Festival of Mountain Music

Event Details

TIME: 4:00-6:30 P.M.
PRICE: TICKETS COMPLIMENTARY
TICKET RELEASE: 10/5

Join us at the Festival of Mountain Music as four-time Grammy award winner, David Holt hosts three exciting acts performing music of the southern mountains today! Enjoy performances from award-winning talent from the Snyder Family Band, The American Songster Dom Flemons, and top bluegrass group Balsam Range. Get ready for an afternoon of great music, dancing, and celebration for all ages. Full line up below.

Performance Line up:

Host - David Holt
Four-time Grammy Award winner David Holt will be the host for the event while playing mini-performances throughout the show. Holt is a musician, storyteller, historian, television host and entertainer, dedicated to performing and preserving traditional American music and stories. Holt plays ten acoustic instruments and has released numerous award-winning recordings of traditional mountain music and southern folktales. Holt is well known for his television and radio series. Currently, he is hosting the PBS series David Holt's State of Music, featuring some of the regions finest musicians including Rhiannon Giddens, Steep Canyon Rangers and Balsam Range. For over 30 years David has been the host of the NC PBS series Folkways, that takes the viewer through the Southern Mountains visiting traditional craftsmen and musicians.

First - Snyder Family Band
The Snyder Family Band based out of Lexington, NC, performs a unique style of bluegrass music infused with a wide range of styles and genres. The Snyder Family Band features the award-winning talents of Samantha on fiddle and Zeb on guitar. They are backed by their dad, Bud, on upright bass. Samantha Snyder is an award-winning fiddler as well as a top-notch singer and songwriter creates a warm and energetic feel on stage that demonstrates her true enjoyment of music. Zeb Snyder, a skilled multi-instrumentalist, and highly devoted musician pulls from a wide variety of musical genres such as southern rock, blues, and country, tastefully creating his own rich style. He is widely acclaimed for his lead guitar, his songwriting, and his distinctive rhythm, which he has specially developed to carry and enrich the trio's music. Supporting these gifted young musicians, their dad, Bud Snyder, holds down a rock-solid upright bass rhythm. His ability to adapt to the multiple genres that influence the band is a key ingredient of the trio's signature sound.

Second - Dom Flemons
Dom Flemons is known as "The American Songster" since his repertoire of music covers nearly 100 years of American folklore, ballads, and tunes. Flemons is a music scholar, historian, record collector and a multi-instrumentalist. He is considered an expert player on the Banjo, Fife, Guitar, Harmonica, Percussion, Quills, and Rhythm Bones. He has performed with leading musicians, such as Mike Seeger, Joe Thompson, Martin Simpson, Boo Hanks, Taj Mahal, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Guy Davis. He has been a professional touring musician for the past ten years and has traveled around the nation and the world presenting traditional folk and roots music to diverse audiences. Flemons has performed as a soloist at prestigious venues, such as Carnegie Hall, Cecil Sharp House, the Grand Ole Opry, the Opening Ceremony for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Newport Folk Festival and represented the United States at the 2017 Rainforest World Music Festival in Kuching, Malaysia. In 2017, Flemons was featured on David Holt's State of Music on PBS and performed as bluesman Joe Hill Louis on CMT's original hit television show "Sun Records."

In 2018, Flemons will release his first solo album titled "Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys" as a part of the African American Legacy Recordings series, co-produced with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Flemons is also Co-Founder of Grammy Award Winning Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Third - Balsam Range
Balsam Range ascent to the top of the Bluegrass world has left a well-marked trail of success since the band's inception in 2007. They have become one of the genre's most award-winning acts in recent years, garnering 10 International Bluegrass Media Association Awards on the heels of six critically-acclaimed albums. The group has left audiences spellbound while headlining major festivals from coast-to-coast, selling out venues across the nation and in multiple appearances at the Grand Ole Opry. Earlier this year, Balsam Range released "Mountain Overture," a collaboration with the Atlanta Pops Orchestra Ensemble that debuted on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart at #5 and the Classical Crossover Chart at #6. Their previous outing, Mountain Voodoo, debuted at #4 on the Billboard Bluegrass Albums Chart and remained on that chart for 45 weeks. Three singles from that album reached #1 on the Bluegrass Today Chart, including "Blue Collar Dreams," which spent three consecutive months at the top.

Balsam Range is; Buddy Melton (fiddle, lead and tenor vocals), Darren Nicholson (mandolin, octave mandolin, lead vocals, baritone and low tenor vocals), Dr. Marc Pruett (banjo), Tim Surrett (bass, dobro, baritone and lead vocals), and Caleb Smith (guitar, lead & baritone vocals). The five original members are all acoustic musicians and singers from western North Carolina. They thoughtfully and respectfully adopted the name of a majestic range of mountains that surround part of their home county of Haywood, NC where the Great Smoky Mountains meet the Blue Ridge, the Great Balsam Range.