Artist Category: Country | Page 7

Antigone Rising

Best known for relentless touring and masterful musicianship, Antigone Rising played upwards of 280 shows a year in their early days. Whether it was an open mic on a Monday night or a jam packed New York City hometown show, the ladies and their infamous Vanna White (the band’s beloved 15 passenger van) eventually blazed a trail straight to arenas alongside The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith.

Founding sisters Cathy and Kristen Henderson have always had the same philosophy. Play better than the boys and make sure the fans feel like part of the family. That philosophy plus writing undeniably catchy songs has allowed this self sustained group to maintain her independence and leave an indelible mark on an industry best known for leaving girl (bands) behind.

Girls Rising (501c3) main objective is to inspire girls to pursue nontraditional career paths. Through outreach workshops the band performs at schools and community centers around the world, Antigone Rising is inspiring the next generation of kids to be game changers! To learn more about the band’s nonprofit, or to make a donation, visit Girls Rising.org online!

Nobody’s Girl

Hailing from Texas, Alabama, and Georgia respectively, now neighbors in Austin, BettySoo, Grace Pettis, and Rebecca Loebe are bewitching audiences with sumptuous harmonies and unforgettable songwriting. Friends now for a decade, they first met at the legendary Kerrville Folk Festival, each winners of the annual “New Folk” award. Luscious harmony singers, effortless instrumentalists, seasoned touring artists – they recognized what each can accomplish individually could be made all the stronger by collaboration.

The harmonies are thrilling; echoes of Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt’s Trio recordings. The songs are powerful and spare. The stage presence confident and assured.
The band will release its full length self titled debut in July 2020, following the Waterline EP which was released in 2018 via Lucky Hound Music. Watch the first lyric video / track from the album, “Kansas” here:

Tyler Ramsey

In addition to having released three acclaimed solo albums, Ramsey is perhaps most immediately recognizable, until his recent departure, as the guitarist and a co-writer in Band Of Horses, having played with them since 2007, prior to the release of their breakthrough album, “Cease To Begin.” A well-established and acclaimed guitar player and singer in the burgeoning western North Carolina music scene, where he calls home, he first learned to play music on piano before moving to the guitar. Ramsey grew up listening to and studying country-blues guitar players like Mance Lipscomb and Mississippi John Hurt, and American finger pickers like John Fahey and Leo Kottke, absorbing their sound and making it all his own.

His fourth solo album, which was recorded in Louisville, Kentucky, during tour downtime and completed this past summer, is set for release in 2018. The new songs are lush and full, and realized with help from a list of friends old and new, adding gorgeous vocal harmonies, strings, and guitar counterpoints.

Caitlin Canty

Caitlin Canty is an American singer/songwriter whose music carves a line through folk, blues, and country ballads. Her voice was called “casually devastating” by the San Francisco Chronicle and NPR Music describes her songs as having a “haunting urgency.”

Motel Bouquet, Canty’s third record, features ten original songs that hold her darkly radiant voice firmly in the spotlight. Produced by GRAMMY-winning Noam Pikelny (Punch Brothers) and recorded live over three days in Nashville, the album boasts a band of some of finest musicians in roots music, including fiddler Stuart Duncan and vocalist Aoife O’Donovan. Rolling Stone hails Motel Bouquet as “dreamy and daring” with “poetic lyrics and haunting melodies.”

Since the release of her critically-acclaimed Reckless Skyline in 2015, Canty has put thousands of miles on her songs, circling through the U.S. and Europe. She warmed up stages for Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Milk Carton Kids and Josh Ritter and recorded with longtime collaborators Darlingside and with Down Like Silver, her duo with Peter Bradley Adams. She won the Troubadour songwriting competition at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and her song, “Get Up,” was nominated for Song of the Year in the Folk Alliance International Music Awards. Canty’s original recordings have recently appeared on CBS’s Code Black and on the Netflix original series House of Cards.

Raised in small-town Vermont, the daughter of a school teacher and a house painter, Canty earned her degree in biology in the Berkshires and subsequently moved to New York City. She spent her days in the city working as an environmental sustainability consultant and her nights making music at Lower East Side music halls and bars. In 2009, she quit her job and set out to make music full time. In 2015, she packed up her house plants and her 1939 Recording King guitar and drove to Nashville, TN, which she now calls home.

