Jam sessions, featuring a number of instruments and singers, are always the highlight of the Up the Mountain festival.
Jam sessions, featuring a number of instruments and singers, are always the highlight of the Up the Mountain festival.
Up the Mountain: Old-time Music Festival is a celebration of Appalachian mountain music and dance.
It will feature traditional tub-thumping, hollering fiddle and string band music, sweet songs, harmonies and spooky ballads. The old-time genre encompasses mountain fiddle and banjo tunes, unaccompanied ballads, mountain gospel, shape note singing, as wellas some early country/blues and cajun.
A Saturday night concert and dance will be open to everyone, with prizes for best male and female old-time outfit. The evening's performance will be headlined by Sawmill, a Kiwi Old-time string band featuring special guest fiddler Andy Fitzgibbon from West Virginia at Pukeora Estate, in Waipukurau.
Fitzgibbon studied with the old masters of West Virginia fiddling, something which has been noted in reviews of his latest recording with The Iron Leg Boys. Having won numerous awards, Fitzgibbon is well placed to teach a workshop on Saturday morning.
He will be joined by Helena Faust, Liam McKenny, Don Milne, Jim Doak, Silvia Carlyle, Andrew Bicknell and others for a weekend of jamming and performing.
