Vocal Week

Click on the See More for the lineup of teachers at Vocal Week 2015!

While singing can connect us to many wonderful cultures, the act of singing is itself one of the oldest and most powerful traditions. Vocal Week offers a wealth of opportunities to join in this joyous energy. Students can learn songs in a range of traditional cultures and styles, taught by nationally and internationally known singers, teachers and songwriters. Taking good care of your voice will be emphasized, along with classes in voice technique and vocal warm-ups every morning. Those at the beginning level can get tips on creating simple harmonies, while more experienced singers can get a challenging workout.

Tuition is $450 plus room & board. Registration is now open! To register, specify Vocal Week and select a total of three classes, one class per period. See website for full listings by class periods. Class selections can be changed upon arrival if desired.

Flawn Williams
(Coordinator & Ad Hoc Harmonies)
started singing with his parents and sister around their South Carolina home and on road trips in their ’54 Ford. Other influences included church choirs, doowop records, and the “Folk Scare” of the 1960s. He has led workshops in shape note singing and other topics from his eclectic repertoire and since 1997 has coordinated Augusta’s Vocal Week. He performs in many Washington Revels productions. Flawn’s credits include harmony vocals on CDs by Bryan Bowers, John McCutcheon, Ginny Hawker & Kay Justice, Ann Porcella and others. He also produced Cathy Fink’s album The Leading Role and Ginny & Kay’s Signs and Wonders.

Kathy Bullock
(African American Gospel Songs & From Ghana to Jamaica)
is a professor of music and chair of the music department at Berea College, Berea, Kentucky, where she has worked for over twenty years. Her work there includes teaching music courses, directing the Black Music Ensemble (eighty voices singing African-American sacred music), publishing, lecturing and performing throughout the United States, Europe and Africa. Additionally, Dr. Bullock has designed and completed new study abroad programs for Berea College students, traveling to Zimbabwe, Ghana and Jamaica. Kathy’s ongoing research includes sub-Saharan African and African-American music and culture, and the influences of/connections in the African diaspora.

Eva Salina
(Between Heaven and Earth: A Balkan Harmony Singing Sampler & Violets and Roses: Healing Songs, Lullabies, & Prayers)
A native of Santa Cruz, California, Eva Salina has been immersed in Balkan traditional music for 22 years. She has studied with some of the greatest living singers of Balkan traditional music, and is a remarkable teacher with 16 years of experience. Her rich, agile and powerful voice and her enthusiastic, skillful, inspired teaching have quickly established Eva as a renowned singer, interpreter and teacher of traditional Balkan vocal music. Singing primarily through the traditions of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey and the Romani people, Eva has also done a good deal of Georgian, Corsican, Traditional American and Ukrainian singing traditions. Her first visit to Augusta met with rave reviews from students, so we’re happy to welcome her back this year!

Emily Miller
(Duets Around the World & American Duet Singing)
Emily was raised playing and singing Louvin Brothers and Stanley Brothers songs with her parents while they traveled the world as journalists. Her main musical role these days is as singer in a honky-tonk country band, The Sweetback Sisters, which tours regularly around the US and the world. Emily also performs old-time music as a duo with her husband, Jesse Milnes; teaches workshops with her mother, Val Mindel; performs with the Starry Mountain Singers and directs the Davis & Elkins College Appalachian Ensemble’s string band.

Suzannah Park
(Duets Around the World & American Duet Singing)
Suzannah Park comes from a family of three generations of ballad singers, storytellers, and dancers. Her joyous and intuitive teaching style, born of a lifetime of familiarity with American and English folk music, makes singers old and young feel at home in the songs that she shares and with each other. Whether she’s teaching ballads, lullabies or sea shanties, laughter and good times abound. When not on tour with the Starry Mountain Singers or Village Harmony, Suzannah lives in the NC mountains of her birth where she dances with the Green Grass Cloggers and leads the Wild Asheville Community Chorus.

Charles Williams
(Finding Your Voice)
is a singer, actor, narrator and voice instructor. He has taught Vocal Week classes for many years. He also can slap a mean hambone rhythm! He performed in the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th anniversary production of “Porgy and Bess” and has toured the world singing Broadway tunes, spirituals, German lieder and field hollers. Most recently he toured worldwide with Philip Glass’ opera “Einstein on the Beach.” Williams also has served as vocal consultant for the vocal group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and is a master teacher/artist in voice at the Levine School of Music in Washington, DC.

Rhiannon Giddens
(Mouth Music from Many Lands)
Rhiannon Giddens is an American original—an artist with an unforgettable voice who culls the music of our collective past to point the way to the future. Reviving, interpreting, and recasting traditional material from a variety of sources has been central to Giddens’ career, especially in her groundbreaking work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The CCDs have shared the role African-American performers and songwriters played in US folk music history, while making recordings that are vital, contemporary and exuberant. Rhiannon is also making a mark as a solo performer and in other collaborations like T-Bone Burnett’s The New Basement Tapes project.

