Kingfisher

Gallery Hours: Thursday- Saturday 2pm-5pm

Artist Reception: October 13, 5pm-6pm

Performance: October 13, 8pm-10pm (TICKETED EVENT)

I first saw David Childers perform on a hot, humid night in July 2000 at the legendary Double Door Inn in Charlotte, NC. Most of the songs he performed that evening were filled with the subject matter of Jesus, damnation, salvation, the devil, forgiveness, and redemption. I will never, ever forget it. It was such an inspiration that the next day I wrote David a personal letter asking him if we could make a record together about those things in which he was singing about. We have been friends ever since. No record or manager contract. Just a handshake.

It is my hope David's greatness as a songwriter and artist will be recognized and appreciated by many in years to come. Please lend an ear to his latest release, ‘Serpents of Reformation,’ and experience for yourself the same power that moved me so, that mesmerizing Summer night some fourteen years ago. -- Dolph Ramseur

MOUNT HOLLY, North Carolina — Singer-songwriter David Childers is the proverbial study in contradictions. A resident of Mount Holly, North Carolina, he’s a former high-school football player with the aw-shucks demeanor of a good ol’ Southern boy. But he’s also a well-read poet and painter who cites Chaucer and Kerouac as influences, fell in love with folk as a teen, listens to jazz and opera, and fed his family by practicing law before turning in his license to concentrate on his creative passions.

The legal profession’s loss is certainly the music world’s gain. Childers’ new album, Run Skeleton Run, releasing May 5, 2017 on Ramseur Records, is filled with the kinds of songs that have made him a favorite of fans and fellow artists including neighbors the Avett Brothers. Scott Avett contributes to four tracks, and Avetts bassist Bob Crawford co-executive-produced the effort with label head Dolph Ramseur. (Crawford and Childers, both history buffs, have recorded and performed together in the Overmountain Men).

In fact, it was Crawford who kickstarted this album, Childers’ sixth solo effort, by suggesting he reunite with Don Dixon (R.E.M., the Smithereens), who’d produced Crawford’s favorite Childers album, Room 23 (done with his band the Modern Don Juans). Crawford also suggested tracking at Mitch Easter’s Fidelitorium Recordings.

“I’ve made records in my living room and been perfectly happy with it. But I think ol’ Bob wanted to give it one more shot,” Childers says. “It’s kind of like the Wild Bunch at the end of the movie, on their last train robbery.”

Not that he’s suggesting this is his “last train robbery.” Not with songs as rich as these. Sounding like literature and playing like little movies — several are under three minutes long — they’re populated by sailors, hermits, lovers and killers, facing off against fate, skeletons, good, evil, or simply the trials of everyday existence. Lust, virtue, guilt, innocence; alienation, desperation, sorrow, gratitude … he examines these conditions with such precision — combined with music that draws on folk, rock, rockabilly, country and Cajun influences — he doesn’t need lengthy exposition.

“You look at a song like ‘Pancho and Lefty’; it tells a story in four stanzas,” Childers notes. “An amazing story. That’s the way I approach songwriting. You don’t have to say so damned much. ‘The train went down, oh lord oh lord.’”

That line is from “Belmont Ford,” a mandolin-laden disaster song about the Great Flood of 1916. It’s based on a poem by Mary Struble Deery, a Chicago friend. The twang- and bluegrass-infused “Collar and Bell” (featuring drums/percussion by his son, Robert, and fiddle by Geoffrey White) had a similar origin; its lyrics are derived from ones written by Shannon Mayes, an Ohio school principal. Another Ohioan, Mark Freeman, shares credit for “Hermit,” a mid-tempo rocker of sorts with Dixon singing harmony, that Freeman started and Childers finished.

“I’m always looking for ideas,” he says. “I’ve never been able to get any serious writers to co-write with me. Here are these folks, just regular people, and they got something to say, and they’re sending me stuff, and I’m going ‘Well, if they’re gonna send it to me, I’m gonna try and do something with it.’”