Eleanor Buckland

Since 2014, Eleanor Buckland has been one-third of Lula Wiles, the Boston-based folk-rock trio that has become an acoustic music scene favorite with their three critically hailed albums. Their two most recent albums were released on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings: What Will We Do (2019) and Shame & Sedition (2021). For much of this time, Buckland was also working on another musical project – her own album. You Don’t Have To Know (released on October 29) spotlights a different side of Buckland’s musical interests as it sets her deeply personal songs against inventive indie rock arrangements.

Born and raised in Maine, Buckland comes from a family full of musicians. Her grandmother, Betty Buckland, was prominent in the New England bluegrass scene, while her father, Andy Buckland, played electric guitar in Boston area bands. It’s not surprising then that someone who grew up playing bluegrass fiddle music as well as a healthy dose of Michelle Branch and Sheryl Crow would wind up with varied musical tastes – something Buckland clearly demonstrates on her solo debut.

Tyler Hughes

Tyler Hughes hails from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where he began learning the traditions of mountain music and dance at age 12. He performs regularly, but also dedicates time to teaching through private lessons, camps, and a variety of music classes as an adjunct professor at the Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap. Tyler is an accomplished square dance caller and also took the 3rd place ribbon in clogging/flatfooting at the Morehead Old-Time Festival in 2015. As a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, he has performed all across the southeast of the United States both as a soloist and with several bands including the East Tennessee State University Old Time Pride Band, Fifthstring, and the Empty Bottle String Band. He graduated from East Tennessee State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies in 2015. He has studied traditional music at home in the Appalachians and across the Atlantic in Ireland and Scotland.

Today, Tyler performs a mix of Old Time, Country and Western music reminiscent of the first half of the twentieth century. His country music variety show is sure to include influences from his native Wise County, Grand Ole Opry stars like Little Jimmy Dickens, and Hollywood cowboys such as Roy Rogers. Along with solo performances, Tyler appears with the Empty Bottle String Band and as a duo with Sam Gleaves. He is available for teaching private lessons, workshops, and camps.

Laura Cantrell

Country singer Laura Cantrell has balanced different aspects of her music life over the course of a 20-plus years career, whether as a recording artist, radio host, writer, or working parent of a high-school aged musician. Well-known as a recording artist with a devoted following in the US and UK, and as the host of “Dark Horse Radio,” a program devoted to George Harrison on SiriusXM’s The Beatles Channel, or as a performer curating “States of Country,” her monthly live series exploring regional diversity in country music, Cantrell has expressed her passion for country music through various platforms. Last June, she returned with Just Like A Rose: The Anniversary Sessions, an album of original music celebrating her first 20 years of striking this balance. Just Like A Rose is a buoyant collection showcasing Cantrell’s songcraft, sense of history, and conviction as a modern woman singing country music.

Since 2000, Cantrell has released Not The Tremblin’ Kind, When The Roses Bloom Again, Humming By The Flowered Vine, Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs of the Queen of Country Music, No Way There From Here, and The BBC Sessions. She has toured extensively in the US, UK and Ireland, and was a favorite of pioneering British DJ John Peel, who called her first album, Not The Tremblin’ Kind, “my favorite record of the last ten years, and possibly my life.” Cantrell recorded several Peel Sessions for the BBC from 2000-2004 and appeared on the first Peel Day program on Radio One commemorating the first anniversary of Peel’s death. Cantrell’s music has been celebrated in the press, including features in the New York Times, “O”Magazine, Elle, the Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times of London, and Maverick Magazine. Cantrell’s music has been featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “On Point” and :”Weekend Edition” and the BBC’s “Women’s Hour.”

She has performed on “A Prairie Home Companion,” “Mountain Stage,” and the “Grand Old Opry,” and appeared on the television programs “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” and BBC One’s “The Andrew Marr Show.” She is currently the host of “Dark Horse Radio,” SiriusXM’s program about George Harrison that runs on The Beatles Channel. Just Like A Rose features songs Cantrell wrote in Nashville with acclaimed cowriters Gary Burr, Fred Wilhelm, and Mark Winchester, and with longtime collaborator and guitarist Mark Spencer, as well as tunes written by Amy Rigby and Joe Flood, artists Cantrell knew from the roots music scene in New York in the 1990s. The material spans Cantrell’s most recent songwriting and songs she’s been humming to herself since before she’d had her own band or played her own shows. “It is interesting maturing into your musical worldview, you still have songs that hit you like you’re a teenager with your first crush, and others that reflect more experience and nuance, or frustration with tough realities, and then those you just love purely as music–there’s a bit of it all on this album.”

