The Workshop
Just in time for Thanksgiving, award-winning songwriter Joe Newberry will give a workshop based on themes of family and home. Joe loves to help songwriters focus on making their good ideas even better, or get them started if they only have a trunk full of ideas. If workshop participants have any pieces in progress, or are stuck on a lyric, Joe also loves to brainstorm. Through exercises and discussions, the workshop will work to uncover the heart of the song!
About Joe Newberry
Known around the world for his exquisite clawhammer banjo playing, Joe Newberry is also a powerful guitarist, singer and songwriter. The Gibson Brothers’ version of his song “Singing As We Rise,” featuring guest vocalist Ricky Skaggs, won the 2012 IBMA “Gospel Recorded Performance” Award. With Eric Gibson, he shared the 2013 IBMA “Song of the Year” Award for “They Called It Music.”
A long-time and frequent guest on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, he was a featured singer on the Transatlantic Sessions 2016 tour of the United Kingdom with fiddler Aly Bain and Dobro master Jerry Douglas, and at the Transatlantic Session’s debut at Merlefest in 2017 with fellow singers James Taylor, Maura O’Connell, Declan O’Rourke, Sarah Jarosz, and Karen Matheson. In addition to performing solo, Newberry plays in a duo with mandolin icon Mike Compton, and also performs with the dynamic fiddler and step-dancer April Verch.
Growing up in a family full of singers and dancers, he took up the guitar and banjo as a teenager and learned fiddle tunes from great Missouri fiddlers. He moved to North Carolina as a young man and quickly became an anchor of the incredible music scene in the Tar Heel state. He does solo and studio work, and plays and teaches at festivals and workshops in North America and abroad.
