Mountain Times Appalachian Roots Revival Announced Daylong Outdoor Festival At Fairgrounds April 21st By Jeff Eason The Mountain Times has long been known as a leader in bringing readers information about live music events in the High Country. The newspaper is going one step further this spring when it hosts the first Mountain Times Appalachian Roots Revival, an all-day outdoor festival of live music featuring some of the best local, regional and national acts in the burgeoning acoustic music scene. The Avett Brothers Jill Andrews and Sam Quinn of the everybodyfields Wrinkle Neck Mules The Mountain Times Appalachian Roots Revival is scheduled for Saturday, April 21st starting at 10 a.m. at the High Country Fairgrounds, just east of Boone. The festival will feature performances by The Avett Brothers, Larry & Jenny Keel with Steve “Big Daddy” McMurry, the everybodyfields, Wrinkle Neck Mules, Black Cash & the Bad Trips, Possum Jennkins, and the Lost Ridge Band. Tickets for the festival are $25 in advance and $35 the day of the show. Kids 12 and under get in free with paying adult. The Avett Brothers, originally from Greenville, North Carolina, are one of the fastest rising acoustic acts in America today, and their energetic live shows have been the talk of MerleFest for the past two years. The band features Seth and Scott Avett, plus upright bass player Bob Crawford. Their albums include Four Thieves Gone: The Robbinsville Sessions, A Carolina Jubilee and Mignonette. This past fall the band released the six-song EP The Gleam and played to a standing room only crowd at Legends in Boone. Larry and Jenny Keel are the guitarist and upright bassist of the Americana and roots music outfits The Larry Keel Experience and Natural Bridge. For the Mountain Times Appalachian Roots Revival they will be teaming up with singer and guitarist Steve “Big Daddy” McMurry, the driving force behind the popular western North Carolina pop-blues-jazz-bluegrass band Acoustic Syndicate. The everybodyfields, from Johnson City, Tennessee, are considered one of the up-and-coming bands in Americana music today. The band’s blend of off kilter lyrics and beautiful guitar, bass and dobro arrangements help provide a backdrop for the voices of singers Jill Andrews and Sam Quinn. Recently the band traveled to Nashville to record its third album, which will be released around the same time as the live show in Boone. The album is a follow-up to the fantastic Captain Mexico Records releases Plague of Dreams and Halfway There: Electricity & the South. Anyone who has heard Black Cash & the Bad Trips know that the band is much more than a Johnny Cash tribute act. They revive the spirit of the Man in Black and breathe new life into his oeuvre, particularly the material from the early part of his career. “Unwilling to let the songs of one of America’s greatest country legends just turn into car commercial fodder, and unable to do them justice by merely imitating them as closely as we could, (we) took on each song as if we had never heard it before,” said a spokesman for the band. “Keeping true to the original, simply composed pieces, we slowly added our own layers of sound to them until they became not just an attempt to bring back a song from an old record collection, but a full resurrection of the original mood and soul of the pieces that has lived on with the first generations of fans, who to this day love the music.” The Wrinkle Neck Mules are a northern Virginia band formed in 1999 that blends a variety of instruments and voices to create what The Independent termed, “a righteous Americana mishmash.” The band’s debut album, 2003’s Minor Enough, featured songs about whiskey factory disasters, sterno setbacks, fallen moonshiners and untimely deaths. The band’s newest album, The Wicks Have Met, will be released on Lower 40 Records in April. Advance tickets for The Mountain Times Appalachian Roots Revival Festival will go on sale in the coming weeks.