ABOUT OUR PERFORMERS

Sheila Kay Adams is a seventh-generation ballad singer, storyteller, and musician from the Sodom Laurel community of Madison County, North Carolina, an area renowned for its centuries-old tradition of unaccompanied ballad singing. Taught by the elder singers of her mountain community, Sheila has spent her life preserving, performing, and passing on the songs and stories handed down through generations of her family.

A gifted clawhammer banjo player and award-winning storyteller, Sheila began performing as a teenager and has since appeared at major festivals and events throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, including the National Storytelling Festival and Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

Sheila received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts, as well as the North Carolina Heritage Award and the Brown-Hudson Folklore Award. In 2026, she was named a United States Artists Fellow.

She is also the author of two books, has released several acclaimed recordings, and has served as a singing coach and advisor for film projects. Through her performances, teaching, storytelling, and advocacy, Sheila continues to ensure that the old songs and stories of Southern Appalachia remain a living tradition.

Donna Ray Norton is an eighth-generation Appalachian ballad singer, storyteller, and culture bearer from the Sodom Laurel (Revere) community of Madison County, North Carolina, where ballad singing has lived in her family for generations.

Donna Ray learned these songs the traditional way, by ear and knee-to-knee, through her mother, Lena Jean Ray; her cousin, Sheila Kay Adams; and generations of Ray, Wallin, Shelton, and Norton kin. She is the granddaughter of legendary fiddler Byard Ray and Morris Norton, who played banjo and mouth bow.

For Donna Ray, the old songs are not relics or museum pieces. They are an inheritance: stories held in memory and passed from one generation to another, where music is woven into family, place, and everyday life.

She has shared stages with artists including Ketch Secor, Warren Haynes, Grahame Lesh, Tim O’Brien, and Sierra Ferrell, bringing traditional unaccompanied ballads into contemporary performance spaces. Her work and advocacy for Appalachian culture have been featured in Oxford American, Rolling Stone, and Garden & Gun.

Donna Ray is a recipient of the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Youth Award for Balladry and was recognized as a 2026 South Arts Emerging Traditional Artist. As a leader of The Nest of Singing Birds and co-host of the monthly Old Marshall Jail Ballad Swap, she is committed to carrying these songs forward as a living, breathing tradition.

William Ritter is an old-time fiddler, ballad singer, storyteller, and seed-saver from the mountains of Mitchell County, North Carolina. Deeply passionate about the cultural heritage of his home region, William brings together old songs, tunes, stories, and traditional knowledge in performances that explore the connections between people, place, memory, and community.

For more than a decade, he has sought out the songs and stories of older mountain tradition bearers. In 2020, that journey led to a life-changing apprenticeship with renowned Caldwell County ballad singer and storyteller Bobby McMillon. The following year, William released his solo album Mentor, honoring the people who generously shared their music, knowledge, and traditions with him.

His repertoire includes old-time fiddle tunes, folk songs, traditional ballads, and original compositions, including songs dating to the 1700s and earlier and pieces historically connected to Western North Carolina and the Toe River Valley.

William plays fiddle, banjo, guitar, and assorted other “string-ed things,” and his performances are enriched by stories gathered through years of porch visits, bean-stringings, seed swaps, and his study of Appalachian roots music.

William was recognized as a 2021 South Arts Emerging Traditional Artist.