“… she sings in a sweet, clear, purposeful voice…” —The New York Times

Mike Witcher

Growing up the youngest of 5 in a musical and artistic family in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Michael found his voice playing the Dobro at the age of 14. In less than a year, he was playing with his dad’s, Dennis and brother, Gabe’s band The Witcher Brothers. Michael started teaching and doing session work when he was 16. Since then he has recorded/toured with Dwight Yoakam, Fernando Ortega, Peter Rowan, Laurie Lewis, Tyler Hilton, Missy Raines and The New Hip, John Paul Jones, Sara Watkins, The Gibson Brothers, Dolly Parton, Joan Osborn, Willie Watson, Chris Jones and others. Michael is currently a member of The Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band. Known not only for his rich tone and lyrical phrasing, Michael is also a highly sought after instructor. At age 19 he published his first instructional book, Resonator Guitar: Tunes Techniques and Practice Skills. Since then he has published a second book Resonator Guitar: 20 Bluegrass Jam Favorites and can be found teaching at the top acoustic music camps around the world.

Lenny Solomon

Lenny Solomon is one of Cambridge’s best kept secrets. A songwriter/singer, he’s been performing for over 40 years writing hundreds of songs in styles ranging from folk, to country, to blues. Since 2002 he has released four CDs and has won over a dozen songwriting awards. He will now grace the stage at Passim.

Lenny Solomon’s style has been compared to John Prine, Guy Clark, and Jerry Jeff Walker. Solomon began his career in the late 1960s and was the second act booked when the Club 47 reopened as Club Passim. He aslo headlined Passim’s first New Years eve show. A fixture at the long defunct Idler Coffeehouse in Harvard Square, he regularly performed there on Friday nights for over eight years. The Idler was a training ground for such music luminaries as Geoff Bartley, Paul Rishell, Spider John Koerner, and Ric Ocasek. During these years he shared bills with many name performers including Chris Smither, Carolyn Hester, Bonnie Raitt, and Spider John.

From the 1980s through the mid-1990s, Solomon continued to write songs, but rarely performed, instead choosing to raise his family and work in environmental research at Harvard University. From 1978 though 2009 he managed a research program that investigated ozone depletion in the stratosphere and more general aspects of climate change.

In 1997 Solomon began performing again and formed a folk/country band. Performing his original material, Solomon has released four CDs, Not Life Threatening, Armando’s Pie, Maybe Today, and Under My Hat. Songs from these albums have been aired on over 150 radio stations around the country and around the world.

NERFA

NERFA is the northeast regional afiliate of Folk Alliance International (www.folk.org), a Kansas City, MO-based nonprofit organization that seeks to nurture, engage and empower the international folk music community — traditional and contemporary, amateur and professional — through education, advocacy and performance. Our goal is to provide opportunities for our members to network regionally and advance the overall mission of Folk Alliance International to:

Increase understanding of the rich variety, artistic value, cultural and historical significance, and continuing relevance of folk music among educators, media and the general public. (Education),
Provide a bridge to and from folk music organizations and needed resources, and to help those organizations link with their constituencies. (Networking),
Influence decision-makers and resource providers on the national, state, provincial, and local levels — ensuring the growth of folk music. (Advocacy),
Support and encourage the development of new and existing grassroots folk music organizations. (Field Development),
Strengthen the effectiveness of folk music organizations by providing professional development opportunities. (Professional Development).

To help accomplish these goals, NERFA holds an annual four-day conference where artists, agents, booking agents, venue and festival promoters, recording industry professionals, graphic artists, folk DJs, journalists, photographers, publicists and production professionals get together to exchange ideas, learn by attending workshops, panel discussions and seminars, participate in an exhibit hall, attend formal showcases of juried performing artists, and go to private and guerilla showcases hosted by performers, agents and promoters. NERFA has expanded its outreach by holding more local one-day conferences within its region, as well as NERFA Showcase concerts at venues around the region and NERFA Presents Young Folk showcases at various festivals in both the U.S. and Canada.