Sarah Jarosz, Jill Andrews, and more on Mountain Stage
About this Event
We are excited to record this episode of Mountain Stage at The Schaefer Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of Appalachian State University in Boone, NC!
GUEST ARTISTS: Sarah Jarosz, Missy Raines & Allegheny, Jill Andrews, Andrina Turenne, and more TBA
Tickets: $20-$45
*Tickets go on sale Wednesday, Sept. 2 at 10am ET
$45 Tier 1
$35 Tier 2
$30 App State Faculty/Staff
$20 Child/Student
Contact [email protected], call 828-262-4046, visit the box office at the Schaefer Center for the Performing Arts, or purchase online
About Mountain Stage: Since 1983, Mountain Stage has been one of the most beloved programs in public radio history. Eclectic and authentic, the show’s varied guests have included iconic artists from John Prine and Townes Van Zandt to Wilco and Phish. Under the leadership of Grammy Award-winning country and bluegrass star Kathy Mattea since 2021, Mountain Stage continues to bring music discovery to parts known and unknown.
Produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed by NPR Music, each two-hour episode is recorded in front of a live audience and can be heard every week on over 200 stations across America, and around the world via NPR Music and mountainstage.org.
Jill Andrews
From her years in the Everybodyfields to her critically acclaimed solo career, to her latest collaboration, Hush Kids, which she co-founded with Nashville songwriter and producer, Peter Groenwald, Andrews has delivered irresistibly melodic, genre-bending music for nearly two decades. Anchored by frank songwriting but continuously and unapologetically evolving, Andrews’ tape deck currently hosts a range of influences from Joni Mitchell to Diana Ross to the Beatles to contemporaries, Gregory Alan Isakov and St. Vincent. The result is bold, infectious, introspective music that has served as the backdrop to some of America’s most beloved television series, including Grey’s Anatomy, This Is Us, Nashville, and Wynonna Earp, to which she composed the theme.
“Andrews’ songs are beautifully crafted, and the production molds even the more
pensive selections into minor masterpieces”
— American Songwriter
The seventh full-length from four-time Grammy Award-winner Sarah Jarosz, Polaroid Lovers is an album-long meditation on those strangely ephemeral moments that indelibly shape our lives. “What I love about a Polaroid is that it's capturing something so fleeting, but at the same time it makes that moment last forever,” says the Texas-born singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist. “It made sense as a title for a record where all the songs are snapshots of different love stories, and there's a feeling of time being expansive despite that impermanence.” Thanks to the rarefied alchemy that infuses all of Jarosz's output—her finely wrought lyricism, ravishing vocal work, virtuosic yet unfettered musicality—Polaroid Lovers performs the much-needed magic of leading us toward a heightened sense of presence, all while casting a lovely spell with her timelessly powerful songs.
There’s something of Missy Raines in every song she records or performs. Whether she wrote it herself or selected it from another songwriter, she’s lived inside the story and the sound. And she wants you to experience it alongside her.
Love & Trouble, Raines’ latest album with her band Allegheny, offers views from the highest peaks of her native West Virginia and from the deepest hollers of heartbreak. The 10 songs come to life with people, places, and stories that have caught her heart during her five-decade journey in bluegrass and beyond.
“Who I am,” Raines reflects, “is because of what I've been through, what I've seen and experienced, what I've loved, what I've been moved by.”
As a kid, Raines often traveled with her family to festivals in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., the beating heart of bluegrass in the 1960s and 70s. She’d dabbled in piano and guitar, but when her father bought a bass for himself when she was 10, she picked it up and never let it go. (The same bass is still her primary instrument now.) She started performing as a young teenager, and since then she’s played with some of the greats across several generations: Mac Wiseman, Kenny Baker, Eddie Adcock, Bobby Osborne, Alison Brown, Bill Evans, Laurie Lewis, and Claire Lynch, to name a few. In her 40s, she took on the mantle of bandleader, cementing her own legacy in the bluegrass world.
In 1998, she became the first woman to win IBMA’s Bass Player of the Year award, and she’s won that title another nine times since, as well as IBMA awards for collaborative projects with a wide range of her bluegrass peers and a Grammy nomination for her 2018 album, Royal Traveller. Her stature and her sparkle made her a well-received host of the 2024 IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards show alongside fellow bassist John Cowan.
Nearly all the songs on Love & Trouble are rooted in some moment along her path, in the people and places and feelings she wants to share with her audience for the kind of connection that lasts.
“Yanceyville J*il” stems from one of Raines’ earliest memories of bluegrass, or at least from the backstory behind it. It was the early 1970s, and she was a kid in the audience at the storied Camp Springs, North Carolina, bluegrass festival. When Jimmy Martin’s set time rolled around, festival promoter Carlton Haney walked onstage and explained that Martin wasn’t going to be performing that evening, though he’d rejoin the festivities the following day. “You’re not going to hear Jimmy sing tonight,” Raines, in a near-perfect mimic of Haney’s North Carolina drawl, recalls him explaining, “because Jimmy’s gonna spend the night in the Yanceyville J*il.” The way she’s heard it, there was a backstage scuffle between Martin and Haney before the set. The ground was muddy and tempers were high, ripe conditions for a juicy bit of bluegrass lore. Decades later, Raines has committed the story to song, told from Martin’s imagined perspective: “I’ve been in hard liquor and soft red clay / And I’ve been in some trouble here today / Roll and tumble tooth and nail / I ain’t going to the Yanceyville J*il.”
