Rising Appalachia

Rising Appalachia is an American folk band led by sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith, rooted in the landscapes of Atlanta, New Orleans, and the southern Blue Ridge Mountains. Their music draws on Southern folk traditions, New Orleans swamp culture, and Atlanta's street spirit—what they describe as a companion-planting symbiosis where each tradition strengthens the others. The full ensemble features Duncan Wickel on fiddle and cello, David Brown on upright bass and baritone guitar, and Biko Casini on drums and percussion, each a tradition keeper in their own right. People care about their work because Rising Appalachia operates at the intersection of musical authenticity, environmental activism, and community healing—they don't simply perform songs, they pioneer sustainable touring practices and embed their shows as communal gatherings where audiences reconnect to the earth, to each other, and to ancestral lineage. Over ten albums, they've collected and created music that moves through motherhood, heartbreak, birdsong, and the deeper currents of American folk memory, earning them a devoted following across 264,000+ Spotify followers who recognize something true and necessary in their sound.

Rising Appalachia inherits the lineage of American Southern folk music—specifically the Blue Ridge Appalachian tradition, New Orleans swamp and jazz vernacular, and the broader international roots music ecosystem. Leah and Chloe grew up in a blue-collar bohemian Atlanta household where their mother was a fiddler and their father a sculptor; they were raised at contra dances, in neighborhood forests, and around banjos and harmony singing. Beyond their family roots, they've actively traveled and studied with tradition keepers across multiple continents—Leah spent time in Chiapas, Mexico studying art and Indigenous activism, while both sisters have collected songs in Ireland, Bulgaria, and Colombia, and traveled with a circus from Southern Italy to Northern Sweden. Their work honors the African roots of American folk traditions, most explicitly on *The Lost Mystique of Being in the Know*, which features Arouna Diarra from Burkina Faso on ngoni, tracing the lineage back to the continent. They're also part of the broader contemporary folk revival that includes collaborators like Ani DiFranco, Trevor Hall, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, placing them in a lineage that values both ancestral song and living, evolving practice.

*Live From New Orleans at Preservation Hall* is the essential entry point for newcomers—it's a homecoming record made with Aurora Nealand and Branden Lewis of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and it captures the seven years Leah and Chloe lived in New Orleans, giving listeners an immediate sense of place, ensemble chemistry, and what Rising Appalachia sounds like in a living, breathing setting rather than studio isolation. The record demonstrates their range across traditional New Orleans instrumentation while preserving the clarity of their harmonies and the emotional weight they bring to every song. If you want a broader overview of their songwriting across different moods and collaborators, *Wider Circles* (10 Year Anniversary Edition, recently reissued in 2025) provides a retrospective arc through their catalog. For those curious about how they reimagine canonical American folk and soul music, *Folk & Anchor*, their 2024 covers album spanning Bob Dylan to Beyoncé and Erykah Badu, shows their interpretive power and willingness to trace lineage across genre boundaries. Newcomers who want to hear them in their most recent form should explore *Flower Child* (2025) and the forthcoming *Unseen* (2026), which tilt toward intimate songwriting about motherhood, love, and expanded inner experience—these records feel like invitations into their current creative moment rather than retrospective exercises.

Rising Appalachia's sound is built on layered, conversational harmony between Leah and Chloe's voices, often moving in close intervals with a particular attention to the spaces between notes rather than to vocal exuberance. The instrumental foundation centers on banjo and fiddle—the core instruments of Appalachian tradition—but the full ensemble arrangement typically includes Duncan Wickel's cello creating warm, sometimes mournful underpinnings, David Brown's upright bass and baritone guitar anchoring the bottom end with old-time resonance, and Biko Casini's percussion work adding texture without overwhelm. The pacing is deliberate and often slow—this deliberation is intentional, rooted in their commitment to the Slow Music Movement, a practice of sustainable touring that extends to how they construct and present songs. Listeners often describe their music as having a gothic, melancholic quality (they're tagged with the southern gothic genre on Spotify) that sits somewhere between folk ballad and contemporary chamber music—sparse enough to let silence matter, dense enough in harmonic content that repeated listens reveal new emotional registers. There's an earthiness to the production, a sense that the songs have been worn smooth by many hands across generations, even when the arrangements are inventive or include unexpected collaborators like Aoife O'Donovan or Ayla Nereo.