Childers has always regarded his place in the musical pantheon as that of an outsider, though not deservedly so. As those involved with this album indicate, he’s well-regarded among tastemakers. Evidence includes playing the syndicated World Café and Mountain Stage radio shows (he’s done the latter twice), as well as Merlefest’s mainstage. He’s also toured in Europe, and hopes to again. But he credits the support of Crawford and Ramseur with helping him sustain his musical career — which began in college, though he didn’t start recording until the ’90s.

Childers’ father had given him a banjo when he was 14, but he still had his “jock mentality” back then and didn’t do much with it. That changed when he picked up a guitar at 18.

“My girlfriend had left me for one of my best friends and I was all shook up and needed an outlet besides drinking and fighting. As soon as I learned my first chords on a guitar, I knew I had a friend who would never betray me,” he recalls. He formed his first band, the acoustic trio Steeltree, in 1973, and released his first album, Godzilla! He Done Broke Out!, as David Childers & the Mount Holly Hellcats, in 1995. His first solo album, Time Machine, came in 1998. He spent several years playing rock, folk and honky-tonk with the David Childers Band, then the Modern Don Juans, whose fans included the Avett boys. He calls his current band the Serpents, but says he’s given up trying to label each incarnation.

His last album, 2014’s Serpents of Reformation, delved into religion; this time, several songs address aging and the perspective of a man in review mode — a perspective he sums up on the final track, “Goodbye to Growing Old,” written with Theresa Halfacre. It approaches the subject with a mix of acceptance and defiance.

Well, it’s mostly just a state of mind/And I ain’t about to say that it’s time/To surrender to anything. Anything. Anything, he sings, driving home his points with harmonica and his own layered harmony.

“I used to be afraid of growing old, but now I wouldn’t trade where I am for all the lean fury of my youth,” Childers insists, saying he’s happier now than he’s ever been. Especially now that he can concentrate on making music and painting; he and Robert did the album cover, a fine example of his primitive/outsider style.

He’s also considering adding memoirs to his publishing credits, which include two books of poetry. And there’s gardening, and dogs and cats, to tend. Yep, life’s pretty good for the man Crawford likes to call “the sage of Mount Holly.”

Crawford has also called Childers “a great friend, a great thinker and a great man … a true North Carolina treasure.”

But let’s take out “North Carolina,” because Childers is the kind of treasure who can spread joy wherever people love listening to great songs. In other words, just about anywhere. Or everywhere.

Mariee Sioux Sobonya was born on the Humboldt coast in Arcata, California. When she was two her family moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills in the Yuba River watershed in Northern California, to pursue their dream of farming and living off the land. She was raised on their small farm whose surrounding lands were originally occupied by the Nisenan people before the cultural and environmental decimation that occurred at the hands of expansionist migrants and settlers during the gold rush, and has come to be known as Nevada City (the Nisenan still survive in tragically small numbers and continue to fight for visibility and Federal recognition). Mariee grew up surrounded and deeply touched by music—going to bluegrass festivals and listening to her father’s bluegrass band—but held no particular personal musical ambitions. However, she taught herself to play the guitar at 18 while volunteering at a school for Mapuche children in Patagonia, Argentina, and wrote her first songs here while taking refuge from the Patagonia winds indoors. She continued finger picking and writing songs and would make two home-recorded albums purely at the urging of friends. In 2007 she released her first studio album, Faces in the Rocks, on which she collaborated with Native American flutist Gentle Thunder and which achieved a dedicated cult following that would propel her career to this day. She began touring Europe as well as North America and has continued ever since. Mariee Siou has learned to more consciously embrace her role in the ancient and new tradition of healer-singers who have always helped hold the human social fabric together. Through music she attempts to fill a cultural void left by severed connections to her Polish, Hungarian, and Indigenous North American heritages and to thereby address the broader cultural voids felt by Americans today. She does this “with hopes of enticing the sacred work of grief back into our lives from the exile American society has placed it in”—and this is strongly evident in her 2019 release Grief in Exile, as well as in her forthcoming EP Circle of Signs. The songs continue to come to Mariee Siou, and her approach as a singer continues to mature. The flowing melodies and quivering vibrato of her voice, as well as the poetry itself, continue to locate themselves and their work with a more solidly grounded precision as to just what that work is. Her most recent songs most deeply reflect this clarity of vision and acceptance of both her role as an artist and the endless need for that role in this changing world. Mariee Siou brings us back to the child and the grandmother in ourselves, in a time in which it has never been more needed — and she intends to keep it up as long as she has a voice.

