Anna and Elizabeth

"There's something truly inspiring about this collaboration between 25 year olds from southwest Virginia... and a very special treat for lovers of pure traditional singing and playing, afficionados of the great ballad, and anyone that gets excited witnessing culture carried forward with mastery, love and a profound and real understanding of what makes old material great.”
SING OUT MAGAZINE

We are two friends who began performing together out of a desire to share not only the beautiful mountain fiddle tunes and ballads that we fell in love with, but to draw audiences into the stories of the folks who taught the music to us, the story of the culture and the mountains that created the tradition.

We began our collaboration-- we visited archives, we visited the homes of old musicians, we interviewed the grandchildren of ballad singers who'd long been passed away, and we began to create art together. We learned songs together-- a capella ballads and hymns, lullabyes and rousing banjo and fiddle tunes-- Elizabeth, with the powerful voice colored with the old style ornaments and Anna's soulful fiddle and banjo playing, and her percussive dancing. We illustrated the songs and stories on long scrolls called "crankies"-- some were of quilted fabric, some of detailed paper cuts, some pen and ink-- we perform these illustrations, scrolling them slowly as we sing the song or tell the story, revealing one section at a time.

We bring the songs, the stories and the art together in our performances. Since our start, two and a half years ago, we've shared these stories and mountain songs across the US and abroad, including the Sharq Taranolari Festival in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the High Museum of Modern Art in Atlanta, The Creative Alliance in Baltimore, the Seattle Folk Festival, the Lexington Opera House (KY), as well as in the small places that celebrated this music in the first place-- living rooms, community centers, and schools throughout the mountains.

ELIZABETH is a young ballad singer and banjo player from Rural Retreat, Virginia, whose heartfelt and powerful singing has won her prizes at regional fiddlers conventions since the age of eleven. The recipient of the 2012 Folk Alliance Mike Seeger Scholarship, Elizabeth learned the ballad tradition under the guidance of her mother, and acclaimed ballad singers Sheila Kay Adams, Bobby McMillon, and Ginny Hawker. She has recorded three solo albums, and her singing has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, most recently, and Prairie Home Companion, when she was 15 years old. She has sung for audiences across the country, the Republic of Georgia, and Ireland, and has taught Appalachian ballads and unaccompanied singing at music camps and workshops. She lives on a farm, with three goats.

ANNA is a musician, producer, folklorist and artist. She moved to Kentucky in 2007 to study traditional music and has since apprenticed with the masters of the Kentucky fiddle tradition: Bruce Greene, John Harrod and Paul David Smith, as well as banjo players Lee Sexton and Earl Thomas. She is a two-time fellowship recipient at Berea College to research the lives of female fiddlers in Kentucky, and is currently researching the lives of West Kentucky Fiddlers, and documenting the Clodhoppers, a central Kentucky stringband. She produced a compilation album showcasing Appalachia’s finest young traditional musicians: The New Young Fogies, and is faculty coordinator of the Cowan Music School, Kentucky’s sole traditional music school.

They are at the heart of what we all call "traditional." I've know both of them personally and am so impressed with not only their talent, but also their commitment to keeping it real and digging below the surface. They represent not only what they do, but the people they learned it from. GINNY HAWKER