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The Crooked Road On Tour will be featured in performances at the State Fair of Virginia in Doswell on Friday, Sept. 27 through Sunday, Oct. 6. The 31 Crooked Road performances throughout the 10-day Fair include a Main Stage concert by Blue Highway and Wolfe Bros. String Band on Saturday, Sept. 28 at 7 p.m., and three performances daily (at noon, 3 and 6 p.m.) on the Heritage Village stage. Heritage Village performers include the Sandy Shortridge Band (Sept. 27 & 28), Jim Lloyd (Sept. 29 & 30), Martha Spencer & Kelley Breiding / Spencer Branch (Oct. 1 & 2), Mac Traynham (Oct. 3 & 4), and Hunter Holmes & Corbin Hayslett (Oct. 5 & 6).
The Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail performances celebrate the traditional music that has been kept by families and communities of Southwest Virginia since colonial times. Settlers of this mountainous region since the 1700’s have brought various ingredients – a cappella gospel music from German tradition that lives in the Old Regular Baptist churches today; spirituals, emotive singing and a musical gourd we now call a banjo from African tradition; and ballads and fiddles brought by the Scots-Irish and English. Mixed together, these ingredients have produced one of the richest musical traditions on earth.
Highly esteemed bluegrass band Blue Highway has earned a collective 28 IBMA Awards, 6 SPBGMA Awards, one Dove Award, and three Grammy nominations as a band. Blue Highway’s 2016 album “Original Traditional” was nominated for a 2017 GRAMMY Award for Best Bluegrass Album, and the group was voted the Favorite Bluegrass Artist of All Time by the readers of Bluegrass Today in April 2016. Wolfe Bros. String Band is an old time group from the Elk Creek Valley of Grayson County, Virginia. While the band cherishes the rich tradition of tunes and songs that have been handed down by musicians, they also believe in adding their own songs and arrangements to this living old time tradition.
Sandy Shortridge is a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and storyteller from the coalfields of Buchanan County, Virginia. A master storyteller through song, Sandy conveys the emotions and pride that many mountain people share for their home and culture. Originally from the Virginia coalfields, Jim Lloyd now lives in Rural Retreat, where he operates Lloyd’s Barber Shop and plays solo and with others. He was the longtime guitarist for the old time string band, the Konnarock Critters. Spencer Branch is the collaboration of Martha Spencer from Whitetop Mountain and North Carolina native Kelley Breiding. They play music drawn from their mountain heritage in addition to traditional country, bluegrass, and original songs. Willis, Virginia resident Mac Traynham, a builder of cabinets and banjos, plays several instruments, and is a teacher of mountain music at music workshops nationwide. Hunter Holmes and Corbin Hayslett represent a minority of young southern musicians mining the veins of rural American music. Both interpreters and students of traditional rural music from a young age, Holmes and Hayslett transport their listeners back to the 1920s and 1930s with breakdowns and blues captured on shellac.
The Crooked Road On Tour performances at the State Fair of Virginia are supported in part by the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Main Stage concerts are presented by Virginia Farm Bureau Insurance.
For more information, visit www.statefairva.org or call (804) 994-2800. For more information about The Crooked Road, visit www.thecrookedroad.org, call (276) 492-2400 ext. 2409, or email: info@thecrookedroad.org.