Sometimes it’s like that — the story, and the song, almost writes itself. But Raines is just as adept at creating something entirely new, often from just one little spark.
The spark for “Eula Dorsey,” a co-write with Tony Rackley, was simply hearing the name in passing during a conversation with a friend. The real-life story didn’t linger, but the colorful name wouldn’t let Raines go. Fresh from her first-ever trip to Scotland, Raines was reflecting on the ties between Scotland and West Virginia, and the vast history of immigrants in America. That all came together for a story she applied to the Eula Dorsey in her mind. It is not a happy story. But it allows Raines’ voice to expand to its fullest power, and it offers a significant twist on the M**der ballad trope. “I wasn’t interested,” Raines says, “in writing another song about a woman being victimized and not having an option out.”
While some of her songs have deep roots in the past, Raines turns her keenest observations to our present day. “Coal Black Water,” about mountaintop removal mining, is the latest in a string of songs she’s selected to shine a light on the damage done to rural people in rural places by human-driven forces. (See also: “Who Needs a Mine?”, a hard look at the opioid addiction epidemic from her previous album, Highlander.) The lyrics of “Coal Black Water,” written by Nathan Bell, describe pieces of mountain blasting into the valleys, into the sky, into the streams, and along with them the past and future of people living nearby. “This world isn’t fit for beast or human,” Raines sings over a cascading, foreboding melody, “but we live like men and we work like women / And hope for better for our sons and our daughters / who are born just to drown in coal black water.”
Throughout her career, Raines has chosen her musical collaborators as carefully as she chooses her songs. On Love & Trouble, her fifth album for Compass Records and third produced by label head Alison Brown, she’s joined by California bluegrass pioneers Kathy Kallick and Laurie Lewis (“Anywhere the Wind Blows”) and Sister Sadie’s Deanie Richardson on fiddle on “Future on Ice.” And she was just as deliberate in choosing the members of her band, Allegheny. Ben Garnett (guitar), Eli Gilbert (banjo), Ellie Hakanson (fiddle), and Tristan Scroggins (mandolin) are a generation or so younger than Raines, but the bridge between them is a shared understanding of bluegrass and the possibilities within its traditions.
“Their love of traditional bluegrass runs as deep as mine does,” she says. “They’ve studied and listened to it and are moved by it in the same way that I am.” But even with that reverence for what’s come before, they’re not afraid to innovate.
Raines herself has built a career on finding new ways to see both the music she loves and the world around her. Much of that comes from not only playing with younger musicians, but also listening to what they have to say.
“I hate to use the cliché ‘It keeps me young,’” she says, “but it does make me keep thinking. It keeps my mind open and working and critically thinking. And I want to always continue to do that. I really don't want to end up in a place where I see things in just one way.”
Allegheny is Ben Garnett on guitar, Eli Gilbert on banjo, Ellie Hakanson on fiddle, and Tristan Scroggins on mandolin. The band is named for the Allegheny highlands of West Virginia where Raines grew up. This band is a significant nod to her deep traditional bluegrass roots. The music is traditional and hard-driving at its core but energized with Raines’ well-known penchant for originality and innovation.
“I grew up in West Virginia, just a few miles from the historic C&O Canal, the headwaters of the Potomac River, and the Maryland and Pennsylvania state lines. Geographically, it was a pretty straight shot down ‘out of the hills’ to the Washington DC, Baltimore, and northern Virginia areas and my family would travel there as much as possible to hear all the incredible bluegrass that was being made there during the 60’s and the 70’s. Washington, D.C. was a hotbed of bluegrass (both traditional and progressive) at the time with bands like Bob Paisley & Ted Lundy, Del McCoury and the Dixie Pals, the Country Gentlemen, and the Seldom Scene. All of that music affected me deeply then and today I’m having the time of life letting those influences shine through with this band, Allegheny.”
Andrina Turenne is an acclaimed singer-songwriter from Winnipeg. Her songs, in both French and English, explore themes of home, nature, connection to each other, and connection to ourselves and the land. Andrina’s solo debut Bold as Logs was released in the spring of 2023, charting on independent radio across Canada and the United States. She followed up in 2024 with Je suis un arbre, a Francophone EP that earned her a nomination for Francophone Artist of the Year at the Western Canadian Music Awards.
Andrina co-founded Chic Gamine, the vocal group that won the 2009 Juno for Roots Album of the Year and toured across Canada, the US, the UK, and Germany, opening for Smokey Robinson and Lake Street Dive.
Her bilingual solo debut, Bold As Logs (2023), charted on independent radio in both Canada and the US, and she followed it with Je suis un arbre in 2024.
She moves between English and French seamlessly — warm, rootsy, and built for exactly the kind of music discovery Mountain Stage does best!
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