The Pocahontas County Opera House will present the Pine Mountain Sessions, featuring Heather Summers and Da-niel Martin Moore, Saturday, November 9, at 7:30 p.m.
This special show will include a sampling of the songs and verse recorded by a number of Kentucky artists at the chapel of the Pine Mountain Settlement School.
Summers is a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist in the Appalachian tradition. She will appear solo for her performance at the Opera House, but regularly performs with Anna Krippenstapel in the duo, The Other Years. In 2012, Summers met some cool folks that played “old-time” music and hasn’t looked back. The tunes felt as though they already lived inside her, so she began playing banjo and old-time guitar religiously.
Daniel Moore is a singer-songwriter and producer whose work has been described as Appalachian Accoustic and Optimistic Folk. Since his first album, Stray Age, came out in 2008 he has recorded with Ben Sollee, Jim James of My Morning Jacket and Joan Shelly.
The Pine Mountain Sessions project is a natural progression for Martin known for his collaborative explorations. The two LP album which includes songs and poems by some of Kentucky’s most celebrated songwriters and poets began back in 2017 when Martin visited the Pine Mountain Settlement school for his birthday.
“We basically had the whole mountain to ourselves. We took tons of hikes, and we spent some time in the chapel, where we ended up recording the album. And I thought, ‘You know, it sounds so beautiful in here,’ when I was playing the piano and just listening to it reverberate through the room. It’s such a magical place to make music. It also sounds wonderful. And I thought, ‘I’ve got to try to make a record down here.’”
In a few recording sessions scattered across the winter and spring of 2017-18, Daniel Martin Moore gathered musicians and writers from all across Kentucky in the century-old chapel on the slopes of Pine Mountain to make new recordings of their work. Nearly all of the songs and poems were previously unreleased. The rich, reverberant sound of the chapel at Pine Mountain Settlement School binds these never-before-heard recordings together, and is the atmosphere that inspired the beautiful and candid performance.
Tickets are $10 for adults. Youth 17 and younger are admitted free of charge. Tickets are available at the door and in advance at pocahontasoperahouse.org or at the 4th Avenue Gallery in Marlinton.
The Opera House Performance Series is presented with financial assistance through a grant from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History and the National Endowment for the Arts, with approval from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts. Support is also provided by Pocahontas County Dramas, Fairs and Festivals and the Pocahontas County Convention and Visitors Bureau.