Rhiannon Ramsey Exemplifies the Next Generation of Fiddlers

06/27/19 • 2 min

Down the Road on the Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina

Recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in mountain music among musicians who were born in the 1990s and 2000s. Among the youngest of this cohort, North Carolina fiddler Rhiannon Ramsey epitomizes a blend of great musical chops and continuation of mountain traditions. Her native Madison County is famously musical, a place that the early ballad collector Cecil Sharp referred to as “a nest of singing birds.” She leads her own band, Rhiannon and the Relics, and in 2018 she joined the Stony Creek Boys, a band that has been an anchor of Asheville’s traditional music community for more than fifty years.

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Zoe and Cloyd Bring Varied Family Traditions to Mountain Music

The husband-and-wife duo of Natalya Zoe Weinstein and John Cloyd Miller perform under their middle names. Zoe and Cloyd represents not only the partnership between Natalya and John, but a coming-together of two families’ musical traditions. Natalya is the daughter of a jazz pianist, and the granddaughter of a Russian klezmer musician. She herself plays klezmer and classical as well as mountain music. John is the grandson of Jim Shumate, a North Carolina Heritage Award recipient who made pioneering recordings as a member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and Flatt and Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys.

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Fiddler Carley Arrowood Lends Her Voice to Mountain Music

It’s not unusual for a mountain musician to be a part of several different musical traditions. A Blue Ridge fiddler might play in a mountain swing session on Friday night, sit in with an old-time band playing for a square dance on Saturday night, and sing in the church choir on Sunday morning. In this respect, Carley Arrowood is in good company. But Carley stands out in her youth: few artists as young as she have already mastered so many genres. She plays, sings, and writes bluegrass and gospel music, and was a classical performer as a child.