Daniel Coston knows a thing or two about North Carolina music. The photographer and writer has documented our state's music community since 1995.
Topics Related to Come Hear NC
While Mount Airy is best known as the hometown of American actor Andy Griffith (and the prototype for the fictional town, Mayberry), it has always had an underground. Founded in 1948, hometown station WPAQ served as a sanctuary and tributary for the early bluegrass pickers that emerged from the surrounding hills and hollers. By the mid-1960’s, Mount Airy had a handful of record labels to circulate the sounds of regional artists. One such label, Tornado Records, holds the distinction of issuing “Thoughts of a Madman” by the Nomads, which became canon in the genre of garage rock.
Donaldson Toussaint L'Ouverture Byrd II aka Donald Byrd is probably most remembered as a Detroit City born Hard Bop maestro. In the mid-1970s Byrd began to collaborate with the Mizell Brothers -- Larry and Fonce -- to chart a new direction for Jazz and Funk music that would reverberate a generation later in the music of Hip-Hop Acts like GURU of Gangstarr and Main Source.
On February 28th, 1964, Thelonious Monk graced the cover of Time Magazine. The essay within, “The Loneliest Monk” by Barry Farrell, reinforces the imagery of the cover – painting monk as a mysteriously dark, but brilliant innovator.
To read the article published 55 years ago today.
Willie French Lowery was born in 1944 in Robeson County, N.C. During his career, he published over 500 songs and his groups “Plant and See” and “Lumbee” toured with the likes of the Allman Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, and Canned Heat. Beyond his musical prowess, Lowery was a pillar of North Carolina’s Lumbee community, serving as an activist, educator, and tradition-bearer of his tribe’s heritage.
Sister Lena Mae Perry says music is like medicine. She would know. At 80-years-old, Sister Perry has helmed the Branchettes, a celebrated gospel group from Johnston County, North Carolina, for decades. To see her perform is to witness the healing powers of music, and, at risk of cliché, to be taken to church.
Born in Johnston County in 1940, she grew up in a farming family that deeply valued education, faith, and music.
From negro spirituals to the blues, Black Southerners historically have relied on music to document the social ills of America and resist state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies.
Since 1989, the State of North Carolina, through the North Carolina Arts Council, has honored dozens of folk artists with the North Carolina Heritage Award. Throughout 2019, we will highlight the eminent musicians honored with the award. Today, we republish the official N.C. Heritage Award profile of the Wilson Brothers, a gospel duo from the western part of the state who received the award in 1998.
Back home in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s, I used to listen to a jazz radio show called “En Clave de Jazz” where the DJ played music by artists such as Tito Puente, Cal Tjader and Bobby Hutcherson. It was through that program that I discover the marimba! At the time, I had no idea what that instrument was or where I could learn it but I immediately felt in love with its sound. Then in 1994, I started taking marimba lessons at the Escuela Libre de Música in Caguas, Puerto Rico; from there I went to the Puerto Rico Music Conservatory and eventually to the University of North Texas.
Story From our Friends at the Blue Ridge Music Trails