The Blue Ridge Music Center Final Scheduled Performance

October 23 - This performance will mark the end of the 2011 musical programming at the Blue Ridge Music Center. Informal Mid-Day Mountain Music Jams will continue from noon to 4 p.m. daily until the end of the month before the music center closes for the winter.
Ballads & Songs of the Blue Ridge.  Traditional singers from North Carolina and Virginia will converge at the Blue Ridge Music Center for a special, free, performance-talk: Ballads and Songs of the Blue Ridge. It will be the last heritage event of the 2011 season.

Come Go Home With Me, a collection of short stories drawn from life in Madison County, and My Old True Love, a novel of love and family in Civil War-era Madison County. In 1997, Sheila Kay Adams won the North Carolina Society of Historians' Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award, and received the North Carolina Folklore Society's Brown-Hudson Award for outstanding contributions to the folklore of her home state.

  

Robert Lynn "Bobby" McMillon, a North Carolina Folk Heritage Award recipient, was heir to numerous strands of Appalachian culture. From his father's family in Cocke County, Tennessee, he learned Primitive Baptist hymns and traditional stories and ballads. From his mother's people in Yancy and Mitchell Counties, North Carolina, he heard "booger tales, haint tales," and legends. Because these songs and tales have deep roots in his own family and experience, Bobby has a passion for them and for sharing them. "Eventually, I began to realize," he says "that if I didn't perform the songs I was learning, most of the repertories of the people I learned from would be lost because they didn't have family members of their own to hand them down to." His greatest gift is his rare ability to convey to listeners a feeling for the world from which the stories come.

Musical duo, Martha Spencer and Jackson Cunningham, are known as the Whitetop Mountaineers. They both live in Whitetop, Virginia, in the highest mountains in Virginia and have been steeped in traditional music from a very early age. They are known internationally for their fine instrumental playing and beautiful duet singing. Martha has composed many moving songs about the Blue Ridge. Jackson is a well known as a luthier, (instrument maker), of the region. Both musicians also sing and perform with the Whitetop Mountain Band - one of the most popular stringbands in Virginia. The Whitetop Mountaineers have recorded two CDs: "Home on the Mountain" (2008) and "Go Away with Me: Songs from Virginia's Hills and Hollers"(2010). This is the first time that Martha Spencer, Jackson Cunningham, Sheila Kay Adams and Bobby McMillon have appeared on stage together and it sure to be an event not to miss.

Seating opens at 1:45pm. Free admission. Phone (276) 236-5309 x112 to reserve seating. Those with reserved seats must show up 15 minutes prior to the start of each event. At start-time remaining seats are given to drop-in visitors.  All October Heritage Events are free thanks to support from Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the National Council for the Traditional Arts.