*Leylines*, produced by Joe Henry and featuring Ani DiFranco and Trevor Hall, is a landmark record that takes its name from earth energies connecting sacred sites around the world—it represents Rising Appalachia at their most expansive in terms of guest collaboration and conceptual ambition. *Live From New Orleans at Preservation Hall* is essential for understanding how they inhabit ensemble space and what their music sounds like in real time with other tradition keepers, making it both a performance document and a statement about their home in New Orleans culture. *The Lost Mystique of Being in the Know*, recorded in a single day and featuring Arouna Diarra from Burkina Faso on ngoni, is crucial for anyone wanting to understand their commitment to tracing African roots within American folk traditions—it's economical, focused, and intellectually rigorous. *Wider Circles* (10 Year Anniversary Edition, 2025) functions as a career overview and reveals how their songwriting has evolved across a decade of work. For their most recent creative moment, *Flower Child* (2025) and the upcoming *Unseen* (2026) show Leah and Chloe writing from deepened life experience, particularly about motherhood and love's expansion and rupture, making these records feel like necessary additions to their catalog rather than retreads. Each album reveals a different facet of their practice—there's no single essential album, but these five create a complete picture of who they are as tradition keepers and contemporary songwriters.

Rising Appalachia's distinction lies not in technical virtuosity alone but in their integration of environmental activism, sustainable touring practice, and community healing into their artistic identity—they're not folk musicians who occasionally engage in activism; activism and land stewardship are central to how they conceive of their work. They pioneered the Slow Music Movement, a commitment to sustainable touring that has seen them travel by Amtrak train, bio-diesel bus, horseback, and sailboat, opening their shows to local nonprofits, herbalists, farmers, and poets at every stop rather than treating the venue as a closed commercial transaction. Their approach to tradition is particularly sophisticated: they're equally fluent in Appalachian fiddle and banjo, New Orleans jazz vernacular, and international roots music collected across multiple continents, yet they avoid the rootless cosmopolitanism of some contemporary folk projects by maintaining deep geographic and cultural anchoring. The songwriting voice—particularly in recent work—is distinctive in its emotional specificity about motherhood, heartbreak, and internal transformation, moving away from the abstract spiritual language common in contemporary folk music toward something more grounded in actual lived experience. Finally, their response to Hurricane Helene in their home region of Western North Carolina—spending months on volunteer relief work, supply drops, rescue efforts, and water deliveries, then gathering under a lean-to to play banjos and fiddles from a generator for neighbors in need—reveals a conception of their role as musicians that extends far beyond performance, making them singular among their peers in the depth of their community commitment.

Rising Appalachia's work is not suited for listeners seeking high-energy, uplifting folk-pop with an emphasis on major keys and optimistic messaging—their music's strength lies in its willingness to dwell in melancholy, complexity, and the minor-key spaces where real transformation happens, which can feel slow or emotionally demanding to ears trained on feel-good singer-songwriter conventions. Listeners accustomed to virtuosic technical display or flashy instrumental pyrotechnics may find their arrangements occasionally restrained and focused on ensemble cohesion rather than individual spotlight moments, making the music feel understated rather than impressive. Their commitment to sustainable touring and community-embedded shows means they don't perform at major festival circuits or high-capacity venues with the frequency of mainstream folk acts, so those seeking convenient access to Rising Appalachia performances need to be willing to travel to smaller theaters and regional cultural spaces. The Slow Music Movement ethos—which rejects the extraction model of typical touring—also means their shows are structured as communal gatherings rather than passive concert experiences, which may not appeal to listeners who prefer a clear separation between performer and audience. Additionally, listeners seeking primarily instrumental or purely devotional music won't find a primary focus there; Rising Appalachia's power is in the integration of narrative songwriting, vocal harmony, and instrumentation working in service of storytelling rather than spiritual transcendence alone. Their work requires some patience and repeated listening to reveal its depths, making them less immediately gratifying than artists designed for casual consumption.

