Eric Bibb, Moira Smiley & The Rhizome Quartet, and more on Mountain Stage – Morgantown, WV

We are excited to return to the WVU Canady Creative Arts Center in Morgantown, WV as part of the University Arts Series.

*Paula Cole will be unable to appear as previously announced. We will be working to reschedule as soon as possible.

GUEST ARTISTS: Eric Bibb, Moira Smiley & The Rhizome Quartet, Twisted Pine, and more TBA

Since 1983, Mountain Stage has been one of the most beloved programs in public radio history. Eclectic, authentic and unpredictable, 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 surefire energy and 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 nearly 300 stations across America, and around the world via NPR Music and mountainstage.org

Tickets: $27 – $39, Students $10-$39

Eric Bibb

Born into a lineage of activism, Eric’s father, the late Leon Bibb, was a key figure in the civil rights movement, marching alongside Dr. Martin Luther King. Immersed in the Village folk scene during his youth, Eric found inspiration in the visits of luminaries like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger. Influenced deeply by the sounds of Odetta, Richie Havens, and Taj Mahal, he synthesized these elements into a style uniquely his own.

Beyond conventional genres, Bibb is labeled a bluesman, but he defies categorization, seamlessly sliding between musical realms. Grounded in the folk and blues tradition with contemporary sensibilities, Bibb’s music reflects his thoughts on current world events and his own lived experiences, whilst remaining entertaining, uplifting, inspirational and relevant.

Bibb’s catalogue is now over 40 albums strong, with his ethos exemplified in 2023’s Grammy-nominated Ridin’, which drew inspiration from the painting A Ride for Liberty by Eastman Johnson, depicting a Black family fleeing enslavement during the Civil War. His 2024 album In The Real World, recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, has just been released, receiving critical acclaim. Am I the change I long to see? Bibb asks through his music.

As Eric reflects on his musical journey, gratitude pervades. Evolution is evident in his voice and guitar playing, with his words providing grounding in truth and fostering a vision of unity amid a world filled with divisive rhetoric. Eric Bibb is more than a blues troubadour; he is a storyteller and philosopher. His legacy is not just in the notes he plays or the stages he graces but in the questions he poses and the hope he instills.

Moira Smiley & The Rhizome Quartet

Composer

An active composer and performer, Moira has written commissions for the LA Master Chorale, Conspirare, Cincinnati Vocal Arts Ensemble, Mirabai, Stile Antico, American Choral Directors Association, Voces Novae, VocalEssence, Pacific Chorale, NOTUS, Ad Astra Festival and countless others. Her arrangements and original compositions for choir – especially those with her signature body percussion – are performed by millions of singers around the world. The European premiere of Time In Our Voices was performed by the voices and mobile phones of Ars Nova Copenhagen under the direction of Paul Hillier. In 2018-2019 Moira released the album and choral songbook, Unzip The Horizon as companion to her The Voice Is A Traveler solo show. She continues composing and improvising in collaboration with artists in film, video game production, theater and dance, and her work can be heard on feature film soundtracks, BBC & PBS television programs, NPR, and on more than 70 commercial albums. Her most recent premieres include her secular liturgy, The Song Among Us for Cincinnati Vocal Arts Ensemble and Keep On for VocalEssence. Her current projects include Utopias for voices and strings, and a re-telling of Ovid’s tale of Narcissus for mobile phones and voices. A new album of folksongs with string quartet, ‘The Rhizome Project’ will be released in 2024.

“Moira Smiley is a brilliant musician – an innovative composer and arranger, and a heartbreakingly beautiful singer. Her music transcends (and expands) boundaries.”

Billy Childs – multi-grammy-winning composer/pianist

“Moira has an innate ability to capture an elemental primal feel in her music”

Thomas Baty – Choral Director

Performer

Singer / Composer Moira Smiley has toured the world and recorded with Indie-pop favorites, Tuneyards, performing with them on all the late-night TV shows (Kimmel, Colbert, Conan O’Brien, UK’s Jools Holland, etc.) and recently to re-open David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center in NYC with Chris Thile, Hilary Hahn and Brad Mehldau. She began her singing career in Baroque and Medieval music, collaborating with Paul Hillier, Fretless Consort of Viols, Dufay Collective and Sinfonye, BBC Singers and New World Symphony. As a folksinger, she’s fronted the legendary Irish-American supergroup, Solas as well as the Lomax and Folklife Projects produced by Jayme Stone, and continues to lead her own vocal collaborations as VOCO and The Voice Is A Traveler.

