Strong Mountain Women: How Ballads Power People – Songs and Stories from the Appalachian Collections of Cecil Sharp, Maud Karpeles, and Olive Dame Campbell

Join us on Friday, April 6 at 7pm in the museum’s Performance Theater for “Strong Mountain Women: How Ballads Power People – Songs and Stories from the Appalachian Collections of Cecil Sharp, Maud Karpeles, and Olive Dame Campbell.”

From 1916 to 1918, English ballad collector Cecil Sharp traveled the Appalachian region to document variants of ballad songs and photographed some of the singers who shared their music. The special exhibit – The Appalachian Photographs of Cecil Sharp, 1916 to 1918 – highlights 26 rare photographs that offer a stunning window into the lives of Appalachian people of the period.  This exhibit will be on display at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum from March 17 to May 31, 2018.

This related program will feature a talk by Donald Hughes, exhibit curator, and a performance by eighth-generation North Carolina ballad singer and storyteller Donna Ray Norton. Norton is one of the artists on the 2017 Grammy-nominated recording Big Bend Killing: The Appalachian Ballad Tradition, a two-disc set that features a number of performers, including Roseanne Cash and Sheila Kay Adams.

The Appalachian Photographs of Cecil Sharp, 1916 to 1918 is on loan from the Country Dance and Song Society, with permission of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

For more information about the exhibit, go to www.cecilsharpinappalachia.org.

The program starts at 7:00pm; doors open at 6:30pm. Tickets for the “Strong Mountain Women: How Ballads Power People” program are $5.

Buy Tickets Here