Paul Brown
(Piedmont to Mountains: Country Blues, Old-Time and Bluegrass Songs)
Paul Brown started singing when he was a kid, soaking up the African-American country blues and old-time songs his mom knew from central Virginia. His love of these “home” songs prompted him to seek out more singers offering similar sounds. That led him into the world of southern Appalachian string bands, in which he’s been singing and playing banjo and fiddle for decades. Today Paul is possibly best described as a white country blues banjo songster. He carries a repertoire of songs from intimate to raucous, along with the inflections and memories of old-timers who taught him.

Diana Sáez
(Songs of the Spanish-Caribbean Tradition & Songs From the Andes)
A leading specialist in Latin American music and an accomplished choral conductor, Diana V. Sáez is the founder and artistic director of Cantigas, a chamber choir dedicated to choral music of Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean. Cantigas received the 2014 Choral Excellence award by the Choralis Foundation. And in late 2014, Cantigas performed at the International Choral Festival in Buga, Colombia, along with choirs from all over Latin America. Ms. Sáez is frequently invited as a guest conductor for regional and state festivals. She has also sung in several Latin American folk groups in Boston and Washington, D.C.

Alice Gerrard
(Songwriting & Traditional Singing Repertoire and Style)
is a singer and songwriter who has performed and advocated for old-time and bluegrass music for over 40 years. She plays old-time fiddle, banjo and guitar. Her recordings with Hazel Dickens during the 1960s and ’70s influenced a generation of women musicians from Laurie Lewis to the Judds. Alice’s song, “Agate Hill,” was an inspiration for Lee Smith’s latest novel, On Agate Hill. Her most recent recording, Follow the Music, was a finalist for a 2015 Grammy in the Folk category. She is founder of the music magazine Old-Time Herald and makes her home in Durham, NC.

Penny Anderson
(Vocal Warmups)
Penny Anderson is a life-long singer of both choral music and traditional folksong. She is a songwriter; a choral composer, leader and teacher and a faithful Augusta Vocal Week attendee since 2003. In 2011 her choral composition “Cat Jeoffry” had its world premiere at Augusta Heritage Center’s Vocal Week. Her teaching includes a five-week course on early New England choral music for the Osher Institute at the University of Pittsburgh. She has sung shape-note music since the 1980s and organizes the Pittsburgh monthly shape note sing. She would rather sing, preferably with a group, than do anything else.

Laurelyn Dossett
(Vocal Week Assistant)
Singer/songwriter Laurelyn Dossett lives and writes in the piedmont of North Carolina, and her songs tend to reflect the stories of the region, both traditional and contemporary. One of the most sought-after voices in creative collaborations, she co-founded Polecat Creek with singing partner Kari Sickenberger in 1997. Laurelyn is a frequent performer at regional music festivals such as Merlefest and has been a guest on the radio show Prairie Home Companion. She has toured with Rhiannon Giddens, Alice Gerrard, Diana Jones and Daniel Bernard Roumain. Laurelyn premiered composer Kenneth Frazelle’s song cycle, “Songs in the Rear View Mirror,” in 2010, and has toured with the North Carolina Symphony in 2009 and 2011 and 2013.

In recent years Laurelyn has partnered with Triad Stage’s Preston Lane to write five plays featuring regional folklore and original music: Brother Wolf (2006), Beautiful Star: An Appalachian Nativity (2006), Bloody Blackbeard (2008), Providence Gap (2010) and Snow Queen(2013). They will premiere a new play, Radiunt Abundunt, in 2016. A song from Brother Wolf, “Anna Lee,” was featured on Levon Helm’s Grammy-winning record, Dirt Farmer, is included in the documentary film about Helm’s life, called “Ain’t in it for my Health,” and is featured on the 2011 Grammy-winning cd Levon Helm’s “Ramble at the Ryman.”
Commissioned by the North Carolina Symphony, Dossett and the symphony premiered her new song cycle, “The Gathering: A Winter’s Tale in Six Songs, in November 2011. Her song “Leaving Eden” is the title track of the Grammy-nominated recent release by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and Playmakers Repertory Theatre at UNC is developing a play based on the song, also called Leaving Eden and premiering in 2016.

Laurelyn has taught songwriting and singing at the Augusta Heritage Center, as well as at many universities, workshops and festivals. She is the 2012 recipient of the Betty Cone Medal of Arts, the 2010 recipient of the North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship for songwriting, 2004 winner of the Chris Austin songwriting contest at Merlefest, and a 2010 fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She lives with her family in Greensboro, NC.

Don Friedman
(Staff Musician, Jam Leader)
Don Friedman hails from the old-time and bluegrass mecca of Brooklyn, NY, where he sings, harmonizes, and plays and teaches guitar. He’s currently in three trios in the New York area: ‘Triboro’, ‘Just Left Town’, and a group with Trip Henderson and frequent Augusta staffer Emily Eagen. Don also co-teaches old-time and folk harmony singing with Emily at Brooklyn’s Jalopy Theater and School of Music. He has for decades led jams and sing-alongs at a variety of venues, and will be filling that role at Augusta for the tenth time this summer. By day, he is an attorney with a New York-based anti-poverty agency.

Amanda Lynn Stubley
(Liaison, Jam Leader)

Tom Druckenmiller
(Liaison)