MOUNT HOLLY, North Carolina — Singer-songwriter David Childers is the proverbial study in contradictions. A resident of Mount Holly, North Carolina, he’s a former high-school football player with the aw-shucks demeanor of a good ol’ Southern boy. But he’s also a well-read poet and painter who cites Chaucer and Kerouac as influences, fell in love with folk as a teen, listens to jazz and opera, and fed his family by practicing law before turning in his license to concentrate on his creative passions.

The legal profession’s loss is certainly the music world’s gain. Childers’ new album, Run Skeleton Run, releasing May 5, 2017 on Ramseur Records, is filled with the kinds of songs that have made him a favorite of fans and fellow artists including neighbors the Avett Brothers. Scott Avett contributes to four tracks, and Avetts bassist Bob Crawford co-executive-produced the effort with label head Dolph Ramseur. (Crawford and Childers, both history buffs, have recorded and performed together in the Overmountain Men).

In fact, it was Crawford who kickstarted this album, Childers’ sixth solo effort, by suggesting he reunite with Don Dixon (R.E.M., the Smithereens), who’d produced Crawford’s favorite Childers album, Room 23 (done with his band the Modern Don Juans). Crawford also suggested tracking at Mitch Easter’s Fidelitorium Recordings.

“I’ve made records in my living room and been perfectly happy with it. But I think ol’ Bob wanted to give it one more shot,” Childers says. “It’s kind of like the Wild Bunch at the end of the movie, on their last train robbery.”

Not that he’s suggesting this is his “last train robbery.” Not with songs as rich as these. Sounding like literature and playing like little movies — several are under three minutes long — they’re populated by sailors, hermits, lovers and killers, facing off against fate, skeletons, good, evil, or simply the trials of everyday existence. Lust, virtue, guilt, innocence; alienation, desperation, sorrow, gratitude … he examines these conditions with such precision — combined with music that draws on folk, rock, rockabilly, country and Cajun influences — he doesn’t need lengthy exposition.

“You look at a song like ‘Pancho and Lefty’; it tells a story in four stanzas,” Childers notes. “An amazing story. That’s the way I approach songwriting. You don’t have to say so damned much. ‘The train went down, oh lord oh lord.’”

That line is from “Belmont Ford,” a mandolin-laden disaster song about the Great Flood of 1916. It’s based on a poem by Mary Struble Deery, a Chicago friend. The twang- and bluegrass-infused “Collar and Bell” (featuring drums/percussion by his son, Robert, and fiddle by Geoffrey White) had a similar origin; its lyrics are derived from ones written by Shannon Mayes, an Ohio school principal. Another Ohioan, Mark Freeman, shares credit for “Hermit,” a mid-tempo rocker of sorts with Dixon singing harmony, that Freeman started and Childers finished.

“I’m always looking for ideas,” he says. “I’ve never been able to get any serious writers to co-write with me. Here are these folks, just regular people, and they got something to say, and they’re sending me stuff, and I’m going ‘Well, if they’re gonna send it to me, I’m gonna try and do something with it.’”

Childers has always regarded his place in the musical pantheon as that of an outsider, though not deservedly so. As those involved with this album indicate, he’s well-regarded among tastemakers. Evidence includes playing the syndicated World Café and Mountain Stage radio shows (he’s done the latter twice), as well as Merlefest’s mainstage. He’s also toured in Europe, and hopes to again. But he credits the support of Crawford and Ramseur with helping him sustain his musical career — which began in college, though he didn’t start recording until the ’90s.

