John McCutcheon to headline Home Craft Days concert

Alice Gerrard, Kay Justice & local favorites to open the show

The 48th Annual Home Craft Days festival kicks off on Friday, October 18 at 6 p.m. with the opening night concert presented by the Pro-Art Association in conjunction with Mountain Empire Community College. Seven-time Grammy nominee, John McCutcheon returns to the area to headline the concert. McCutcheon has been hailed ‘folk-music’s renaissance man’, as a master of a dozen different traditional instruments—most notably the rare and beautiful hammer dulcimer. Whether in print, on record, or on stage, few people communicate with the versatility, charm, wit or pure talent of John McCutcheon.

Alice Gerrard and Kay Justice will open the show on Friday night, along with local favorites Tommy Bledsoe, Rich Kirby, Todd Meade, and Tyler Hughes. Simply put, Alice Gerrard is a talent of legendary status. In a career spanning some 50 years, she has known, learned from, and performed with many of the old-time and bluegrass greats and has in turn earned worldwide respect for her own important contributions to the music. Kay Justice, of Wytheville, Virginia, is a long-time singer of Appalachian music, and her voice has been described as that of a ‘coal country angel.’ Kay grew up surrounded by music—both of her grandmothers sang at home and in church, one playing old-time banjo and the other pump organ and piano. Kay has apprenticed Helen White, of Mouth of Wilson, Virginia who performed last year at the 47th Annual Home Craft Days.

If you’ve attended Home Craft Days even once in the last 47 years, the following names are sure to ring a bell because Tommy Bledsoe, Rich Kirby, Todd Meade, and Tyler Hughes are certainly no strangers to the festival. Tommy Bledsoe and Rich Kirby have extensive roots in Southwest Virginia’s old-time music having performed together with John McCutcheon as Rye Straw. The two have been instrumental in organizing music for Home Craft Days for over 40 years. In recent years, the two mentored Meade and Hughes, a younger generation of musicians and instructors for Mountain Empire Community College’s Mountain Music School, to take the reins of musical organizing around the festival. Combined, the four present over fifty years’ experience with the region’s music and its tradition bearers like Janette Carter, Uncle Charlie Osborne, and Ralph Stanley.