A rare opportunity to experience 3 National Heritage Fellows on one stage. Featuring Sheila Kay Adams, Donna Ray Norton,and William Ritter, this extraordinary performance weaves together spellbinding stories, traditional ballads, mountain music, and generations of Appalachian wisdom. As nationally recognized master “tradition bearers,” these artists carry forward a rich cultural legacy with humor, heart, and authenticity, creating an unforgettable evening that honors the voices, songs, and stories of the Southern mountains.
This rare opportunity is supported in part by a FY27 Southern Artist Spotlight Grant from South Arts.
A “nest of singing birds” was the name English folklorist Cecil Sharp gave to Madison County, North Carolina, when he visited the area in 1916 to collect the ancient ballads that had survived there, being gently passed down knee to knee and warm hand to warm hand. During his visit, he collected over 25 ballads from a woman named Mary Sands. The county is still known for this rich tradition that goes back at least nine generations.
The moniker has now been adopted by a cooperative of singers in the region that are keeping this art form alive. Centering around Sheila Kay Adams, the matriarch of the traditional music community in Western North Carolina, the group is led by her second cousin Donna Ray Norton, one of the eighth generation of their family to keep these songs of love and loss and the stories that surround them alive. Through activities like Ballad Night at the Old Marshall Jail Hotel and performances at festivals and performing arts centers across the United States and the world, these acapella songs are shared from the hearts of the singers to an ever-expanding community of people searching for the magic that abides inside this viable living, breathing tradition not yet lost to time and technology.
“I found myself for the first time in my life in a community in which singing was as common and almost as universal practice as speaking… So closely, indeed, is the practice of this particular art interwoven with the ordinary avocations of everyday life that singers, unable to recall a song I had asked for, would often make some such remark as, ‘Oh, if only I were driving the cows home I could sing it at once.’ … I would go away in the evening with the feeling that I had never before been in a more musical atmosphere.” - Cecil Sharp