.C. Handy Award for Best Traditional Recording. They have also contributed music to the syndicated television miniseries The Wild West (directed by Keith Merrill). Sparky's unique renditions of John Henry and Jesse James were used in the National Geographic Society’s 1994 video entitled Storytelling in North America. Sparky Rucker has also appeared on numerous radio programs, including National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Prairie Home Companion, and Mountain Stage. He also performed in Carry It On and Amazing Grace: Music in America, two videos produced by the Public Broadcasting System.
George Gibson
October 23. From an interview with Marc Fields at the Black Banjo Symposium:
GEORGE GIBSON: I grew up in Knott County, Kentucky actually at the confluence of the Big Doubles, Buffalo and Little Doubles creeks. At that time they all dried up in summer. My father had a country grocery store. About 1950, a neighbor who was 5 or 6 years older than I was playing old time banjo, and that was very rare, because in the Forties, fellows older than I started playing bluegrass. The culture had collapsed. All the things connected with the old music was gone. This fellow's name was James Sloan, and he had learned from a couple of outstanding banjo players, and I'd heard a rumor that my father had played.
He probably hadn't played banjo in 10 or 15 years when I bought one and probably drove him crazy beating around it. One day he picked it up and started playing, and he was an outstanding old time player and he used somewhere between 15 and 20 tunings. And I learned some from James Sloan. People in that area they learned by emulation, that is you didn't ask older people what they did or how they did it, you listened and then you tried to duplicate the same sounds. Which means you might of got some of the same sounds but you used a lot of different techniques getting those sounds.
George recorded Last Possum Up the Tree for June Apple Records and is currently authoring a book on Black banjo and dance.
Hallowe’en in the Bluegrass
October 30. A ghoulish gallery of ghastly ghostly presences, including Tedrin Blair Lindsay, Russell Henderson, Dennis Bender, and Ron Pen presenting songs, stories, tales, and frights of the Eve of Hallow's Eve.
Don Pedi
November 6. Don Pedi was born into a musical family in Chelsea Massachusetts. On weekends, his grandfather, who died before Don was born, would close his barber shop for business, and open his home in the back as a gathering place for family and friends to share homemade food, fellowship and live music. Don's grandfather played guitar, mandolin and banjo. Don's uncle Frank made his living singing and playing music. Another gifted singer is Don's dad. He'll burst into song at the drop of a hat.
Don got involved with the Boston area folk music scene in the early sixties. 1964 was when he first laid eyes on a dulcimer. It was being played by Richard Farina at a live performance by Mimi and Richard Farina at the old Unicorn Coffee House in Boston.
The sound of the dulcimer proved most alluring. That night in a conversation with Richard Farina, Don was convinced that someday he would get himself a dulcimer and play it. Contemporary performers like Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Patrick Sky, Joan Baez and others attracted Don to the Newport Folk Festival. While there he was exposed to traditional musicians like Frank Proffitt, Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt, Almeda Riddle and such that where a major influence on his musical tastes.
By 1966 Don was traveling a lot. With Cambridge as a base, he lived for various periods of time in different parts of the country. In 1973, while living in the Colorado Rockies, Don met Tad Wright and Keith Zimmerman, a couple of musicians from Asheville, NC. After hearing Don play, they invited him to join them. He did, and they piled into Tad's 1969 Volkswagen mini-van and drove to North Carolina.
At first sight of the mountains around Harmon Den and Fines Creek, Don knew 
he was home. He's pretty much lived in and around Asheville from then on. Since settling in Western North Carolina Don has been recognized as the man who could "really play" a dulcimer. He is a pioneer in that his music has broken new ground and cleared a path for others. In Don's hands, the dulcimer has been accepted as an instrument well suited to playing traditional Southern Dance music. This was at a time when most "Old-Time" musicians thought a dulcimer should be hung on a wall with a pretty ribbon.
In 1991 Don and wife Jean moved to a little farm in the mountains of Madison County, North Carolina. The area is rich in traditional music and customs (neighbors still plow with mules and horses).
Alice Gerrard, Carl Jones, and Beverly Smith
November 13. Simply put, Alice Gerrard is a talent of legendary status. In a career spanning some 40 years, she has known, learned from, and performed with many of the old-time and bluegrass greats and has in turn earned worldwide respect for her own important contributions to the music.
Alice is particularly known for her groundbreaking collaboration with Appalachian singer Hazel Dickens during the 1960s and ’70s. The duo produced four classic LPs (recently reissued by Rounder on CD) and influenced scores of young women singers — even The Judds acknowledge Hazel and Alice as an important early inspiration.
Alice’s first solo album, Pieces of My Heart, was released on the Copper Creek label in 1995 to critical acclaim in Billboard, Bluegrass Unlimited, New Country, and other publications. This superb recording showcases Alice’s many talents: her compelling, eclectic songwriting; her powerful, hard-edged vocals; and her instrumental mastery on rhythm guitar and banjo.
