MATT WATROBA
There are few that can boast a first-name-basis relationship with almost all of the major folk musicians in the North American continent, as well as a comprehensive grasp of the folk music genre both past and present. One who can is teacher, writer and performer, Matt Watroba. His love of folk, roots and traditional music led him to his position as the host of the Folks Like Us program on Detroit Public Radio, a position he has held for over 22 years. In 2007, he partnered with Sing Out! magazine to create the Sing Out! Radio Magazine, an hour long syndicated radio show heard across the country and on XM Satellite Radio. He was awarded “Best Overall Folk Performer” by the Detroit Music Awards for the year 2000, and his long list of credits include the prestigious Ann Arbor Folk Festival, The Old Songs Festival, the New Jersey Folk Weekend, Louisville’s Kentucky Music Weekend, The Fox Valley Festival and hundreds of school and community presentations throughout the Great Lakes Region. He has interviewed and performed with hundreds of performers including, Pete Seeger, Odetta, Charlie Louvin, and Jean Ritchie. In addition, Matt’s musical partnership with the Rev. Robert Jones has created one of the most sought-after and unique educational experiences available in the country today.

BRIAN PETERS
Dirty Linen magazine calls Brian Peters, “one of the very best performers in the field of English traditional song and music.” Brian has been a professional performer for over twenty years, during which he’s played countless British folk clubs and most of the major festivals, as well as undertaking many tours in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. He’s internationally known as a performer of the old ‘Child Ballads,’and he also performs a wide variety of other songs from the English tradition and elsewhere. A compelling and passionate singer, Brian is also one of England’s best anglo concertina players and also uses button accordion and guitar in his imaginative song accompaniments. He has been on staff at the Augusta Heritage Center’s Vocal Week, and Pinewoods Camp Folk Music Week, as well as the Celtic College at Goderich, Ontario, and The Woods Camp. He’s performed at festivals across North America, including Old Songs, Champlain Valley, Mystic Seaport, and Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. He has recorded eight solo CDs of which the most recent, Songs of Trial and Triumph, concentrate on the Child Ballads. The distinguished English singer Roy Harris, reviewing the album for The Living Tradition magazine, said: “Brilliant… the best “Lord Randal” I’ve ever heard, the best “Georgie,” the best “Lucy Wan”… I have a new ballad hero.” www.harbourtownrecords.com/peters.html

GAYE ADEGBALOLA
Gaye Adegbalola is a powerful singer and songwriter who has composed a string of blues hits. A founding member of Saffire – The Uppity Blues Women, Gaye also performs solo; in a classic blues duo with piano accompanist, Roddy Barnes; and as front woman for Miz A & The Freedom Band. An outstanding instructor, Gaye is a former Virginia State Teacher of the Year. She received the Blues Music Award (the “Grammy” of the blues world) for her song “Middle Aged Blues Boogie,” and was nominated for the Blues Music Award’s Contemporary Female Blues Artist, and Acoustic Blues Album of the Year with Saffire. For many years, Gaye has taught blues vocal techniques and performance at The Augusta Heritage Center’s Blues Week and the Centrum Blues Workshops in Port Townsend, WA, and authored an instructional DVD, Learn to Sing the Blues, on the prestigious Homespun Tapes label. An internationally-recognized blues artist, she has 13 CDs in international distribution, with three on her own label, Hot Toddy Music. www.adegbalola.com

