Kevin Fore of Surry County, NC and Galax, VA (Carroll County)
If you want to hear a living master of the different styles of clawhammer banjo that emerged from the Round Peak community, listen to Kevin Fore.
But Kevin doesn't just play banjos: he makes them....
Pär Persson Mattsson
Hi, I'm Pär. I'm a fiddler raised in Svärdsjö, a small idyllic village in Dalecarlia, Sweden. Folk music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember: my parents...
Breathing new life into Missouri fiddling: John P. Williams
Introduction
John P. Williams is an oldtime fiddler from Madison, Missouri who grew up deeply entrenched in the tradition of Missouri fiddling. John was a regular attendee of the Bethel Youth Fiddle Camp and apprenticed...
Interview with Allison de Groot
Can you tell me about your path to oldtime?
"The first time I heard clawhammer banjo was Leonard Podolack playing on an album by The Duhks, a band from my hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. I’ll never...
Ryland Burhans
Ry grew up in Athens, Ohio. While raised around heaps of old-time, he spent most of his teenage years attempting to escape the music of his parents, experimenting with a wide range of instruments...
Aviva Steigmeyer: interview + tunes
I grew up in Washington state and started playing old-time music when I was 18 years old. My parents were migrant fruit pickers in the 1970s and ‘80s and both are writers and artists,...
Tom Turino & Shannon Arnold
Tom Turino was a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1987 to 2014. He has been playing old-time banjo since 1974, as well as a number of other instruments...
Christopher Suen
I met Chris through the kind of serendipity + hospitality that has characterized most all of my experience in the oldtime community. Chris was in Germany touring with The Fugitives, a band he's played...
Caitlin Hearn
Caitlin Hearn is a fiddle player who currently lives in Regensburg, Germany, where she is an English teacher. She got her musical feet wet at age 9, when she began studying classical violin in...
George Jackson – interview + tunes
I grew up about as far away geographically from the regions where old-time music originated as you could imagine, but American culture was all around me in my home country of New Zealand, in...