The concert benefits the Friends of the Cumberland, a non-profit created to sup-port the development of the Cumberland Trail State Scenic Trail and its related natural areas and park lands.

The Friends contribute to the protection of natural beauty and unrivaled bio-diversity, impressive historic structures and priceless archaeological heritage, and celebrate the cultural heritage of the people and communities who neighbor the Cumberland Trail.

The Cumberland Trail Suite:

A gala benefit concert at the gorgeous Tivoli Theater in Downtown on Friday, March 22nd 7:30- 10:00 pm.

Musicians’ Profiles

Emma Bell Miles artworkCourtesy of the Chattanooga Public Library

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Hosting and Performing~Tim O’Brien:

Tim O’Brien does it all, with musical gifts that leave his audiences in awe. He can fill an auditorium standing singly beside an assemblage of instruments, but he’s of-ten paired with other master musicians, the best of their time. His virtuosity has humble beginnings in West Virginia. He absorbed his parent’s Perry Como re-cords and the Lawrence Welk Show, but abandoned them for Dylan. He plugged away at the Peter Gunn Theme on a box guitar, until his paper route afforded an electric guitar. With ten rock numbers and some school friends, he became a performer. He kept the box, though, tinkering with acoustic and folk music. At age 16 an aunt passed on her violin to Tim.

Two years later, a mandolin and Sing Out! tablature led him to explore a multitude of old-time fiddle tunes. By 1978, he was a charter member of Hot Rize, launching a 12-year career as a fiddler, singer, and mandolinist in the internationally acclaimed bluegrass band. It was perhaps the most successful group carrying progressive sounds forward, while acknowledging bluegrass’s root music, plus making some fun as a counterfeit western swing and country band, Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers. Tim O’Brien’s music remains an assemblage of very original compositions, tones, techniques, and melodies from lost times and new minds. He’s twice been honored by the International Bluegrass Music Association as Male Vocalist of the Year, and has a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album, Fiddler’s Green. His abundant voice captures everyone’s attention, and is heard on the soundtrack of the film Cold Mountain. Partnerships on stage or record with Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, Steve Martin, Bela Fleck, Mark Knopfler, and The Chieftans have creat-ed extraordinary new music, and his own compositions have been recorded by The Dixie Chicks, Garth Brooks, Kathy Mattea, and Nickel Creek. Tim O’Brien has previously performed in Chattanooga, riverside, at the 3 Sisters Bluegrass Festival.

Hosting and Performing~Rhiannon Giddens:

Rhiannon Giddens didn’t know what to expect when she traveled to the first Black Ban-jo Gathering at Appalachian State University in 2005. In a day, she met the musicians that changed her life. Joe Thompson was there, an African-American fiddler born in 1918, who lived not far from her home in the North Carolina Piedmont. A street musician named Dom Flemons also showed up, and the soaring and raucus style of the Carolina Chocolate Drops roared out. A music critic put it this way, “The minute the Carolina Chocolate Drops were formed, the American music landscape was a much better place.” The Drops have since pro-duced six albums, including a Grammy-wining project entitled Genuine Negro Jig. Rhiannon grew up with the folk-style sound of Sweet Honey in the Rock, Disney classics, and some Segovia in the house. Love of singing led her to the distinguished Oberlin Conservancy for classical training, and hard work cast her in leading roles in their operas. She was also taken in by sounds that were less formal, like Celtic fiddling and old-time music. When she discovered the banjo’s African identity, she searched for a means to explore all the history and music that surrounded its mysteries. Her songwriting and arrangements have been lauded for their complicated, entangled, genre references, all at once down home, modern, hip, and showy. Rhiannon and her band just might change the future of acoustic music.

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Fletcher Bright: Tony Trischka, “the Godfather of New Acoustic Music” has named Fletcher Bright as his “favor-ite fiddler in the country” to play beside at a jam session- quite an endorsement! Fletcher Bright is the Chattanooga fiddler, and Chattanooga’s greatest supporter of traditional and bluegrass music. Playing for the National Folk Festival and the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra, teaching fiddle workshops from Canada to England, creating and producing the 3 Sisters Bluegrass Festival/Bluegrass on the River, and receiving the Governor’s Award in the Arts–all reflect a lifetime of generosity, good humor, and great music.

Ed “Doc” Cullis has played banjo with Fletcher for 65 years, since he was a 7th grader and Fletcher a senior at McCallie. Doc witnessed the entire evolution of bluegrass banjo, and joined along, starting with rock-solid Scruggs-style when it was a modern wonder, then taking melodic forays after Bill Keith introduced a new style almost 20 years later. Some other members of the invincible Dismembered Tennesseans will be hand – the full band includes Laura Walker (bass), Bobby Martin (guitar), Don Cassell (mandolin) and Brian Blaylock (dobro and guitar).

The Chattanooga Choral Society for the Preservation of African American Song: Perhaps America’s first great contribution to the body of world music is found in the spirituals and camp meeting songs that gave power and freedom to our vernacular and popular music. The Chattanooga Choral Society (CCS) for the Preservation of African American Song is a group formed for the purpose of preserving the rich heritage of African American songs with special emphasis on the Negro spirituals.

