Meet our Performers

Paul Brown is an award-winning fiddler, banjoist and singer who offers unique insights into evolving fiddle and banjo styles of southwest Virginia and northwest North Carolina. Introducing Paul’s Tiki Parlour album, music journalist Tom Piazza wrote, “Paul Brown practices an art of deceptive understatement. He’s never in a hurry, because he’s already there. He has spent his entire life steeped in what is usually called old-time music, and none of it was lost on him.”

As a young man who’d learned his first songs from his mother’s Virginia repertoire, he immersed himself in the old, nearly Celtic-sounding fiddle styles of southwest Virginia fiddlers Luther Davis, Parley Parsons and others, plus the music of Round Peak players Tommy Jarrell, Kyle Creed and Fred Cockerham. He also focused on the styles of transitional players including Fred Cockerham, Robert Sykes, Benton Flippen, and Benny Jarrell. He considers all of these artists his main direct fiddle mentors.
Paul has produced and recorded numerous albums documenting fiddlers young and old. He co-founded the Mount Airy, NC Hometown Opry stage show, and created the Across the Blue Ridge public radio music and culture program. He received the North Carolina Folklore Society’s Brown-Hudson Award for contributions to cultural preservation. He’s a veteran of the Smokey Valley Boys, the Toast String Stretchers and other bands.
Paul retired from NPR in 2013, having worked at the radio network as a news executive, reporter, editor and newscaster. In addition to his focus on world news, he reported and produced numerous stories on arts and cultural figures including old-time, bluegrass, jazz and blues musicians.

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Hannah Mayree (they/them) is a musician who has worked with the banjo as their primary instrument for the last decade. Hannah is a recording artist whose original music is deeply inspired by Black string band music and clawhammer banjo techniques. Working as a cultural organizer they founded the Black Banjo Reclamation Project in 2018 in their home state of California in the Bay Area.

As a student and player of old-time banjo and a novice at the fiddle studying with David Bragger through a grant from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts , Hannah loves the music that comes from Black and Afro-diasporic traditions that have become what we all know and love as American music. Hannah’s relationship with the banjo has been both a historic excavation with political focus, as well as a window into the future of folk. Hannah has a body of work that highlights original and traditional banjo compositions as well as harmonies through acoustic live vocal looping and involves audiences in community singing when performing music from their new 2026 self-titled album Hannah Mayree.

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Hog-eyed Man is an Athens-based acoustic band comprised of fiddler Jason Cade and multi-instrumentalist Rob McMaken. Drawing primarily on the archaic tunes and pre-radio aesthetics of Southern Appalachian fiddling traditions, Jason and Rob have forged a compelling and authentic style of oldtime music, both reflecting deep respect for the past masters and carrying the musical conversation forward to the present era. Jason is the 2026 Artist in Resonance Fellow at the American Folklife Center within the Library of Congress and he has won the fiddle contest at the Appalachian String Band Festival in Clifftop, WV. His playing has been described as “a seamless fusion of rhythm and melody, with the power to reach deep inside and inspire strong emotional responses” (Bluegrass Unlimited), “pure fiddle joy” (Fiddler Magazine), and “as honest and direct a representation of music sourced from past generations of North Carolina fiddlers as one could wish for” (fRoots).

Georgia native Rob McMaken cut his teeth busking in New Orleans and toured the US and Europe playing an eclectic mix of global folk music with the band Dromedary in his early twenties. After moving to Athens GA in the 1990s, he recorded and performed with Americana artists like Jonathan Byrd and Jim White. Once Rob met fiddler Jason Cade, he began his deep dive into Southern Appalachian oldtime music. He has since developed a distinctive accompaniment style on lap dulcimer, mandolin, guitar, and banjo-uke—seamlessly weaving between melody, harmonic counterpoint, and rhythmic drones that echo Old World aesthetics. As the multi-instrumentalist-counterpoint-to-the-fiddle in the two-man-band Hog-eyed Man, Rob has co-released six albums over the past decade featuring more than 100 rare tunes from Southern Appalachian traditions. His approach has been praised as “both emotional and expressive, transcending any particular age” (FolkWorld), “deftly complementing the fiddle melodically and harmonically,” (Musical Traditions), and “glorious” (The Living Tradition).

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Tricia Spencer and Howard Rains are an old-time folk music duo who were brought up in the music of their families. Tricia is a Kansas fiddler who learned knee to knee from her grandparents and other master musicians in the Midwest. Howard is an artist and fiddler from Texas, now living in Kansas, who comes from a family rich in both of those traditions. They met in 2012 and blended their fiddle sounds into a unique voice in old-time music. They have recently been joined by their children to form the family band The Lost Keys.

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Rafe Stefanini has been at the forefront of the revival and preservation of traditional music from the rural south for over forty years. His work on fiddle, banjo, guitar and song is represented in more than 20 CDs, both as headliner and as guest. He has recorded and performed with influential artists including the Wildcats, Big Hoedown, David Bragger, The Rockinghams and Jumpsteady Boys (with Bruce Molsky, Joe Newberry and Mike Compton). He has also performed and still does with daughter Clelia Stefanini. He has been a teacher at countless music camps on fiddle, banjo and guitar.

 

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