Blog

One of my most favorite songs that I have written, Me & The Redbird River, is to be made into a children’s book! It’s a song that tells of growing up in Appalachia from a child’s perspective, and describes the beauty of the subsistence skills that have continued to flourish there.  And I am so […]

This is my Big Mommy. Her name was Emma Wilson Hensley and she was from Oneida, KY. (Her name was pronounced “Emmer”, for those of you who didn’t grow up speaking mountain!) She was my Granny’s second cousin and one of her closest friends. She was my second grandmother. Like my grandmother, most of her […]

We are all just now recovering from all the fun LAST weekend in Lexington, as a passel of pickers, singers, dancers, poets, merry-makers, and general yee-haw revelers descended on Lexington for our annual old-time music event at Artsplace. A good time was had by all, and we’re already making plans for next year. The inimitable […]

I had a great time teaching a clogging and flatfooting workshops with Julie Shepherd-Powell and AP Powell for the Bluegrass Ceili Academy workshops in Lexington recently!

We have been having a blast playing around the region, and are putting together some overseas tours, too! We are happy to be spreading the traditions of our beloved Kentucky with audiences far and wide. Here is a recent picture from our performance at the University of Kentucky Appalachia in the Bluegrass series!

“A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay.”  This is a suburban tree, in a suburban yard, in the suburban neighborhood where my Appalachian family moved after my dad lost his job with the coal company. This is my sweet little granny, who never stopped working her mountain magic even after […]

I’m excited to announce that I received a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, for the creation of a new feminist song plus choreography, and I’ll get to work with the fabulous Teresa Tomb of Rakadu Gypsy Dance. I’m writing an original ballad exploring feminist themes through an Appalachian lens, and then Teresa and […]

I’ve been having a blast learning new steps and creating fusion dance with my new niece, Paulina Vazquez. (My nephew has excellent taste!) We have been collaborating as part of the Cornbread & Tortillas project.

I’m happy to announce that my apprentice, Susan Howell, and I have received a Folk & Traditional Arts Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, where I’ll be sharing some flatfoot dance traditions from the mountains with her over the course of the next year—the FIRST-EVER award for traditional percussive dance! Photo by Zoey Raven.

So, my mother didn’t know anything about making albums per se, but something she DID teach me helped me get through a recent challenge we encountered while making the latest Zoe Speaks CD. See, we found out a few weeks ago that there had been a hard drive crash involving our project, and that data […]