Author: sarosing_wp

I will be teaching several regional ballad and song workshops this August, including resistance songs, shaker songs and hollering! Dates, locations, and full descriptions of the workshops are provided below. Please e-mail me at blairpathways@gmail.com to register. Come learn some new songs, ballads and hollers before the summer is out!

North Asheville
August 5th and 6th: 
Resistance Songs from Appalachia Workshop, Saturday August 5th, 10:00am-12:00pm, $20
Southern Appalachian Ballads Workshop, Saturday August 5th, 1:00-3:00pm, $20
Songs of the Shakers (co-hosted with Miranda Brown), Sunday August 6th, 1:00pm-3:00pm, $15-25

Marshall
August 6th, 12th and 13th:
Songs of the Shakers (co-hosted with Miranda Brown), Sunday, August 6th, 6:30-8:30pm, $15-25
Southern Appalachian Ballads Workshop, Saturday August 12th, 1:00-3:00pm, $20
Resistance Songs from Appalachia Workshop, Sunday August 13th, 1:00-3:00pm, $20
An Introduction to North Carolina Hollering Styles, Sunday, August 13th, 4:00pm-5:00pm $10

*Register for both Resistance Songs and Southern Appalachian Ballads for $35!*

Resistance Songs from Appalachia Workshop (2 hours) $20
In this workshop we’ll be learning songs, ballads and stories from rights movements of the mountain south. We’ll touch on movements from over two hundred years of Appalachian history including the black lung movement, opposition to strip mining, textile mill strikes and coal mine unionization. I’ll present introductory information on each theme and connect the songs we learn with their histories. All participants will receive recordings of the songs covered and lyric sheets.

Southern Appalachian Ballads Workshop (2 hours) $20
This will be a knee-to-knee workshop of “story-songs” from Southern Appalachia that uses a sing-and repeat style of learning. We will draw primarily from Eastern Kentucky and Western North Carolina repertoires, learning songs of cross-dressing ladies saving their lovers, foolhardy young men leaving home for adventures, false-hearted chickens and more. We’ll focus on a mix of unique American ballads as well as interesting “Child” ballad variants. All participants will receive recordings of the ballads covered and lyric sheets.

Shaker Songs Workshop, co-hosted by Miranda Brown (2 hours) Sliding scale $15-25
Who are the Shakers? What about their beliefs made them live in separate communities throughout the eastern U.S.? Where are they now? Long associated with furniture, celibacy and dance, the Shakers of the last 260 years are so much more, including prolific songwriters who have contributed much to the American repertoire. In this workshop, we’ll explore historic Shaker culture by learning 18th and 19th-century Shaker songs with their universal messages of love, humility and community. We will teach several melodies, a few lovely harmonies, and also play with “layering” song parts on top of each other to create interesting polyphonies. All participants will receive recordings of the songs covered and lyric sheets.

An Introduction to North Carolina Hollering Styles (1 hour) $10
Arguably one of the oldest forms of music, versions of “hollering” are found in cultures around the world. Using high and low-pitched calls, often with ornamented vocal breaks, hollering was a common form of communication in rural communities in the United States for hundreds of years. This workshop will present several hollers from Piedmont North Carolina traditions (and a few Deep South traditions), including cow-calling, calling for water, distress calls and a variety of expressive hollers.

To register for these workshops, please e-mail Saro at blairpathways@gmail.com.

I’m honored by Dan Schatz’s Huffington Post article about my song “More Waters Rising.” You can read it (and watch my video) here! “More Waters” is, in essence, collaborative. It’s inspired by the many movement songs that I grew up with, especially from Appalachian and African-American traditions. I hope it can be useful to present and future movements.

I’ve posted a new song on youtube called “More Waters Rising.” This is a song that I created back in March 2016 when the HB2 bill was passed here in North Carolina. Now in the early days of the Trump administration, this song feels deeply resonant. For me, this song is about seeing what’s coming on the horizon: harder times that are inevitable and unavoidable. But the answer to the fear of what’s coming is resiliency and claiming a strength within ourselves that has been there all along.

Aspects of this song are inspired from elements of African-American Civil Rights and protest songs.

This song is meant to be sung in groups. Please share this song, use it at protests, use it in church, use it in meetings, add new verses, spread it around!

Lyrics:

There are more waters rising,
This I know, This I know.
There are more waters rising,
This I know.
There are more waters rising,
They will find their way to me.
There are more waters rising,
This I know.

There are more fires burning…

There are more mountains falling…

I will wade through the waters…
I will wade through the waters,
When they find their way to me…

I will walk through the fires…
I will walk through the fires,
When they find their way to me…

I will rebuild the mountains…
I will rebuild the mountains,
When they find their way to me…

Last verse can be “There are more waters rising” again, or “I will wade through the waters” again.

Thanks, please share it around!

I was honored to be interviewed by fellow musician Sam Gleaves for the Bluegrass Situation!

Here’s an excerpt: “Ballads are intensely personal and intensely public at the same time, and one song can carry so many different stories, depending on who you ask and how they’ve interpreted the song. And so, I think largely learning in what is sometimes called the knee-to-knee style is a practice in empathy and in deep listening to someone else.”
Check out the article here!