Grammy-winner and guitar-playing legend Redd Volkaert is renowned throughout the country music world and beyond for being one of the greatest Telecaster players in history. A true giant of country music, Volkaert once played in Merle Haggard’s backing band The Strangers in the spot previously manned by Roy Nichols.
While many songs in folk music are credited as “traditional” or “public domain,” there is simply no song without a songwriter. Though not a household name, David “Bluegrass Buddy” Via, of Patrick County, Virginia, is known in bluegrass and jamgrass circles as one of today’s greatest and most prolific songwriters. He started singing in church at age three and playing guitar at age twelve. He also began writing his own compositions at an early age and has since gone on to pen numerous chart-topping songs for artists including Ronnie Bowman, Dede Wyland, and Larry Keel. While David’s songs are generally categorized as bluegrass, they often emanate a decidedly bluesy feel and an overt allegiance to the working-man’s folk music of the late Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash. One of his most cherished honors was Jeanette Carter’s request that David’s song “Lord Keep the Light On” be performed at her funeral, sung by Carter Family friend and legendary country artist Marty Stuart.
Hailing from the Washington, D.C. area, singer, MC, and percussionist J Pope fell in love with music at church. The semi-regular Sunday morning appearances by The Fleming Sisters inspired her desire to connect with people through musical performance. “The way they would perform, the emotion they would give, and the emotion it would evoke in the people who were there was so powerful,” Pope remembers. “They made me want to become a performing artist.”
Justin Golden's origins are deeply vested in the blues, with roots in the Mississippi Delta, Chicago, and the Piedmont of Virginia. Picking up the guitar as a teenager, Justin did what came naturally and let the music flow through him. Fascinatingly, the Piedmont Blues style first came to him in a dream. Before he had ever heard the term, he had written several songs in the Piedmont style. While perhaps not as well-known as the Mississippi Delta style, the Piedmont Blues has a deep history in Virginia, and is home to some of its greatest practitioners, including the late John Jackson and John Cephas. By far, the most distinctive feature of the Piedmont guitar style is its finger-picking method, in which the thumb lays down a rhythmic bassline against which one or two fingers pluck out the melody of the tune. Using this technique, the Piedmont guitarist makes a single instrument sound like several, setting up a complex dialogue of bass and treble parts.
One of the most respected and versatile multi-instrumentalists of his generation, longtime Virginia Folklife Stage favorite Danny Knicely has won many awards and is deeply revered for his virtuosity on the mandolin, guitar, and fiddle, as well as his singing style and flatfoot dancing. A musician’s musician, Danny has a chameleon-like ability to fit into any musical situation, as evidenced by his prolific participation in cultural exchanges with a diverse range of musicians from across the globe. Here in the U.S. Danny has collaborated with prominent musicians such as Vassar Clements, Tim O’Brien, Wyatt Rice, Cedric Watson, Mark Schatz, and banjoist Will Lee, whom he met while jamming at the legendary Galax Old Time Fiddlers Convention.
Nobody’s Business hails from the Grayson Highlands mountain region of Southwest Virginia, where the state borders North Carolina and Tennessee. The band is steeped in the traditions of rural “Old-time” mountain music that has been passed down through generations in this unique area of the Blue Ridge mountains. While often lumped in by casual listeners outside the region with its musical offspring bluegrass, old-time string band music developed in the nineteenth century, when European and African musical styles converged in America’s first frontier, the Blue Ridge. Predominantly fiddle- and banjo-driven, old-time is what luminary cultural scholar and advocate Joe Wilson described as “frontier music,” primarily intended for dancing and entertainment at house parties, community gatherings, and jam sessions. Grayson and the surrounding counties in southwestern Virginia remain an epicenter of old-time to this day, and Nobody’s Business is among its most talented current torchbearers.
Widely celebrated as the “First Family of Gospel Music” in Richmond, Virginia, The Legendary Ingramettes have been blowing the roof off performance stages for nearly six decades. For this performance, they will reunite with their friend Sherman Holmes, the surviving member of soul/blues legends the Holmes Brothers. It simply wouldn’t be the Virginia Folklife Stage without the Ingramettes closing it out. Come join them and Sherman and uplift your soul!
Linda Clayman Lay grew up in Clayman Valley, a tiny community named after her family outside of Bristol, Tennessee. She grew up surrounded by music in a family that treasured tunes, from old-time and bluegrass to gospel and traditional country. Her father, mandolinist Jack Clayman, formed a family band with Linda and her brothers and sisters, taking them to the places where the local musicians gathered, jammed, and performed.
For communities on Virginia’s Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula, the oyster fishery was perhaps the largest and most influential industry from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Men and women employed by the industry worked a variety of jobs, from boat cook, captain, and crew, to shore-based scow gangs and shuckers. Shucking in particular provided many employment opportunities for African Americans throughout the Chesapeake region.
The tsam is a Buddhist ritual performed by dancers wearing elaborate costumes and masks. It was introduced to Mongolia in the eighth century, when the Indian saint Lovon Badamjunai sanctified the first Tibetan Buddhist temple. The tsam is a secret and subtle ritual, the meaning of which is often known only to those who perform it. In the 1930s, the Communist government in Mongolia banned the tsam, along with other religious displays. It has since been revived by a number of Mongolian artists, particularly Gankhuyag “Ganna” Natsag, a mask maker and visual artist who was born in Ulaanbaatar.
