Backwoods Beat Music Festival
Come to Northwest North Carolina and enjoy a day filled with Mountains, Music, and More!
Join us for a day of songwriting workshops from 9am - Noon at the Alleghany Campus of Wilkes Community College. The morning workshops are followed with an evening Songwriting Competition and performances by John McCutcheon and Gretchen Peters.
Saturday, June 23, 2018 - Workshops
Wilkes Community College • Sparta, North Carolina
Songwriting Workshops
Workshop Sessions
Youth workshop: 9am-10am
Adult workshops:10am to 11am
11am to 12pm
Lunch
12 to 1pm
Workshop Registration
Cost: $50 per student (includes lunch)
Participants should arrive by 9:30 and are encouraged to bring instruments.
Students will switch teachers after each session.
Backwoods Beat Music Festival Concerts
Two nights of great music
Friday June 22 & Saturday June 23
8pm each night
Headlliners are:
Fri. Night - John McCutcheon
Sat. Night - Gretchen Peters
(Songwriting contest winners perform
Sat. June 23 at 6:30)
Muddy Creek Cafe • 60 S. Main St • Sparta NC
Gretchen Peters
"One of Nashville's greatest talents of the past two decades...still equipped with the ability to stop clocks with a well-turned phrase." - Uncut (9 out of 10 stars)
"Ben Glover, Jason Isbell, Suzy Bogguss and others help out along the way, but this is all Peters's show as she shines a light under some very dark rocks." - Q Magazine 4/5 stars
"'Blackbirds' is one of the most affecting murder ballads since Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" left a trail of corpses strewn across the American landscape." - Rolling Stone
"Blackbirds 11 tracks rank among the most elegant and eloquent narrative punches to the gut she's yet recorded." - Nashville Scene
"'When All You Got Is A Hammer' is a war song for our times." - No Depression
“Sexy and sublime, angelically clean and devilishly dirty, blemished yet beautiful, the apex of quality songwriting, excellent playing and world-class production.” - The Bluegrass Situation
"...a profound, poetic, career-defining album from singer and songwriter of the highest order."-AllMusic.com
John McCutcheon
John McCutcheon
Folk music's renaissance man — master instrumentalist, powerful singer-songwriter, storyteller, activist, and author.
“John McCutcheon is not only one of the best musicians in the USA, but also a great singer, songwriter, and song leader. And not just incidentally, he is committed to helping hard-working people everywhere to organize and push this world in a better direction.”
— Pete Seeger
"The most impressive instrumentalist I've ever heard."
— Johnny Cash
"He has an uncanny ability to breathe new life into the familiar. His storytelling has the richness of fine literature."
— Washington Post
"Calling John McCutcheon a 'folksinger' is like saying Deion Sanders is just a football player."
— Dallas Morning News