PHIL JAMISON
Founding coordinator of Old-Time Music & Dance Week, Phil is nationally-known as a dance caller, musician, and flatfoot dancer. For more than thirty years he has been calling dances and performing and teaching at music festivals and dance events throughout the U.S. and overseas, including over twenty-five years as a member of the Green Grass Cloggers. His flatfoot dancing was featured in the film, Songcatcher, for which he also served as Traditional Dance consultant. From 1982 through 2004, he toured and played guitar with Ralph Blizard and the New Southern Ramblers. He also plays fiddle and banjo. He has done extensive research in the area of Appalachian dance, and has published many articles on traditional dance in the Old-Time Herald. In 2007, he was named the National Old-Time Clogging Champion (Senior Division) at Uncle Dave Macon Days in Murfreesboro, TN. Phil teaches mathematics and Appalachian music at Warren Wilson College, where in recent years, he has also hosted Dare to be Square!, an annual weekend workshop for square dance callers.

BRUCE GREENE
Bruce Greene is best known for preserving and playing the fiddle music of Kentucky. As a young man, he traveled throughout the state collecting and learning from the last generation of traditional fiddlers there, some born as far back as the 1880s. Bruce apprenticed with a number of older fiddlers including Hiram Stamper, the family of John Salyer, Manon Campbell, Gusty Wallace, and Jim Bowles, learning their archaic repertoires and bowing techniques. Since the late 1970s, Bruce has lived in western North Carolina with his family, where he has continued to learn from local traditional musicians. He has taught at Swannanoa, Augusta, the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, and Mars Hill, and he has been invited as a master fiddler to numerous other events. In addition to fiddling, Bruce has studied banjo with the Helton family of eastern Kentucky, and he sings with his partner, Loy McWhirter. www.brucegreene.net

RAYNA GELLERT
Rayna Gellert grew up listening to old-time music and has been particularly influenced by the fiddling of her father, Dan Gellert. After playing violin in her school orchestras, she took up old-time fiddle in 1994 when she moved to North Carolina to attend Warren Wilson College. Since then, she has earned prizes at the Appalachian String Band Music Festival at Clifftop, WV, and recorded two popular and influential CDs of fiddle tunes: Ways of the World and Starch and Iron with Susie Goehring. Rayna has toured extensively throughout the U.S., Europe, and South America, and she has taught fiddle workshops throughout the country and overseas, including Ashokan, Augusta, Mars Hill, the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, and Sore Fingers in England. In 2003, she was a featured performer at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Since 2003, she has toured and performed with the stringband Uncle Earl www.uncleearl.net, with whom she has made two critically-acclaimed recordings for Rounder Records, the most recent, Waterloo Tennessee, produced by John Paul Jones. She has also performed with the dance company, Rhythm in Shoes and the West African-influenced rock band, Toubab Krewe. Rayna recently moved from Asheville to her new home in Lexington, KY.
www.rayna.utopiandesign.com

ERYNN MARSHALL
Erynn Marshall has played fiddle for over twenty-five years and fell in love with old-time music a decade ago. The music captivated her, but it was the people she met and the places she visited along the way that kept her immersed in the music of the South. For several years, Erynn conducted fieldwork in West Virginia visiting many older fiddlers and singers, and she also completed an Appalachian Fellowship at Berea College in Kentucky. She has written a book, Music in the Air Somewhere: The Shifting Borders of West Virginia’s Fiddle and Song Traditions (WVU Press 2006) and recorded two CDs, Calico and Meet Me in the Music with banjoist, Chris Coole. She continues to perform and teach at festivals and camps across North America including Augusta, Midwest Banjo Camp, Woods Music and Dance Camp, North Atlantic Fiddle Convention, Institute of Musical Traditions, and others. Fiddler Kenny Jackson describes Erynn’s fiddling as, “having a sense of delight in it, even in the lonesome pieces.” Erynn is thrilled to be an instructor at Swannanoa Old-Time Week 2008! www.hickoryjack.com

