Topics Related to Come Hear NC

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Etta Baker is one of North Carolina’s most famous Piedmont blues guitarists. Born in Caldwell County, she started learning guitar from her father when she was three. Her masterful, emotive pickin’ first appeared in 1956 on the album Instrumental Music from the Southern Appalachians, but it took 35 years before her next recording - and first solo record - One Dime Blues appeared. That album arose from many years of recording sessions produced by Wayne Martin, our host of “Director’s Cut.”

Caroline Shaw masterfully stitches together sound, ideas, and genres.

Happy spring! I hope you’ve been getting out to enjoy the wondrous arts our state offers.

Lenora Zenzalai Helm Hammonds is a singer, songwriter, composer, educator, and activist who has earned international acclaim for six solo recordings and is one of a handful of female, African American big band leaders.

The scene is now iconic; four young Black men, students at the Historically Black North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro sat down at a segregated lunch counter in a local Woolworth’s department store. In the aftermath, their actions – in ways that we wouldn’t fully understand for decades – went “viral”, inspiring a generation of young Americans, Black and White, to challenge the racial status quo of the American South. Among those who were paying attention was a North Carolina native son, raised in Brooklyn, named Max Roach.

Songs We Love is a weekly podcast series partnership between Come Hear NC and WUNC that explores North Carolina music one song at a time. On this episode from February, Yep Roc recording artist Tift Merritt talks with Eric Hodge about Townes Van Zandt's "Greensboro Woman."

Carolina Shaw | Photo by Kait Moreno.

In the world of classical music, bricolage is the name of the game.

Earl Scruggs and his powerful, groundbreaking banjo style transformed the world of country string band music, helped create bluegrass, and took this style beyond the South into the central strands of American culture.

Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington’s longtime collaborator, was among the most influential figures in American jazz. A versatile composer, arranger, and pianist, Strayhorn joined Ellington’s orchestra at age 22 in 1939 and worked with the bandleader the rest of his life.  

NC State LIVE co-commissioned David Roussève/REALITY’s latest work, Halfway to Dawn, a jubilant dance-theater piece that celebrates all facets of the jazz composer’s rich and complicated life that will be performed at Stewart Theatre on the campus of NC State on Saturday, March 2.

Before there was Bon Iver or Megafaun, Justin Vernon, Phil Cook, Brad Cook, and Joe Westerlund existed as the folk group DeYarmond Edison. Their short-lived, Raleigh N.C. based tenure gained a cult following, and their 2006 split resulted in a creative micro-burst. The Cook Brothers and Westerlund formed the freak-folk trio Megafaun and Justin Vernon retreated to his home state of Wisconsin to create his now world-famous indie act Bon Iver.