Topics Related to Women of NC

Alice Gerrard | Photo by Irene Young.Alice Gerrard is a living legend. A musician, writer, and traditional music advocate, Alice is known for her work with Appalachian singer Hazel Dickens and has appeared on recordings with the likes of Tommy Jarrell and Matokie Slaughter. She performed a song written by her grandson at the 2018 kick-off of the Oxford American's North Carolina Music Issue.

Alexis Raeana | Photo by Sandra Davidson.

In November 2018 the Oxford American launched its North Carolina Music Issue with a series of concerts across the state. In this video, North Carolina Heritage Award Recipient Sister Lena Mae Perry leads a group of musicians from Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill in a rousing rendition of "This Little Light of Mine," at the Fletcher Opera House in Raleigh. Performers include: Sister Lena Mae Perry, Tift Merritt, H.C. McEntire, M.C. Taylor, Chatham County Line, Brian Horton, Phil Cook, Big Ron Hunter, Alice Gerrard and Brevan Hampden.

NEW PODCAST EPISODE!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.

In 2018, Jaki Shelton Green made history as North Carolina’s first African American poet laureate. The North Carolina poet laureate is an ambassador of the power of poetry and the written word to illuminate, educate, entertain, and transform the minds and hearts of people of all ages and from all walks of life.

Lately, Rhiannon Giddens has been telling her kids to enjoy being bored. The quiet, idle moments of her own childhood on Grand Oaks Drive in McLeansville, N.C. sharpened the very imagination and creativity so many have come to know her for.  “We were really bored, and we spent a lot of time outside just trying to make something out of nothing,” says Rhiannon of she and her sister’s upbringing in the small community outside of Greensboro. “That’s usually where good stuff comes.”

Jaki Shelton Green and her poetry are both deeply rooted in the North Carolina experience. As our state’s first African American poet laureate, her words soar while keeping us close to the earth: the touch, the smell and the sound of the everyday are made holy in Green’s writing.

Carolina Shaw | Photo by Kait Moreno.In the world of classical music, bricolage is the name of the game.

As a little girl who grew up playing house in tree forts while also staging living room concerts with a hairbrush as a microphone, I was taught by the world around me that these two paths were mutually exclusive. Later, as I ventured into my twenties majoring in music and pursuing a career in the arts, I was told by a mentor of mine, “You can have it all – you just can’t have it all at once.” Times are changing. Recently, I have worked with several artists who have been able to balance motherhood and a creative career.