This diverse group is comprised of approximately 45 members with different professional backgrounds including students, professors, professional musicians, and others that all share a love of music and a desire to perform it with an emphasis on quality. The Society has performed at the Tivoli with the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra, and at colleges and churches in the region.

Featured Musicians of the Cumberlands

Ed Brown: Ed became a cult hero among progressive 5-string banjoists with two extraordinary albums in the early 1970s, Magnum Banjos, then Sequel to Magnum Banjos. These were among of the most impressive and advanced double and triple banjo arrangements on record in that early progressive era, released on Ed’s personal and obscure label, Sequatchie Records. Bobby Thompson, Nashville’s revered banjo pioneer, became the third banjo on the Sequel album. No overdubbing, of course.

Music has been Ed’s profession all of his life, but he’s remained at home in the Sequatchie Valley, while playing out at theaters, churches, and festivals, and teaching more than one generation of Sequatchie Valley musicians. He established a community amphitheater, and launched the Dunlap Coke Ovens Festival, and has performed at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife. With his father, Ray “Georgia Boy” Brown, he recorded and performed with Fiddling Bob Douglas, one of our region’s most influential musicians.

Earl T. Bridgeman: Earl is the last living bluesman in the Sequatchie Valley. His father, Shorty Bridgeman, was a well-loved African-American fiddler who played for white dances alongside Jess Young, “the Fiddlin’ Coal Miner,” who made fiddle records for Columbia in the 1920s. His uncle fascinated Earl with bottleneck blues guitar, and his family was ingrained with the music of Mt. Zion Baptist Church.

After high school, Earl T. joined the Navy, and picked up the sound of the great bluesmen of the 50s. He took his guitar and harp around the world, performing at sailor’s hangouts in ports of call, or jamming below deck. Earl’s son, who lives on the West Coast, has performed throughout the US and Europe for years as “Earl Thomas,” leading a

blues & soul band, often Grammy nominated. They’ve teamed up together from time to time, recently on a Caribbean “blues cruise” where Earl took his blues back to sea.

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Downer and Williams: The Old Time Travelers Continued:

Matt began recording his grandfather’s music and the overlooked fiddlers and singers from the region in 1998. He eventually contacted Ron Williams, the pioneering folk music fieldworker in Hamilton County, and then joined his stringband, Citico, for five years. Clark Williams, discovered Citico in a downtown Chattanooga club, and soon began playing with Matt and Daniel Binkley. Raised on classical music in Maryville, Tennessee, Clark has mastered many musical styles, composing and per-forming with Big Kitty Sector 9 (psychedelic folk rock) and The Fixins (original rock and roll). During the summer months, Downer and Williams perform at Rock City six hours a day, three days a week, the hardest working musicians in old-time music. Meredith Goins: At age 23, Meredith has been a fiddler “all her life,” developing a strik-ing, progressive style, while connected to the great tunes and great fiddlers that resided in her Sequatchie Valley. Her father, Spencer Todd Goins, also a central figure in the Valley’s musical circles, began teaching Meredith when she was three.

Meredith played with Fiddling Bob Douglas during his nonagenarian years, and regularly joined Ed Brown, and the host of expert musicians at the Mountain Opry at Signal Mountain. She’s been a fiddler for Lou Wamp’s bands, for Cumberland Gap Connection, and has performed on the Grand Ole Opry with the “Father of Hillbilly Jazz,” Vasser Clements. Since graduating from the Department of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University, she has resided in Virginia, teaching music, performing, and touring with Jeff Brown & Still Lonesome a top-level bluegrass band with traditional roots.

Clyde Davenport: Clyde has been honored as one of America’s greatest traditional art-ists, receiving the National Heritage Fellow-ship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992. Since his early 19th century fiddle style came to light, he’s performed at Presidential inaugurations, at the Library of Congress, and for the Smithsonian In-stitution. At age 92, he still makes good fiddles, and has guided a raft of rare and beautiful tunes into the 21st Century. The sweeping, brooding notes of his open-tuned fiddle pieces were heard in Civil War times, and he will play from the repertoire of his father and his grandfather, a veteran who fought at the Battle of Mill Springs. It is rare, indeed, to hear that music through a source so close to those ancient battles.

Joseph Decosimo: Performing the repertoire and styles of the Cumberland Plateau masters has been a serious devotion for Joseph Decosimo, a Signal Mountain native. He met Fiddling Bob Douglas at the Mountain Opry and searched out Roy Acuff’s fiddling cousin, Charlie Acuff, while still high school student. Joseph served as a trail crew leader and a folklorist for the Cumberland Trail two summers during his early college days, and performed on the Cumberland Trail’s first album project, Sandrock and Pine Rosin.

