2025 Staff
We encourage attendees who are at all levels of musical experience to drive the weekend by suggesting or leading workshops and by gathering for impromptu music sessions and conversations. We also hire staff to share their expertise in specific traditional folk genres and the contexts of those song traditions, and to mingle and mentor.
Connie Badgett Steadman
Connie Marie Badgett Steadman grew up in Locust Hill Township in Caswell County, North Carolina, singing gospel music with her family. They were known as the Badgett Family singers. As a trio, The Badgett Sisters have kept alive a tradition of African American harmony and sacred song, singing in “folklife festivals, churches, schools, prisons and mental hospitals.” They have performed sacred music and traditional hymns, gospels and spirituals as well as their own songs at concerts and events all across North Carolina, at Carnegie Hall, at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. and as far away as Brisbane, Australia. In 1990, the Badgett Sisters received the North Carolina Arts Council's Folk Heritage Award for their contribution to African American traditional music heritage. Connie Steadman has also performed at the annual African American Cultural Festival at the North Carolina Museum of History.
Miriam Hacksaw
Miriam Hacksaw (she/they) is a queer mixed Malayali-American fiddler, banjoist and rhythm bones player from the Pacific Northwest. She is known for collecting and reinterpreting tunes from Kerala, India from her Malayali family of Kumbanad. Founder of the old time punk band Foraging and the Rattling Bones, Miriam currently tours as the fiddler for the Flotsam River Circus. She has performed across the country from bookstores to dive bars, and appeared on the traditional music podcast “Get Up In The Cool” with her younger sibling Rye on the pandeiro. You can follow her radical queer fusion projects on all social media platforms @miriamhacksaw
Michael and Carrie Kline
Michael and Carrie Kline perform country harmony duets from coal mining songs to gospel, family songs, front porch music, and songs of people in nature. Their voices carry the songs with truth and authenticity, and their guitar accompaniments and haunting harmonies get you where you live. With their lifelong focus on West Virginia history and tradition, the Klines’ performances celebrate the old-time singers as well as the songs. Michael and Carrie perform in Europe and across the United States. As folklorist-musicians the Klines weave songs and stories, evoking the times that really matter, time with family and friends, spiritual times, wrapped in a patchwork quilt of vivid imagery. Kitchen songs. You can smell the biscuits baking.