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Rising Appalachia Returns to Door Community Auditorium

Rising Appalachia, featuring Chloe (left) and Leah Smith, return to Door Community Auditorium on June 29. Photo by Len Villano.

Because the Door Community Auditorium audience was delighted with the 2013 performance of Rising Appalachia, the sisters Leah and Chloe Smith will return to Fish Creek on June 29 with the unique sound that has emerged from their Appalachian roots and grown to make a place on a world music stage.

The Atlanta daughters of their artist father and musician mother, began their musical career with a basement-recorded album originally intended as a gift to their family and friends. Their approach to Appalachian music combined not only folk and gospel, but hip-hop, jazz and classical, and moved beyond the vocals, the string tradition of banjos, fiddles and guitars, and the percussion of spoons and washboards associated with American folk music, to explore an array of world instruments. Their drumming: tablas, djembes, and congas; other percussion: kalimbas (thumb pianos) and baliphones (folk xylophone); and wind: didgeridoos and beat boxing (vocal sounds). After the success of that first album, a professional career in music was born.

In addition to their work as musicians, the sisters are community activists, working with the RISE Collective, a group of global performers, activists, youth educators, dancers, circus artists, yoginis, acrobats, fire spinners, poets, aerialists, and culture workers who appear at festivals, youth centers, rallies, and even in the streets with the goal of supporting community-based projects combining the arts and justice.

In particular, the sisters believe “there is a strength to arts education as a strong tool for youth empowerment” through the use of “poetry, drumming, sound exploration and body movement.” These opportunities should be “available for any and every group of young people regardless of…demographics.” The Smiths value “the creative spirit of all young people from youth camps to juvenile detention centers.”

Following this philosophy, Rising Appalachia tries to remain independent from the music industry. The alternative appearance of the duo on stage underscores their independence.

The titles of their albums – Soul Visions (2013), Filthy Dirty South (2012), The Sails of Self (2010), Evolutions in Sound (2008), and Scale Down (2007) – evoke the spirit of the duo: “Music is the tool with which we wield political prowess,” they state. “Music has become our script for vision…to connect and create in ways that we aren’t taught by mainstreet culture.

“We are building a community,” they continue, “and tackling social injustice through melody, making the stage reach out with octopus arms to gather a great family.”

Regular listeners to National Public Radio will be familiar with the music and some of the stories of the award-winning ensemble, voted “Green Album of the Year” by the Huffington Post and Atlanta’s Best Folk Act by Creative Loafing; articles praising them have appeared in the New York Times and other publications.

Their performances have taken them throughout the United States, across Europe, into Central American and the Caribbean, and into the Indian subcontinent. To learn more about Rising Appalachia and to watch them perform, visit risingappalachia.com.

The Rising Appalachia band will include another musician or two in addition to the Smiths for the June 29, 8 pm performance at the Door Community Auditorium in Fish Creek. For information and tickets, visit dcauditorium.org or call 920.868.2728.