Donna Ray Norton won’t need to pack any instruments when she comes to Raleigh to open PineCone’s concert with Tim O’Brien and Jan Fabricius on March 7 and teach a workshop the next morning. She’s got her voice, which is all a ballad singer needs, plus a heart full of songs and a long family history of sharing them.
Ballads, as Norton describes them, are “a story told in song,” traditionally unaccompanied by instruments. A ballad is a singer conjuring from the past not only the song itself, but also the feeling behind it, and using their voice to share it into the present. It’s a gift from one generation to another, and a message that transcends time.
Singing ballads was so much a part of Norton’s life growing up in remote Revere, North Carolina — known by locals as Sodom Laurel or just Sodom — that she didn’t realize her family was special.
“Growing up, I thought that everybody’s families did things like what I did in my family,” says Norton, now an eighth-generation ballad singer and related to fiddler Byard Ray, banjo and mouth bow player Morris Norton, and singers Lena Jean Ray and Sheila Kay Adams. “I thought other people went to festivals and got to go backstage and that everybody was a part of something like this.”
Her perspective changed after a move to Asheville and a high school project that led her to a history book in the school library that contained her family’s names in connection to Madison County’s musical traditions. “Even though I had grown up in it, I never took the time to learn about it,” she says. “I knew I had heard the songs and I memorized them, and I knew that we played music and danced and sang all the time, but I didn’t really learn about it.”
Her research continued long after that high school project, and she started to perform ballads not just at home but farther afield. She’s performed at numerous festivals, including the 50th Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., and with the North Carolina Symphony. She was a featured artist in the Birthplace of Country Music Museum’s “I’ve Endured: Women in Old Time Music” exhibit in 2023.
When her mother passed away in 2021, Norton rededicated herself to learning the songs she grew up with, feeling the importance of continuing this music across generations. “This music,” she says, “is my inheritance.”
She’s proud to share that wealth of knowledge at workshops, including the one she’ll teach on Saturday, March 8, at John Chavis Memorial Park in Raleigh. Participants will learn a ballad piece by piece, with Norton singing a verse and the class singing it back. It’s as close an approximation as she can get to how these songs have been passed through her family over the generations.
“A ballad is a long song, and the way that they’re traditionally taught is knee-to-knee, [or] warm-hand-to-warm-hand,” she explains. “And that’s what’s so special about these songs, is that they have been passed down in person. Any old body can go online and find a ballad and learn it. But there’s something to be said about learning it from somebody who’s actually part of the tradition that’s been carried on for so long, in person. And so my goal when I teach a workshop is to teach people why that’s important and what makes it so special.”
Norton’s workshop is part of a series of PineCone-hosted events aimed at showcasing the talents and resilience of traditional musicians from the Western North Carolina counties affected by Hurricane Helene last September. Five artists will perform opening sets before concerts in PineCone’s Down Home Concert series, then teach a Saturday morning workshop the following day. Find the full schedule of workshops here.
Western North Carolina is rich in musical traditions, including ballad singing, with practitioners like Norton carrying those sounds and stories into the future. Even against obstacles as daunting as Hurricane Helene.
During the storm, floodwaters and mud inundated much of the waterfront downtown of Marshall, including the historic Old Marshall Jail, which was operating as a small hotel and gathering place. Before Helene, Norton and others held a ballad swap there on the second Wednesday of every month.
“For us, really, it was just the sense of community and being with people that we care about and sharing songs of our loved ones,” she says. “And it was just really fun. It was the only recurring ballad swap anywhere that we know of.”
Norton and other traditional musicians were among the people helping to clean up downtown Marshall after the flood, singing as they worked, sometimes amid tears. Just weeks after Helene, they held another ballad swap in the old jail as a morale booster, a reminder that the music of the region doesn’t stop, and neither do its people. Since then, the ballad swap has traveled to different venues in Western North Carolina and beyond, but it is scheduled to return to the restored Old Marshall Jail this spring.
Ballad singing, of course, was built to survive. That’s why it’s been around for centuries — Norton says the oldest ballad she knows dates back to the 1500s. The stories in the songs commemorate events that happened a long time ago, but the power of the human voice resonates across time, through hardship, and over any distance. If you can use your voice, and feel the stories in these songs, you too can be part of this rich North Carolina tradition.
Find more info about Donna Ray Norton’s workshop and reserve your space here.