Jeni & Billy at Faulkner Van Buren Library
- When: Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
- Where: Faulkner Van Buren Library, 1900 Tyler Street, Conway, AR 501-327-7482
- Cost: Free
- Age limit: All ages
- Categories: Music (other)
You have to watch where you sit at a Jeni & Billy concert, because that ordinary-looking folding chair might just turn into the back seat of a big ole Buick hurtling down the switchback of a coal truck road.
That barstool might turn out to be the rock-hard sinners pew of a white-washed mountain church. That couch might be a marble stoop on a gritty street in Baltimore, and that velvet theater cushion could just be the well-worn driver's seat of a wagon headed across the windswept Texas plains.
The high twang of a banjo starts it off -- or maybe the mournful lilt of the mandolin. Then, a train comes barreling down the reeds of a harmonica. The guitar catches fire and lifts two voices into the high lonesome harmonies of the Appalachian mountains, painting pictures of miners and millworkers, roustabouts and revival preachers, Buicks and beauty queens.
From Nashville to LA, from Chicago to Tampa, from Conwy, Wales to Conway, Arkansas -- Jeni & Billy have travelled more than 170,000 miles in five years, just to paint pictures in song for thousands of people. At festivals and fiddlers' conventions along the way, they have picked up ribbons in songwriting, traditional folk-singing, guitar-picking, and flatfoot dancing.
They bring their original Appalachian-flavored folk to the Faulkner Van Buren Library on Tuesday, April 16th, 7:00 pm.
On tour out west last year, Jeni & Billy recorded nine of their concerts. Now they are bringing their music back to those same places in the form of a two-CD set of songs, stories, and flatfoot dance captured on the road, complete with audience singing, laughter, and gasps. The double album includes nine audience favorites and six new, never before released originals.
Novelist Lee Smith says, "Jeni and Billy's stunningly original music is as old as the hills, yet brand new at the same time. Jeni is a true poet and a born storyteller, through and through -- many of her songs contain whole novels."
"Jeni's songs spring from the true vine. Billy is the perfect partner, skillfully accompanying Jeni with guitar, banjo and harmonies. These two are tradition bearers -- the next generation of traditional music," according to Mary Smith, Director of the Richmond (VA) Folk Music Society.
Mountain roads and mountain churches, moonshine and oxycodone, snake handlers and sherbet cake -- you get to know them all at a Jeni & Billy concert. You might arrive a stranger, but you'll leave a member of the family.
More information on the duo is available at jeniandbilly.com; their CDs are available on CDBaby.com.
