![]() Beneath Dori Freeman’s still surface, there’s a multi-generational story of regional culture and relevant, observational folk music. Her own father, the mandolin player, teaches music for a living too. She’s raising an eight-year-old daughter there with her husband, Nick Falk, an in-demand drummer (Molly Tuttle, Hiss Golden Messenger) and a teacher for the Floyd Country Store Handmade Music School. Tiny Galax, population 7,000, works for her, and indeed it is a major music city, with its famous annual Old Fiddler’s Convention (approaching its 100th year), with its Blue Ridge Music Center and its address along the Crooked Road roots music highway. “It’s just kind of been a very used up part of the U.S.”īut it’s home and she’s not moving, to Nashville or any other music Mecca. “I wanted to write a song about how important the region is to me and how influential it's been on me growing up, but also I wanted to be realistic and acknowledge some of the issues that exist in Appalachia because of how overlooked the area has historically been,” she says, citing mining companies that take without giving back and manufacturing firms that built communities shipping jobs overseas. She goes on in the song Appalachian to describe the ease with which outsiders demean or exploit her people without much thought. “I’m an Appalachian, I’m a Cripple Creek pearl/ I’m a can to ash in, for the rest of the world,” she sang, using a sharp inner rhyme to foreground a mixture of inherited pride and shame. And one of the songs she sang that day in the Blue Ridge sunshine took the matter on directly. Nashville is enjoying a heyday of artists who are from Appalachia, Freeman has, over the five-plus years she’s been on the national stage, remained decidedly of Appalachia. It surges with feeling and a graceful mountain warble and a tender break that marks it as country whatever she does with it. Dori Freeman’s alto is clear but complex. If her emcee work is subdued, her singing voice sparkles in marked contrast. Well-known for her understated stage presence, Freeman told the audience that her new album was being released that day as if the event was little more extraordinary than picking up her daughter from school. ![]() Her duet partner, in one of several sets she had planned for the festival, was her dad, playing mandolin. ![]() Dori Freeman, who lives less than 100 miles away in Galax, VA, stood on a stage beneath a mural of The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion was just getting started on a recent Friday on the border of Tennessee and Virginia. ![]()
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