Ballad Singing Workshop with Donna Ray Norton

Join 8th generation ballad singer Donna Ray Norton on Saturday, August 15 for an immersive workshop exploring one of the nation’s oldest surviving non-indigenous oral traditions. Raised in the Sodom Laurel community of Madison County, Donna Ray learned these songs directly from family and community tradition and has carried them forward for almost 30 years.

More than music, ballad singing has long served as a way of preserving history, memory, and connection within Appalachian communities. Many of these songs were passed person-to-person and generation-to-generation long before they were ever written down. In places like Sodom Laurel, traditions survived partly because of the seclusion of the mountains and the deep commitment families had to carrying songs and stories forward.

This workshop creates space to learn these songs in the same person-to-person way they have traditionally been shared, while also connecting participants to the region’s resilience, history, and cultural memory.

Participants will hear traditional ballads, learn about the singers who preserved them, experience the traditional “knee-to-knee” style of teaching and singing, and have the opportunity to learn a ballad together. Questions and conversation are encouraged throughout the workshop. Whether you are already involved in traditional music or completely new to ballad singing, this workshop offers a rare chance to experience a living tradition that continues to connect many different communities today.

Date: Saturday, August 15

Time: 1:00–4:00pm EST 

Location: In-person in the museum’s Performance Theater and Learning Center

Cost: $35+tax

Numbers: Up to 15 participants

REGISTER HERE

About Donna Ray Norton

Donna Ray Norton is an eighth-generation Appalachian ballad singer, storyteller, and culture bearer from the Sodom Laurel (Revere) community of Madison County, North Carolina, where ballad singing has lived in her family for nine generations. She learned these songs the traditional way, by ear and knee-to-knee, through her mother, Lena Jean Ray; her cousin, Sheila Kay Adams; and generations of Ray, Wallin, Shelton, and Norton kin, carrying forward one of the oldest surviving oral traditions in the United States. She did not inherit land or wealth. She inherited songs, stories held in memory and passed through bloodlines, where music is not separate from life but woven into it.

As the next in line behind Adams, Donna Ray carries the responsibility of keeping the torch lit and ensuring the songs that shaped her family continue to burn brightly for those who come after her. She has shared stages with artists including Ketch Secor, Warren Haynes, Grahame Lesh, Tim O’Brien, and Sierra Ferrell, bringing traditional unaccompanied ballads into contemporary performance spaces. Her work and advocacy for Appalachian culture have been featured in Oxford American, Rolling Stone, and Garden & Gun. As founder and leader of The Nest of Singing Birds and host of the monthly Old Marshall Jail Ballad Swap, she remains committed to ensuring these songs are not museum pieces but living, evolving traditions rooted in the mountains and resonant far beyond them.

Donna Ray has been recognized as a 2026 South Arts Emerging Artist.