Rising Appalachia maintains an active official website at risingappalachia.com, which is the primary source for tour dates, new releases, and announcements about their Slow Music Movement practices and community partnerships. On Spotify, you can follow their artist profile (264,000+ followers) to receive notifications when they release new music—they're actively releasing material, with *The Long Branch Sessions* and *Flower Child* arriving in 2025, and *Unseen* releasing May 8, 2026, along with the single "Lighthouse" dropping April 24, 2026. Their YouTube channel features performance footage, live sessions, and documentary content that gives viewers a window into how they work and think about their music. For upcoming tour dates, they're scheduled to perform at Assembly in Kingston (November 19-20, 2026), National Sawdust in New York (November 21-22, 2026), and then a substantial West Coast tour in spring 2027 hitting Seattle, Portland, Berkeley, Grass Valley, Napa, and Petaluma, with return performances at their home venues—Variety Playhouse in Atlanta (February 19, 2027) and Tipitina's in New Orleans (February 21, 2027). They're also worth following on social media if you want updates about relief work, seasonal touring practices, and collaborations, as their commitment to environmental activism and community partnership shapes when and where they perform. BrightStar will list their tour information as dates are confirmed, making this directory a reliable place to track their movements alongside their official website.

The core Rising Appalachia ensemble features Leah and Chloe Smith on vocals and multi-instrumental arrangements (banjo, fiddle, guitar), Duncan Wickel on fiddle and cello, David Brown on upright bass and baritone guitar, and Biko Casini on drums and percussion—each of these musicians is themselves a tradition keeper, bringing depth and specificity to their respective instruments rather than serving as hired session players. Beyond the core band, Rising Appalachia has cultivated a rich collaborative network spanning multiple musical traditions: they've worked with Joe Henry (producer of *Leylines*), Ani DiFranco and Trevor Hall on that same record, and most significantly with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band (Aurora Nealand and Branden Lewis) on their vital New Orleans live album. For their forthcoming *Unseen* (2026), they've invited Aoife O'Donovan, Ayla Nereo, Bonnie Paine, and Brittany Haas as special guests, indicating a preference for collaborators rooted in folk and string traditions. They also formed the a cappella spirit-folk ensemble Starling Arrow with Tina Malia, Ayla Nereo, and Marya Stark, showing their willingness to explore stripped-down vocal arrangements with kindred artists. On *The Lost Mystique of Being in the Know*, they brought Arouna Diarra from Burkina Faso to play ngoni, demonstrating their commitment to tracing African roots within American folk traditions through direct collaboration rather than appropriation. These partnerships reflect a philosophy of collaboration as lineage-tracing—they seek out musicians who understand the historical and cultural weight of the traditions they're working within.

Rising Appalachia has performed at NPR's Tiny Desk, one of the most prestigious platforms for contemporary music in America, giving them significant visibility among listeners who follow public radio and digital music journalism. They've also been invited to perform at the Hopi Reservation and Standing Rock, indicating recognition from Indigenous communities and environmental activists as artists whose work carries authentic commitment to land stewardship and social justice beyond performative gestures. Their appearance at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and Red Rocks—two of the most respected venues in American folk and roots music—places them in a lineage of folk artists taken seriously by gatekeeping institutions. Their partnerships with established organizations including the Prison Yoga Project, Honor the Earth, and the Permaculture Action Network demonstrate that they're recognized by serious practitioners in environmental activism and restorative justice work, not simply by music critics. The fact that they were invited to create a track for *The National Park Album* (2025), a collaborative compilation celebrating national park conservation, further underscores their standing as artists whose work speaks to environmental values that extend beyond metaphor into actual policy and land protection. Their response to Hurricane Helene—spending months on volunteer relief work in Western North Carolina—garnered local and regional recognition as musicians who show up with their hands and their hearts, not just their art, a form of institutional trust that often precedes major media coverage. While they may not dominate mainstream music journalism, their recognition comes from the institutions and communities that matter most to their work.