As a musician, Alice has appeared on more than 20 recordings, including projects with many traditional musicians such as Tommy Jarrell, Enoch Rutherford, Otis Burris, and Matokie Slaughter; as an expert with in-depth knowledge of mountain music, she has produced or written liner notes for a dozen more. She also co-produced and appeared in two documentary films.
A tireless advocate of traditional music, Alice has won numerous honors, including an International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) Distinguished Achievement Award, a Virginia Arts Commission Award, the North Carolina Folklore Society’s Tommy Jarrell Award, and an Indy Award.
In 1987 Alice founded the Old-Time Music Group, a non-profit organization that oversees publication of The Old-Time Herald. Alice served as editor-in-chief of The Old-Time Herald from 1987 till 2003.
For years Carl Jones and Beverly Smith have appeared on the traditional music scene, at festivals, on record, at contests and dances, in various bands and formations, playing just about anything with strings or tossing in vocal harmonies wherever there was the oppportunity. In their recordings they bring those years of experience to the art of the duet—songs and tunes, old and new, done simply and with love.
Carl Jones toured with Norman and Nancy Blake as part of the Rising Fawn String Ensemble, playing mandolin, banjo, and fiddle. He often plays as a duo with James Bryan, and is sometimes found pickin' as part of a trio with Bruce Gree
n and Don Pedi. Carl has been an instructor at Pinewoods, Port Townsend's Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, Mars Hill Old Time Week, and the Swannanoa Gathering. His songs have been recorded by the Nashville Bluegrass Band, Rickie Simpkins, and others.
One of the most respected guitar players in old time music today, Beverly Smith is also in demand as a singer, fiddler, and dance caller. She has made numerous recordings, backing up fiddlers Bruce Molsky, Rafe Stefanini, Tara Nevins and Brad Leftwich, vocalizing with Irish musicians Mick Moloney and John Doyle, and also singing with bluegrass great Laurie Lewis. She has taught and played at many camps and folk festivals and, in addition to her collaboration with Carl, also plays with old time band The Rockinghams.
Appalachian Association of Sacred Harp Singers
November 20. The Appalachian Association of Sacred Harp Singers is an informal group that meets to sing from the Sacred Harp and Southern Harmony shape-note tradition. Formed around 1980, the group meets every second Sunday of the month to sing. The annual Kentucky State Sacred Harp Singing takes place at Pisgah Church in Woodford on the Saturday before the third Sunday of May.
Sacred Harp is a uniquely American tradition that brings communities together to sing four-part hymns and anthems. It is a proudly inclusive and democratic part of our shared cultural heritage. Participants are not concerned with re-creating or re-enacting historical events. Our tradition is a living, breathing, ongoing practice passed directly to us by generations of singers, many gone on before and many still living.
All events welcome beginners and newcomers, with no musical experience or religious affiliation required — in fact, the tradition was born from colonial “singing schools” whose purpose was to teach beginners to sing and our methods continue to reflect this goal. Though Sacred Harp is not affiliated with any denomination, it is a deeply spiritual experience for all involved, and functions as a religious observance for many singers.
Sacred Harp “singings” are not performances. There are no rehearsals and no separate seats for an audience. Every singing is a unique and self-sufficient event with a different group of assembled participants. The singers sit in a hollow square formation with one voice part on each side, all facing inwards so we can see and hear each other. However, visitors are always welcome to sit anywhere in the room and participate as listeners.
Berea College Bluegrass Ensemble,
directed by Al White
Members are selected by audition, and typically remain with the group until they graduate from Berea College. The band’s recent tour of Japan marked its second visit there, the first being in 2006. The Bluegrass Ensemble also toured Ireland in 2004 and 2007.
Red State Ramblers
December 11. The music of the Red State Ramblers features native and adopted Kentuckians playing Kentucky tunes and songs that resonate with the truth of life lived close to the font from which this music springs. Will and Jeff grew up in the Bluegrass State, while Nikos and Kevin were inevitably drawn to the Commonwealth several years ago. This is old time music, a music that sings of the old ways in a new way that remains brilliantly alive. Old time music is the garden of delights that raised a progressive crop of genres that flowered as swing, bluegrass, rockabilly, and country. Old time music is the true vine that some folks continue to cherish, and pass on as precious heirlooms, a gift of the past to nourish us in the future.
The Ramblers, Will Bacon (banjo and kazoo), Kevin Kehrberg (bass, guitar), Jeff Keith (mandolin and guitar), and Nikos Pappas (fiddle) recently released their second recording, Commonwealth based on traditional music of Kentucky and in 2008 the band was a finalist in the string band competition at Clifftop Old Time String Band Festival.