As a composer, she’s premiered works alongside Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen, Shara Nova, Rollo Dilworth, Reena Esmail and many others. Moira has been featured in TED conferences, on BBC Radio and TV, NPR, ABC Australia, and live at countless venues from Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall to Walt Disney Concert Hall and Royal Festival Hall. She brings vivid, embodied singing to stages tiny and grand, atop glaciers or in cozy kitchens from Taiwan to Tasmania.

Moira’s 2018 solo album ‘Unzip The Horizon’ premiered at the prestigious Savannah Music Festival in 2018, and she published its companion choral Songbook in 2019. In February of 2021, she released her vocal album ‘In Our Voices’, featuring international VOCO collaborators. A new album of folksongs with string quartet, ‘The Rhizome Project’ will be released in 2024.

“I’m so thankful I’ve had the privilege of performing and recording with Moira. She embodies the endless creative potential of the voice, and… (has made) a deeply moving body of work.”

Merrill Garbus – Tune-Yards

RHIZOME PROJECT album + book

(Preview: https://moirasmileysubscription.com/the-rhizome-project-album-book)_

An album, a collection, a bundle, a root system, a packet of seeds, a rhizome…

Making a music album — maybe especially in an era when most of us listen to singles, playlists and fragments — can invite a listener into a collection of ideas or feelings that make more sense when gathered together. Curating an album of folk songs that ‘formed me’ helps me make sense of the new sounds I create today. Gathering these songs, these stories and these pictures helps me know why certain songs (and people) keep nurturing and challenging me across decades — allowing me to remain a ‘resonant reed’.

I feel very lucky to have grown up with a sense of songs as shared treasures, like stones, shells, leaves and other tiny things gathered on a walk to share later with others. In the album’s accompanying book (The Rhizome Song Stories) are highly subjective, personal stories of one musician’s way of making sense of the world. This book accompanies The Rhizome Project album, but I also believe it can travel solo.

Several of the songs in The Rhizome Project were the first songs to allow me the confidence to sing alone, while others outlined elemental ethics that my little voice could grow into. I remember realizing sometime around age 10 that I belonged to generations of little voices raised bravely and plainly – close to the natural world, and singing in spite of our insignificance. Therefore, songs raising a hand of protest also reminded me to catch wonder and awe in the other hand.

I am a worker bee for music, an introvert and dreamer who travels to make my living. One of the lessons of being in my forties is how deeply shaped I am by the landscape and people I come home to. I look to certain neighbors and friends to remind me of the myriad creative and practical ways to be human – right here, right now, in all the mess, the ordinary, painful and precious.

The Rhizome Project celebrates all the powerful ways we are connected, though, like the rhizome roots, those connections may be hidden or forgotten.

Twisted Pine

LOVE YOUR MIND

On October 18th, Twisted Pine releases its joyous third LP, Love Your Mind, on Signature Sounds Recordings. The title represents the quartet landing on a more expansive sound than ever, after years of touring, serious introspection, bouts of self-doubt, glorious bursts of creativity, and many after-hour festival jam sessions and pickin’ till dawn.

Co-produced by the band and longtime-collaborator Dan Cardinal at his studio Dimension Sound in Boston, the record is loaded with experimental production, fearless songwriting featuring input from each member, finely crafted collaborative arrangements, playing that’s virtuosic and visceral. It’s a reflection of what the band listens to. It’s buoyant pop and delicate folk, raging old-time energy, and old-school r&b grooves.

