Live Music ~ An Evening with Joe Newberry
209 W. Trish Knight St.
20 dollars suggested donation at door. Come early, seats will be first come first serve. Tuesday March 19th 730 p.m.
Known around the world for his clawhammer banjo playing, Joe Newberry is also a powerful guitarist, singer and songwriter. The Gibson Brothers’ version of his song “Singing As We Rise,” featuring guest vocalist Ricky Skaggs, won the IBMA “Gospel Recorded Performance” Award. With Eric Gibson, he shared the IBMA “Song of the Year” Award for “They Called It Music.”
A longtime and frequent guest on A Prairie Home Companion, he was a featured singer on the Transatlantic Sessions 2016 tour of the U.K. with fiddler Aly Bain and Dobro master Jerry Douglas, and at the Transatlantic Session’s debut at Merlefest in 2017 with fellow singers James Taylor, Sarah Jarosz, Declan O’Rourke, Karen Matheson, and Maura O’Connell. In addition to performing solo, he plays in a duo with mandolin icon Mike Compton, and also performs with the dynamic fiddler and step-dancer April Verch.
Newberry has taught banjo, guitar, singing, songwriting, and performance coaching at numerous camps and festivals, including Ashokan, Midwest Banjo Camp, American Banjo Camp, the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, Targhee Music Camp, the Swannanoa Gathering, Centrum Voice Works, the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, Pinewoods Camp, Vocal Week, Bluegrass Week, and Old-Time Week at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, WV, the Australia National Folk Festival, the Blue Ridge Old-Time Music Week, and the Bluff Country Gathering. He was for many years the coordinator of Old-Time Week at the Augusta Heritage Center.
Growing up in a family full of singers and dancers, he took up the guitar and banjo as a teenager and learned fiddle tunes from great Missouri fiddlers. Newberry moved to North Carolina as a young man and quickly became an anchor of the incredible music scene in the state. Still going strong more than 40 years later, he does solo and studio work, and plays and teaches at festivals and workshops in North America and abroad