CLAUDINE LANGILLE
Claudine is best known for her banjo, mandolin and vocal work with Touchstone, the highly acclaimed Irish-Appalachian fusion band based in Chapel Hill, NC, and featuring the Bothy Band’s Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill. Touchstone recorded two award-winning albums on Green Linnet records, The New Land and Jealousy. Claudine has spent time in Galway, Ireland, Cape Breton and Lunenburg, Nova Scotia learning the local music, and she currently performs with Gypsy Reel, who have recorded six CDs in Claudine’s Mount Hollywood Studio in Vermont and have been recipients of a National Endowment for the Arts award for touring artists. Claudine maintains a musical connection with the traditional music of the maritime provinces of Canada, especially her father’s native Nova Scotia. She has been a guest singer at the Celtic Colours Festival in Cape Breton, and was featured on Brian O’Donovan’s Celtic Sojourns radio show in Boston. Claudine has led workshops at folk festivals in the US, Canada, and England, including the Gathering’s Celtic Week. She founded the Mount Holly Folk Club, a weekly gathering of singers and players in her Vermont community. www.myspace.com/claudinelangille

PETER SIEGEL
Peter Siegel’s “radical roots” music is a melting pot of roots Americana. Raised in the old-time square dance community around the suburbs of NYC, and the scene surrounding the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Peter has been fusing tradition and pop culture for as long as he’s been playing music. As a kid surrounded by New York jazz and folk, Peter evolved into a swing-playing, traditional song-singing, finger- and flat-picking, mostly un-categorizable performer. Over the years he’s appeared on a dozen or so CDs including three solo recordings of his own. Peter is at once a traditionalist who pushes the boundaries of the folk genre, an interpreter of traditional songs and a masterful songwriter, as well as a regular on the contra, square, and swing dance circuit in western Massachusetts, and southern Vermont. He has toured for the last 15 years sharing the stage with such artists as Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Peggy Seeger, Jay Unger and Molly Mason, John Cohen, Noel “Paul” Stookey, The Mammals, and Crooked Still. As a teacher in the public schools, Peter has fostered a love of the great traditions of song in a generation of grade school kids and has conducted arrangements of traditional songs from around the world for his kids’ choruses for the last five years. He’s led workshops at dozens of festivals and camps around the country including The John C. Campbell Folk School, Northern Week at Ashokan, and Pinewoods dance music and family weeks. www.petersiegel.com

RODDY BARNES
Roddy Barnes graduated from Missouri Western State University with a B.A. in Classical Performance. He then spent a year studying with French pianist Francois Rene DuChable, and played blues piano throughout France. He was awarded a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and many of his original compositions have been recorded by other artists, including Gaye Adegbalola, Ann Rabson, Gina DeLuca, and Saffire/The Uppity Blues Women. He has composed original scores for The Missouri Repertory Theatre in St. Joseph, MO, and for Sycamore Rouge in Petersburg, VA. In 2005, he was asked to write an original theme song and segue music for the PBS show Cultivating Life, which can still be seen on PBS and WGN. He received his first gospel education in an African-American church in St. Joseph, MO, and he’s continued playing in several churches of various denominations. He has taught the gospel choir class at Augusta’s Blues Week, and also at Centrum in Port Townsend, WA. Along with teaching, composing, and solo performances, he works with Gaye Adegbalola as a duo that has performed across the US, France, and Africa. Roddy will be joining Gaye in her blues class.

BRIAN DEMARCUS
Brian’s career in music and dance dates back four decades when his father gave him his own banjo after Brian returned from a fiddlers’ convention with a passion to play old-time music. He spent 12 years touring professionally with a music and dance group from North Carolina, taking the rich traditional sounds of old-time string band music and southern Appalachian clogging out of the mountain regions and into venues around the world. Over the years he has played with a multitude of bands and has won many awards at fiddlers’ conventions and festivals around the country. Brian’s love of traditional music forms of all types keeps him active with several bands in his home state of Alaska. He teaches clawhammer banjo, bass, guitar, band and dance calling, and has taught at the most prestigious music and dance camps around the country. He is known for his humor, ease of instruction, and love for the genre. He once called a dance for 4,000 people on a hillside at the Philadelphia Folk Festival…no easy feat (feet?). He recently published a book of his original dances called Hands Four And Square Your Sets that was featured in the Country Dance & Song Society’s newsletter and the October, 2008 issue of The Old-Time Herald, an international traditional music magazine.