PAUL KOVAC
Singer, multi-instrumentalist, and scholar of American country music, Paul Kovac has been playing old-time and bluegrass music on guitar, mandolin, and banjo since he was a child. Over the years, he has performed with a long list of musicians, including Bill Monroe, Chet Atkins, Dirk Powell, Ginny Hawker and Tracy Schwartz, Chubby Wise, Byron Berline, Vassar Clements, Hazel Dickens, and Kathy Kallick. He has also toured internationally with the Critton Hollow String Band, the Hotfoot Quartet, and the Fiddle Puppets. Since the mid-1980s, Paul has performed with the Clear Fork Bluegrass Quartet, and he has been on the roster of the Ohio Arts Council’s “Ohio Artists on Tour.” He has been on staff at numerous music and dance camps, and he coordinated the Bluegrass Week at the Augusta Heritage Center from 1996 to 2007. When not playing music, Paul grows Christmas trees and blueberries and makes maple syrup on his farm in Chardon, Ohio.

JOHN HERRMANN
John has been traveling the world playing old-time music for over thirty years. He plays fiddle with the New Southern Ramblers, but he has performed with many bands including the Henrie Brothers (1st place Galax, 1976), Critton Hollow, the Wandering Ramblers, One-Eyed Dog and the Rockinghams. Equally adept on banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and bass, he is known as the “Father of Old-Time Music” in Japan(!), and the originator of the ‘slow jam.’ John has been on staff at numerous music camps from coast to coast. He lives in Asheville, NC.

SHEILA KAY ADAMS
Ballad singer, banjo player, and storyteller, Sheila comes from a small mountain community in Madison County, North Carolina. For seven generations, her family has maintained the tradition of passing down the English, Scottish and Irish ballads that came over with her ancestors in the late 1700s. She learned the ballads from her relatives, primarily from her great-aunt Dellie Chandler Norton. A perennial favorite at Asheville’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, Sheila has performed and taught at many major festivals and workshops throughout the country and been a featured performer in the Southern Arts Federation’s Sisters of the South tour, the National Folk Festival, the North Carolina Folklife Festival, the Kent State Folk Festival, the San Diego Folk Heritage Festival, and the Folkmasters series on National Public Radio. She served as the ballad-singing coach for the feature film, Songcatcher, and her novel, My Old True Love, published in 2004 by Algonquin Books was a finalist for the Southeastern Booksellers Association’s Book of the Year Award. It was released in paperback by Ballantine Books in 2005. www.jimandsheila.com

JOHN HOLLANDSWORTH
A native of Christiansburg in southwest Virginia, John grew up listening to friends and relatives play stringed instruments, and he developed his own autoharp style incorporating both chromatic and diatonic techniques. John has performed and led workshops at the Mountain Laurel Autoharp Gathering, the Willamette Valley Autoharp Gathering, Sore Fingers Summer School, Augusta, the Campbell Folk School, and elsewhere. John has served as editor of the “Interaction Lesson” feature in Autoharp Quarterly magazine, and in 1991, he became the first champion of the prestigious Mountain Laurel Autoharp Gathering Competition. In his native region, where there are many local fiddlers’ conventions, John is well-known for his autoharp playing. He has been named the “Best All-Around Performer” of the Galax Old Fiddlers’ Convention three times, being the only autoharp player ever to win this recognition. www.blueridgeautoharps.com

SUSIE GOEHRING
Susie Goehring has been playing old-time fiddle and guitar and singing Appalachian ballads and Carter Family songs since the late 1970s, when she first joined forces with long-time musical partners Jeff and Rick Goehring. This musical trio formed the core of various incarnations of the Red Mules, an old-time string band that actively performed at festivals, music and dance camps, square dances, and social gatherings throughout the 1980s and 90s. Susie, who is recognized as a strong old-time style back-up guitar player and singer, can be heard on the recent CD, Starch & Iron, with fiddler Rayna Gellert.