Who is rising appalachia

Feeling homesick while living in Southern Mexico, she looked for a connection to her past and taught herself how to play banjo. A few years later, when Chloe came to visit her abroad, Leah offered some clawhammer banjo lessons. They printed copies, figuring that would last them a lifetime. However, when a local college professor heard them singing at a Christmas party, he booked them as part of a Celtic holiday concert in Atlanta.

After two performances, every CD had been sold. Surprised and overwhelmed, they mulled over a career as full-time musicians, then realized that performing could be just one component of a greater overall vision — one that includes advocating for social justice, racial justice, environmental justice, and Indigenous rights. We do a lot of outreach. Leah is a visual artist and she can funnel her visual eye into the project.

I love to write, so that comes in. While they remained active with R. Their touring schedule became busier as they traveled around the globe with their music, and the two began working with other musicians. Percussionist Biko Casini and bassist and guitarist David Brown became a regular part of the group's live performances. Rising Appalachia financed the recording of their release, Filthy Dirty South , with a crowd-funding campaign; like their previous albums, the sisters released the album themselves, and have produced, managed, and marketed their careers from the beginning.

In , Rising Appalachia dropped the album Wider Circles and supported it with a tour in which the group traveled exclusively by train. Leah also launched a new project, the Slow Music Movement, to encourage other artists to embrace new ways of using music to serve the community. When Rising Appalachia returned to the road in , they dubbed the trip the Fertile Grounds Tour, to promote a closer relationship between producers and consumers of healthy foods; the group also announced a new alliance with the Permaculture Action Network.

AllMusic relies heavily on JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to use the site fully. Blues Classical Country. Electronic Folk International. Jazz Latin New Age. Smith: There is indeed a deep appreciation for Americana music across the globe and particularly in Europe. We wanted to show the deeper, more rooted music side of the U.

What inspired that? Our stage is our tool to fully express who we are and what we live for, and a huge part of that is community building. We want our concerts to be a full experience — aural, visual, magical and fully integrating the idea of art as a lifestyle and not just a show. Why is it important for music to bring a voice to causes? We were activists before we were musicians, and once this path took off, we began stitching together all the things we wanted to reflect out into the world and talk about: the importance of family, of tradition and a sense of belonging; environmental destruction; racial inequality; cultural appropriation.

All that hard, gritty stuff that makes us all living, breathing bodies of potential. It becomes an unstoppable network of worker bees that continue to shape, shift and re-inspire us all to step up and walk the walk. What comes next for Rising Appalachia? Smith: Rising Appalachia is at a really important crossroads right now. This is a new move for us, as we have been fiercely proud of our autonomy as a self-run powerhouse.

But we are finally in a position where the workload is too much for us to handle on our own. This is such an honor that we have come this far in our own hands, and to have more work than we can handle, but also brings forth a real sense of vulnerability as we have to ask for help.

In order to take the next step, we need some well-versed professional crew to join us. But it is not just about the music industry, either. We have a lot of work to do. We need our team to be well-oiled bad asses, and ready to take it all on with us.