PineCone and the Town of Holly Springs present the Listening Room Series

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Tickets On Sale
Holly Springs Cultural Center Box Office 919-567-4000, or www.etix.com
PRICE: $16 public, $14 members (use member password to receive discount)

PineCone and the Town of Holly Springs present old-time string band guru Mike Seeger in concert on Friday, May 30th, at the Holly Springs Cultural Center. The 8p.m. concert is the final show of the inaugural Listening Room Series.

Fidelity to traditional sounds has set Mike Seeger apart from other performers since he began touring the United States and abroad in 1960. Mike's music conveys all the depth of feeling, the sheer energy and the infinite variety and texture of true rural music. Like earlier musicians, Mike seeks out his own vision of the music by creating within its traditions, making his music uniquely his own. As he sings the old songs, he plays in a wide variety of old-time styles, accompanying himself on an array of instruments, including banjo, fiddle, guitar, trump (jaw harp), mouth harp (harmonica), quills, lap dulcimer, mandolin and autoharp.

The Seegers sang with their children most Saturday nights. At age five Mike learned the old ballad “Barbara Allen” from his musicologist/composer parents. Soon he was listening to and learning from their collection of early documentary recordings. He began playing instruments in his late teens, learning first from nearby musicians such as his close friend Elizabeth Cotten, and later seeking out other master stylists like guitarist Maybelle Carter, banjoists Dock Boggs and Cousin Emmy, and autoharpist Kilby Snow. Eventually Mike's love for traditional music led him to produce documentaries -- more than twenty-five field recordings and videos -- and to organize many tours and concerts featuring traditional musicians and dancers.

As a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, Mike played an integral role in helping to revive interest in a variety of traditional music, now played by thousands of young musicians across the country. Since his first recordings with the Ramblers in the late nineteen fifties, Mike has gone on to record almost forty albums, both solo and with others.

Mike Seeger has been honored with six Grammy nominations, most recently in 1998 for Southern Banjo Sounds and in 1999 for Retrograss, with John Hartford and David Grisman. In 1995 Mike received the Rex Foundation's Ralph J. Gleason Lifetime Achievement Award, established by the Grateful Dead to recognize “those who exemplify the qualities of talent, vision, innovation that Ralph so tirelessly supported.” In the word of the award citation, Mike Seeger “...remains one of our great musical and cultural resources. To see him perform is to experience the richness of our traditions.”