Discover and Celebrate the Bliss of Asheville's Modern Roots Music

"Rising Appalachia is a genre-bending force of sound that uses both lyrical prowess and diverse artistic collaborations to defy cultural cliches and ignite a musical revolution..." Rising Appalachia "Castle to the Barracks" live warehouse show at Ghost Town Studios in Swannanoa North Carolina

Rising Appalachia
"... Sisters Leah and Chloe Smith grew up in the bosom of the Southern Appalachian music renaissance. Born to a fiddlin' mother and a folk-sculptor father, they were raised with old-time mountain melodies as their lullabies. But, having also grown up amidst the underground hip hop and spoken word movements of the urban South, the group has heavy influences in indie-folk, vintage jazz, political hip hop, and roots music from around the world. Rising Appalachia's eerie banjo originals, gritty lyrics and effortless sister harmonies are compared to that of Ani Difranco, The Be Good Tanyas, and even Bjork. Playing a fiddle, banjo, kalimba, and boudrhan, (with guests on the bass, trumpet, djembe, and more) the group Rising Appalachia offers a fresh, raw approach to a beautiful old tradition. With vocal prowess that only sisters could boast, fantastic story telling from their many years on the road, a enchanting versatility of mellow lullabies, and a dynamic rhythmic groove, this group can captivate any kind of audience..." FIRE DANCING "... Leah and Chloe currently do small scale fire performances at festivals, parties, street fairs, and other celebratory events. This undividable dynamic duo contains a number of different techniques ranging from double poi arrangements to staff and fire eating. They are prone to dance with as many live musicians as can be found on the premises and travel with a multitalented kalymba player and occasional stilt walker, although each performance varies, and they will often carry the torch just as two..."
Check their MySpace page for more music... and upcoming engagements... they hail from Atlanta... travel the world... and occasionally alight here in Asheville... Listen to Atlanta's Creative Loafing Podcast interview with Rising Appalachia.

Photo Blog of Rising Appalachia recording session

Click on each of the dozens of categories to the left to uncover what makes the Asheville area so vital, so intriguing and so, well, UTTERLY BLISSFUL!

From Rolf Potts' Vagabonding blog:

I've never been one of those uptight literary types who thinks that you have to have actually read a book in order to recommend it to others. So I feel no trepidation in suggesting Eric Weiner's new travelogue-slash-memoir The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World The premise of the book is simple but intriguing-- here is Amazon's description:

Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness." The book uses a beguiling mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Singapore benefit psychologically by having their options limited by the government? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? With engaging wit and surprising insights, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.

In the imaginary Netflix queue of books-that-I'm-planning-to-read, this one has just jumped to the top. By the way, why has no one started a Netflix for books? This question, and many more, I'll leave for another day.