Childers’ father had given him a banjo when he was 14, but he still had his “jock mentality” back then and didn’t do much with it. That changed when he picked up a guitar at 18.

“My girlfriend had left me for one of my best friends and I was all shook up and needed an outlet besides drinking and fighting. As soon as I learned my first chords on a guitar, I knew I had a friend who would never betray me,” he recalls. He formed his first band, the acoustic trio Steeltree, in 1973, and released his first album, Godzilla! He Done Broke Out!, as David Childers & the Mount Holly Hellcats, in 1995. His first solo album, Time Machine, came in 1998. He spent several years playing rock, folk and honky-tonk with the David Childers Band, then the Modern Don Juans, whose fans included the Avett boys. He calls his current band the Serpents, but says he’s given up trying to label each incarnation.

His last album, 2014’s Serpents of Reformation, delved into religion; this time, several songs address aging and the perspective of a man in review mode — a perspective he sums up on the final track, “Goodbye to Growing Old,” written with Theresa Halfacre. It approaches the subject with a mix of acceptance and defiance.

Well, it’s mostly just a state of mind/And I ain’t about to say that it’s time/To surrender to anything. Anything. Anything, he sings, driving home his points with harmonica and his own layered harmony.

“I used to be afraid of growing old, but now I wouldn’t trade where I am for all the lean fury of my youth,” Childers insists, saying he’s happier now than he’s ever been. Especially now that he can concentrate on making music and painting; he and Robert did the album cover, a fine example of his primitive/outsider style.

He’s also considering adding memoirs to his publishing credits, which include two books of poetry. And there’s gardening, and dogs and cats, to tend. Yep, life’s pretty good for the man Crawford likes to call “the sage of Mount Holly.”

Crawford has also called Childers “a great friend, a great thinker and a great man … a true North Carolina treasure.”

But let’s take out “North Carolina,” because Childers is the kind of treasure who can spread joy wherever people love listening to great songs. In other words, just about anywhere. Or everywhere.

Please bring a dish! (A dish is not required though!) And please purchase your tickets in advance so we know how many tables and chairs to set up. Prepare yourself for mix of depth, humor, and emotion as he shares his unique and authentic songs with us. Doors Open at 5:30pm Show at 6:00pm “...Partridge sounds like a prodigy of Townes, Guy and Rodney the way his lyrics poetically twist and turn via a grizzled and lived in voice over a jagged acoustic guitar” — Alan Harrison - THE ROCKING MAGPIE “Abe Partridge has established himself as one of the most respected songwriters and visual folk artists in the southeast.” — AMERICAN SONGWRITER MAGAZINE The gallery bar will be open, serving beer, wine, soft drinks, and waters.

Gallery Hours: Thursday- Saturday, 2pm-5pm

Artist Reception: Oct. 21, 4pm-5pm

Joe Cook is a 1988 graduate of Berry College where he studied communications and agriculture. Between 1996 and 2016, he served in various capacities with the Coosa River Basin Initiative/Upper Coosa Riverkeeper in Rome, including serving 10 years as executive director and riverkeeper. Since 2005, he has worked with Georgia River Network as Paddle Georgia Coordinator, organizing and leading paddle trips that introduce more than 600 people to Georgia’s rivers annually. He has travelled thousands of miles on Georgia’s rivers and studied and reported extensively on water resource issues in Georgia since 1994. A photographer and writer, he is the author of Georgia River Network’s River User’s Guide series, including guidebooks covering the Etowah, Chattahoochee, Broad, Flint, Oconee and Ocmulgee rivers. His work is also featured in Wildflowers of the Appalachian Trail, Wildflowers of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains and River Song-A Journey Down the Chattahoochee and Apalachicola Rivers. He lives in Rome, Georgia.