History and music lovers are invited to journey back to the roots of Appalachian music when musicologist Doug Orr shares sounds, stories and backgrounds in Wayfaring Stranger: The Musical Voyage from Scotland/ Ulster to Appalachia, on Thursday, March 30, at 7 p.m., at Blue Ridge Community College in Hendersonville.
The program’s title borrows from a book of the same name co-authored by Orr and Fiona Ritchie, Scottish host and producer of National Public Radio’s The Thistle and Shamrock. Orr’s wife, Darcy, who collected and created illustrations for the book, will join him in presenting an overview of our region’s musical past and present.
“My wife and I met long ago through the music,” Orr says. The two perform in a Black Mountain-based band, The Southern Highlanders.
Their program, he says, will trace American and Appalachian music as we know it today to its earliest days in Scotland and Ulster (Northern Ireland). “These immigrants, who became known as the Scots-Irish after they settled in America, brought their songs, stories and fiddle tunes with them. Many worked their way down the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road and settled into the Southern Appalachian Mountains.”
The best-selling book, which won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award in 2015, includes interviews with such well-known figures as Doc Watson, Pete Seeger, David Holt and Sheila Kay Adams. “The rich musical heritage from Scotland and Ulster,” Orr says, “has been called ‘the music that America comes home to’ and continues to be sustained and performed to this day, with Asheville being a significant setting for the music.”
The program will be held in the Bo Thomas Auditorium. The fee is $10 and advance registration is strongly recommended. Register online at saveculture.org or call 828.692.8062. Check the website also for the world premiere date in June of From Knee to Knee: The Roots of Mountain Music, a ballad film produced by The Center for Cultural Preservation.