On vinyl and on stage, the sound of Twisted Pine is unmistakable, exuberant, daring. What started as a (semi-)traditional bluegrass band in the trenches of the storied folk, bluegrass, and Americana scene in Boston a decade ago has bloomed into an ensemble of players who shapeshift across genres. Even the expansive “progressive bluegrass” label doesn’t come close to capturing their musical scope.

Chris Sartori’s upright bass anchors everything with an undeniable, articulate groove. Dan Bui’s mandolin is thick, crisp, and propulsive. Kathleen Parks’ fiddle and Anh Phung’s flute are at constant play, often augmented with effects pedals for layered musical textures, psychedelic sounds, and wild solo trading, somewhere in the territory between bluegrass and jazz. Out in front of the ensemble, Parks’ lead vocals are an instrument unto herself: equal parts mystery, power, haunt, and a search for the edges. And she’s surrounded on all sides by the voices of her bandmates, who bring on whatever harmonies, unities, whistles, and howls the night requires.

In a world that needs TLC more than ever, Twisted Pine offers a night of exultant travels across genres, across time, to mountains, cities, roadhouses, and back porches where songs bring tenderness, love and relief. All in all, this album and this tour bring the sound of a band that invites you to Love Your Mind

The McCrary Sisters

The McCrary Sisters sing gospel that melds traditional with contemporary and incorporates their influences of classic soul, Americana, blues, rock, and R&B music. Central to their work and any show is their boundless joy in singing, and a desire to spread hope, love, healing (and dancing).

Daughters of the late Rev. Samuel McCrary — a founding member of the legendary gospel quartet The Fairfield Four — Ann, Regina, Alfreda and Deborah grew up in Nashville surrounded by music, artists, community, and faith. The daughters were raised in harmony, singing at home and at their father’s church. In their formative years, the sisters had many accomplishments — individually and together — sharing in their family legacy performing with artists including Bob Dylan, Elvis, Isaac Hayes and Stevie Wonder.

In 2011, the Sisters officially formed their own group, The McCrary Sisters, and have since recorded or performed with notable artists Delbert McClinton, Black Keys, Martina McBride, Eric Church, Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller, Jonny Lang, Robert Randolph, The Winans, Donnie McClurkin, Rosanne Cash, Carrie Underwood, Hank Williams Jr., Dr. John, Widespread Panic, Sheryl Crow, Maren Morris, Gregg Allman and many more.

Their own recordings previous to these include a single “Amazing Grace” (2021), and albums A Very McCrary Christmas (2019), Live (2017), Let’s Go (2015), All The Way (2013), Our Journey (2011)

Yasmin Williams

Yasmin Williams is an innovative guitarist and composer known for her unique compositional approach and expansive instrumental style. Her latest album Acadia, released on Nonesuch Records, showcases her evolution from solo performer to collaborative artist, featuring partnerships with notable musicians like Aoife O’Donovan and Immanuel Wilkins.

Williams’ distinctive creative process involves “ruminating” on single notes until compositions naturally emerge. Beyond traditional fingerpicked guitar, she demonstrates mastery of multiple instruments including kora, harp guitar, banjo, and electric guitar. Her music, while rooted in folk traditions, transcends conventional structures to incorporate elements of progressive rock and experimental composition.

Following her acclaimed 2021 album Urban Driftwood, Acadia represents a significant artistic expansion, featuring three distinct sections that move from traditional folk influences to atmospheric soundscapes and experimental arrangements. Williams’ approach emphasizes sustained tones and intricate articulation, creating music that balances technical precision with ethereal, floating melodies.

ABOUT YASMIN WILLIAMS

Yasmin Williams, raised in Woodbridge, Virginia, grew up surrounded by music. Inspired by a wide range of artists—from Chuck Brown to Jimi Hendrix—she began developing her innovative fingerstyle acoustic guitar technique while studying music theory and composition at NYU.

Williams has released two previous albums, Unwind (2018) and Urban Driftwood (2021), where she introduced unique approaches, such as playing kalimba and guitar simultaneously. She also incorporates instruments like the kora, harp guitar, and banjo. Despite her use of folk instruments, she resists being categorized within the genre, valuing creative freedom over conformity. Her latest record, Acadia, is out now via Nonesuch Records