This year, we’ll be kicking off the annual Lunsford Festival with a ballad swap on Friday evening. The event will be MC’d by eighth-generation ballad-singer Donna Ray Norton and will feature the region’s best ballad-singers, many of whom are descended from the Madison County families from whom Cecil Sharp collected in 1916. Madison County is […]
The 2024 Lunsford Festival has been canceled due to the flooding and devastation in our region. The Lunsford Festival is an all-day festival celebrating regional music and dance traditions. The event is the second longest-running folk festival in Western North Carolina (57th year!) and was named in honor of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who was a […]
Get in the Halloween mood with scary stories and ballads from NEA National Heritage Fellow Sheila Kay Adams. Adams is the seventh-generation bearer of her family’s 200-year-old ballad-singing tradition. Her teachers were her great-aunt Dellie Norton, cousin Cas Wallin, and other kinfolks in the Wallin, Chandler, Norton, Ramsey, and Ray families of Sodom, North Carolina, […]