Southern Songbirds: Opening Concert Kickoff

5 East Edenton Street,Raleigh NC 27601

29 October, 2022

Description

The North Carolina Museum of History announces a special concert series in conjunction with the traveling exhibition The Power of Women in Country Music, coming to us from the GRAMMY Museum® in Los Angeles in October! The exhibition opens Friday, October 28, 2022, and a kickoff concert celebrating this momentous occasion is scheduled for Saturday, October 29, with North Carolina artists Charly Lowry, Caitlin Cary, and H.C. McEntire enchanting us with voice and prose. This concert will be emceed by legendary North Carolina native Jim Lauderdale.  MOHA/museum members, in addition to enjoying unlimited access to the exhibition during its run, will receive a reduced ticket price and priority seating for the concert. Please note: this concert will be recorded live by PBS North Carolina. As such, there will be cameras in the audience. Seats around those camera stations will not be open. This concert is general admission, and seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Charly Lowry, a musical powerhouse from Pembroke, North Carolina, is proud to be an Indigenous woman belonging to the Lumbee/Tuscarora Tribes. She is passionate about raising awareness around issues that plague underdeveloped, underserved, and marginalized communities. While she may be familiar to some from her success as a semifinalist on American Idol, she maintained close ties to her Native American roots, culture, and music as lead singer of Dark Water Rising.  Currently, Charly is writing her first solo album. Recently, she was inducted to the Recording Academy Class of 2021. Her newest band configuration, CHARLY, was selected to participate in the program American Music Abroad, curated by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the association American Voices.  Caitlin Cary is a Raleigh, North Carolina–based artist, singer, songwriter, violinist, and gallery owner. In 1993 Caitlin was a founding member of the alt-country band Whiskeytown, an experience she describes as “a pretty incredible hayride” that yielded two albums that many consider seminal in the alt-country genre. Over her solo career, she’s released two full-length albums, two EPs, a duets album with Thad Cockrell, two albums with super girl group Tres Chicas, an EP with The Small Ponds, and an album of original protest music with the NC Music Love Army. Her label, Yep Roc Records, will release a limited-edition vinyl reissue of her first full-length album, While You Weren’t Looking, on September 30 in celebration of the label’s 25th anniversary. Since 2015 Caitlin has focused on her visual art, especially during a five-year residency at Artspace in Raleigh. She works in a style she calls “Needleprint,” by which she creates intricate collages from repurposed upholstery samples and scraps that she affixes to stiffened canvas using various methods of freehand machine sewing. In March 2021, she and her husband, Skillet Gilmore, opened The Pocket, a small but mighty gallery and workspace in the historic Oakwood neighborhood of Raleigh. H.C. McEntire is a musician, songwriter, composer, producer, performer, and writer living in Durham, North Carolina. Front woman of Mount Moriah, H.C. struck out on her own with her 2018 debut solo album LIONHEART. After two years working all over the world as a backup singer in Angel Olsen’s band, McEntire came home to a hundred-year-old farmhouse tucked away in the woods of Durham, right on the Eno River. Here, McEntire was able to refocus. Like the blue-collar Appalachian kin she descended from, she scheduled her days by the clockwork of the Earth’s rotation: splitting wood, stacking it, weeding and watering the garden, walking the dog past the bridge and back—and every evening on the front porch, watching dusk fall. Eno Axis, her new album, emerged from this time as the strongest work McEntire has shared yet. At any given time, you’re likely to find Jim Lauderdale making music, whether he’s laying down a new track in the studio or working through a spontaneous melody at his home in Nashville, Tennessee. And if he’s not actively crafting new music, he’s certainly thinking about it. “It’s a constant challenge to try to keep making better and better records, write better and better songs. I still always feel like I’m a developing artist,” he says. This may be a surprising sentiment from a man who’s won two Grammys, released 34 full-length albums, and taken home the Americana Music Association’s coveted Wagonmaster Award. But the forthcoming album Game Changer is convincing evidence that the North Carolina native is only continuing to hone his craft. Operating under his own label, Sky Crunch Records, for the first time since 2016, Lauderdale recorded Game Changer at the renowned Blackbird Studios in Nashville, co-producing the release with Jay Weaver and pulling from songs he’d written over the last several years. “There’s a mixture on this record of uplifting songs and, at the same time, songs of heartbreak and despair—because that’s part of life, as well,” he says. “In the country song world especially, that’s always been part of it. That’s real life.” Lauderdale would know: He’s been a vital part of the country music ecosystem since 1991, when he released his debut album and began penning songs for an impressively long roster of country music greats. “When I was a teenager wanting to be a bluegrass banjo player, I never would have imagined that I would get to work with people like Ralph Stanley and Robert Hunter and George Jones and Elvis Costello and John Oates,” he muses. “Getting to work with them inspires me greatly to this day, and I know it always will.”