Joseph has been a featured musician at the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington, the

Berkeley Old Time Music Convention, and the Swannanoa Gathering near Asheville, NC. In 2010 he won the All Southern Fiddling Championship in Chattanooga, a contest crown that had been taken in 1928 one of his inspirations, Fiddling Bob Douglas. In 2012, Joseph released his first album, Sequatchie Valley. Now a faculty member in the Department of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University, his students gain an uncommon understanding of the music and heritage of the Cumberland Plateau.

Downer and Williams: The Old Time Travelers: This duo delivers the souped-up and blues-soaked styles associated with the wild string bands that ruled between Atlanta and Chattanooga in the 1920s. Matt Downer was raised on the Sand Mountain, the Alabama extension of the Cumberland Plateau, and a hot bed of traditional music. At age 16, he was playing dobro with his grandfather, just a few houses down from the Loudermilk homeplace, the boyhood home of country music legends, Charlie and Ira Louvin.

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Tom and Charlie McCarroll, Tammi McCarroll-Burroughs: The surviving sons of Jimmy McCarroll, one of the greatest fiddlers from the Golden Age of hillbilly records, Tom and Charlie are two of the last great fiddlers connected to that era by blood and lifelong devotion. Leader of The Roane County Ramblers, Jimmy composed “The Hometown Blues” which became played under many cover names, including “Goin’ Down the Lee Highway,” “Lee Highway Blues,” “New Lee Highway Blues,” “Opry Blues,” “Fiddler’s Blues” and others. Mainer’s Mountaineers, Bob Douglas, Curly Fox, Arthur Smith, Chubby Wise, Scotty Stoneman, Doc Watson, and David Bromberg all popularized the tune, bringing into the common language of acoustic musicians.

Tom raised his daughter, Tammie, as he was raised, performing on stage since early childhood, playing weekly radio broadcasts, and keeping the family tunes in circulation. With Jimmy, they appeared in a music scene in a Hollywood film with Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn, a distinctive moment in the history of traditional American music. Charlie McCarroll spent his youth playing with his father and Uncle George McCarroll at square dances, contests, and stage shows. He played bluegrass and old-time music in Alabama, and Morgan and Roane counties in Tennessee, becoming a revered carrier of a style and repertoire that represents Tennessee’s finest music traditions.

Chris Ryan: Georgia-born Chris Ryan was eight years old in 1995 when he moved to Hiawassee, one of the last addresses on the state map shared by an 85-year-old master of old-time fiddle and banjo, the tobacco-splattered, high-spirited Ross Brown. The Hiawassee Opry was the kind of place where a kid could admire an old man, and, at first sight, Chris wanted a banjo. His grandparents got him one, along with a Ross Brown fiddle tape, and, two years later, little Chris and old Ross were playing at the same benefit shows.

Chris Ryan’s old-time music is bold and beautiful, old and original. He started playing classical piano by ear at age five, then some of Georgia’s most traditional music by age twelve. After entering the music program at Brevard College, Chris got hooked on ragtime, blues, and the North Georgia fiddling style. All the old music - from the stage or from the sticks - seemed right. During the past five years, original tunes and new appendages for classic tunes have crammed his head, filled with clever movements. He moved into Chattanooga in 2011, following the footsteps of Georgia fiddle hero, Lowe Stokes, to play the dances, shows, programs, and contests, and to teach music at the Folk School of Chattanooga. Sandrock Recordings is releasing Uptown Gals, his solo album, at this event. Van Burchfield accompanies Chris on guitar tonight.

Booker T. Scruggs Ensemble: Booker T. Scruggs is a Chattanooga institution. He has a distinguished career as a professor and administrator at UTC, has received the Local Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Association of Negro Musicians, and has host-ed the longest running, locally produced, public affairs broad-cast in the world, first aired in 1954. His flowing clarinet lines have been heard in every

corner of Chattanooga, as he’s performed jazz, standards, and gospel music at festi-vals, colleges, churches, and community gatherings of every sort. He is a clarinetist with the Chattanooga Clarinet Choir, and a saxophonist with the Chattanooga Gospel Orchestra and the Spectrum Jazz Band. The Ensemble includes Nancy Westmoreland (piano); William Price (bass); Michael Hale (guitar) and Greg Malone (drums).

Nancy Foreman Westmoreland: began playing piano at age six in the St. Matthews Baptist Church in Guthrie Oklaho-ma, a church established by her grandfather who ran in the land rush of 1889. In Las Vegas, she met and married Phil Westmoreland, a Chattanooga native and a major-league blues and soul guitarist who toured and/or recorded with Albert King, Curtis Mayfield, Fontella Bass, and many oth-ers at Chess Studios in Chicago, Illinois. Phil was a Board director for the Las Vegas Blues Society, and Nancy had been raised on her mother’s beloved stacks of blues LPs – they soon had their own Vegas blues show. For two years Nancy toured, also, with the Buck Ram Platters, a descen-dent group, organized by one of rock and soul’s greatest songwriters and producers, who developed and managed the original Hall of Fame group, The Platters. Since her husband returned to Chattanooga, Nancy has played for area churches, peformed with the Booker T. Scruggs Ensemble, and recently accompanied jazz and blues diva Joan Faulkner at a Tivoli appearance.