RSM&TMMC Announces Roots of Appalachian Music Concert Series with Mike Seeger & Carpetbag Theatre

The Ralph Stanley Museum & Traditional Mountain Music Center is pleased to announce the Roots of Appalachian Music Concert Series, a performance and lecture series which explores the diverse roots of the region's music. The first event in this series examines the African roots of Appalachian music with special guests Mike Seeger and Carpetbag Theatre on Saturday, September 8th at 7pm in Clintwood's Jettie Baker Center. Reserve your tickets early for this rare opportunity to explore the history of mountain music with some of the region's best performers and scholars!

Each month from September to December 2007, the Roots of Appalachian Music Concert Series will explore a different side of Appalachian music's history and development, including events highlighting Africa, the British Isles, Eastern Europe, and the string band tradition in the mountains. This important series also seeks to extend special programming to area schools to promote educational outreach and provide area school systems with opportunities to work with regional scholars and musicians.

The first guest in the series, Mike Seeger, has devoted his life to singing and playing "Music from True Vine" -- the home music made by American southerners before the media age. "Music from True Vine" grows out of hundreds of years of British traditions that blended in our country with equally ancient African traditions to produce songs and sounds that are unique to the United States. For the peoples of the rural South, their great variety of music, song and story provided their Shakespeare, their dance music, their news, and the fabric of their daily lives. This music in time became the roots of today's country, bluegrass and popular music, and remains as ever, enduring and refreshing listening.

Fidelity to traditional sounds has set Mike Seeger apart from other performers since he began touring the United States and abroad in 1960. Mike's music conveys all the depth of feeling, the sheer energy and the infinite variety and texture of true rural music. Like earlier musicians, Mike seeks out his own vision of the music by creating within its traditions, making his music uniquely his own. As he sings the old songs, he plays in a wide variety of old-time styles, accompanying himself on an array of instruments, including banjo, fiddle, guitar, trump (jaw harp), mouth harp (harmonica), quills, lap dulcimer, mandolin and autoharp. Jon Pankake of Rolling Stone magazine writes that Mike Seeger's music is "Clean and crisp as any acoustic music now being played . . . Here is an American artist standing forth, voice 'well trained', in narratives, in fun, in irony, himself branch and root of the entwined true vine."

As a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, Make played an integral role in helping to revive interest in a variety of traditional musics, now played by thousands of young musicians across the country. Since his first recordings with the Ramblers in the late nineteen fifties, Mike has gone on to record almost forty albums, both solo and with others.

Mike Seeger has been honored with three Grammy nominations, most recently in 1991 for Solo: OldTime Country Music and in 1994 for Third Annual Farewell Reunion. In 1995 Mike received the Rex Foundation's Ralph J. Gleason Lifetime Achievement Award, established by the Grateful Dead to recognize "those who exemplify the qualities of talent, vision, innovation that Ralph so tirelessly supported." In the word of the award citation, Mike Seeger "...remains one of our great musical and cultural resources. To see him perform is to experience the richness of our traditions."

The Carpetbag Theatre, Inc. (CBT) is a community based, non-profit, professional theatre company dedicated to the production of new works. CBT's Ensemble Company develops new scripts primarily through collaboration and improvisation. Founded in 1970, CBT is a corporation of writers, artists, dancers and musicians. It has had a notably good record of performances, workshops, and other activities, and is one of the few tenured African-American professional theatre companies in the South.

The Carpetbag Theatre has long been a part of a movement in this country that seeks to redefine the way we view culture and the arts originating from culturally-specific communities. As they go about the work of turning people's stories into art, it is vitally important to them not only to tell the stories that make us stronger, but to tell those stories well. As they speak for those who are unheard and unseen by the larger society, they strive to tell those stories with honesty and dignity and concern for the aesthetic of that particular community. It is therefore part of their mission to produce the highest quality work based not only on the standards of the traditional artistic community, but also on the traditional standards of the communities reflected in their work.

The Carpetbag Theatre has been part of an important theater movement for thirty years. Founded in 1969 and chartered in 1970, CBT was a local response to a national movement towards community based professional theater. Carpetbag is a theater rooted in the aesthetic of the particular community, which it served. In the past ten years, they have addressed such issues as the death penalty and its impact on the African American community; economic development and the barriers encountered by people of color in the market place; domestic violence and black feminism; and environmental racism.

Historically, CBT has focused its program initiatives on the professional development of young artists and the participation of all segments of the community in the creative process. In the early years of operation, the organizational focus was the instruction and training of student and community artists. As they began to expand their focus, they developed the professional ensemble company and a series of drama based activities for specific populations.CBT became a resource for the many communities who had taken the initiative to document their own history.

For more information about the September 8th performance, or to reserve your tickets, please contact the Ralph Stanley Museum & Traditional Mountain Music Center at (276) 926-8550. If you would like to know more about the event's performers, please visit Mike Seeger's website at http://mikeseeger.info and Carpetbag Theatre's website at http://www.carpetbag.org.

The Roots of Appalachian Music Concert Series is made possible by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities was established in 1974 to develop and support public programs, education, and research in the humanities and to relate the humanities to public issues. The VFH promotes understanding and use of the humanities through public debate, group discussion, and individual inquiry. Principal activities of the Virginia Foundation include an internationally recognized Fellowship Program, the Virginia Folklife Program, the Virginia Center for Media and Culture, a statewide network of Regional Councils, and the Grant Program. The VFH is non-profit and non-partisan and receives support from private gifts, grants and contributions, and from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Commonwealth of Virginia. For more information, write or call the Foundation's office at 145 Ednam Drive, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903-4629, (434) 924-3296, or visit the VFH online at www.virginiafoundation.org.

The program is presented as a public service. The principal aim of the program is to discuss in an objective and nonpartisan context issues of concern and interest to citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The views and opinions expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the Virginia Foundation, its contributors, or its supporting agencies.