Rocky Ridge Music Center American Roots Music Program

Join us for this four-day immersion in traditional Southern music. The program combines private and group tutorials in various five-string banjo, guitar, fiddle, piano, and mandolin styles with performances, panels, and historical presentations. We welcome musicians age eighteen and over, from advanced-beginners to the most advanced levels.

The program offers not only hands-on study of some of America’s greatest folk stylists from years past, but guidance in creating compositions based on time-tested models, amplifying tradition’s gifts with your own individual talents.
 

Program themes, of interest to the public as well as to players, encompass rural ragtime and pre-blues sources; topical songs and lyrical ballads; in-depth explorations of Bill Monroe, Hobart Smith, and Uncle Dave Macon’s artistry; participatory sing-alongs; musical learning by note and by ear; alternative tunings; fiddle tunes; Old World tonalities and New World applications; how our instruments and music theory work together; how sounds combine and sometimes clutter; demonstrations of flat-picking, down-picking, up-picking, and fingerpicking; and associated histories of these playing techniques and repertories.

Faculty members are Harry Tuft, founder of the Denver Folklore Center; Dick Weissman, famed recording artist, author, and teacher; gifted multi-instrumentalist and singer Raun MacKinnon Burnham; national mandolin champion and flat-picking guitar expert Charlie Provenza; fiddler and composer Max Wolpert; and musician Stephen Wade, author of The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience.

The full 4-day program includes lodging and all meals; the day rate of $150 includes a private tutorial, access to all classes and seminars, and all meals, but neither lodging nor a slot on the final performance.