Knee to Knee is a project about the past, but it’s also a project about the future. Funded by the NC Arts Council as a part of their “In These Mountains” initiative, Knee to Knee is recording the experience, beginning to end, of an 8th generation Appalachian ballad singer learning from an honored master, who just happens to be her mother. Focusing on the expressive arts, practices, and lifeways that emerge within the Appalachian community, The Appalachian Folklife Apprenticeship Program offers 12 month financial support to provide 1:1 training in a community setting, helping to develop the skills of the apprentice on their own path to mastery.
Melanie Penland will be sitting knee to knee with her mother, NEA Heritage Award Winner Sheila Kay Adams, to learn the songs collected from her family in Madison County, NC over 100 years ago by the noted scholar and folklorist Cecil Sharp. They will document the songs and the process through videos, blogs and photos, with the goal of creating a living archive as well as a template for continuing an ancient tradition in a modern world.
Born in 1971, eighth generation ballad singer Melanie Rice Penland was lucky enough to grow up in Sodom, Laurel during the Folk Revival Movement of the 1970’s. It was a time of great interest in all things ‘folk,’ and Sodom, Laurel became particularly well known as a community whose members were holding on to the traditional practice of passing down songs and stories from generation to generation. Melanie has been singing on stage since the age of three and started singing ballads regularly at local festivals at the age of eight. Although Melanie has learned most of the ballads from her mother, Sheila Kay Adams (one of 2013’s NEA Award Winners), she was fortunate to get to have spent time with such ballad singers as Evelyn Ramsey, Brazil Wallin, Dellie Chandler Norton, and Cas Wallin.
Melanie Rice Penland is one of a handful of a younger generation of singers and storytellers from Madison County. She has enjoyed spending time on stage with her cousin Donna Ray Norton, father-in-law Joe Penland, and mother Sheila Kay Adams. Melanie is a regular performer at the annual Bluff Mountain Folk Festival in Hot Springs, NC. She has performed at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Festival, Mars Hill University Heritage Day, and at many other venues in Western North Carolina. In 2005, she was honored, along with Donna Ray Norton, with the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Youth Award for Balladry.
In 1994, Melanie Rice Penland graduated from Mars Hill University as one of the school’s first students to minor in Regional Studies. Melanie spent her junior year in Ireland studying how her family and the tradition of balladry spread from the British Isles to her home in Western North Carolina.
In 1999, Melanie Rice Penland was proud to receive an MA in Appalachian Studies from Appalachian State University. She is known to say that it’s nice to finally have ‘the papers as well as the pedigree.’
Melanie continues to live in Sodom, Laurel on the old home place. Hanging clothes out on the line and listening to the wind whip across the ridge tops, Melanie is constantly reminded of her ancestors as she walks in their musical, and literal, footsteps.
A seventh-generation ballad singer, storyteller, and claw-hammer banjo player, Sheila Kay Adams was born and raised in the Sodom Laurel community of Madison County, North Carolina, an area renowned for its unbroken tradition of unaccompanied singing of traditional southern Appalachian ballads that dates back to the early Scots/Irish and English Settlers in the mid-17th century.
Adams learned to sing from her great-aunt Dellie Chandler Norton and other notable singers in the community such as, Dillard Chandler and the Wallin Family (including NEA National Heritage Fellow Doug Wallin). She began performing in public in her teens and, throughout her career she has performed at festivals, events, music camps, and workshops around this country and the United Kingdom.
In 1975, Adams graduated from Mars Hill College. In 2003 she was named Alumna of the Year and later received a LifeWorks recognition in appreciation for her shared commitment to service and responsibility, presented at the college's LifeWorks 150 Alumni Celebration in April 2007.
After teaching in the North Carolina public schools for seventeen years, Adams turned to full-time music and storytelling.
Adams performs ballads from English, Scottish, and Irish traditions as she learned them from her ancestors, as well as innovating other tunes with a signature drop-thumb clawhammer style on the five-string banjo, an ability which has won her recognition and awards, Adams' extensive knowledge of balladry has also been featured in National Public Radio's The Thistle & Shamrock program with Fiona Ritchie.
Adams' ballad singing and musical performances have also been featured internationally, including the Celtic Colours International Festival in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.
As a storyteller Adams often appears at major festivals including the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee.
Adams has been a regular performer with "A Swannanoa Solstice" in Asheville, North Carolina, alongside such artists as Al Petteway, Amy White, and Robin Bullock. In 2004 she appeared at Art6 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia in conjunction with an exhibition of Sodom Laurel photographs by Rob Amberg.
Other performances include the acclaimed National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee as well as the 1976 and 2003 Smithsonian Folklife Festival as part of The Bicentennial Celebration and Appalachia: Heritage and Harmony.
Adams performs and teaches regularly at the Swannanoa Gathering, a series of week-long workshops in various folk arts held in July and August on the campus of Warren Wilson College, near Asheville, NC. She has taught workshops in banjo playing, unaccompanied singing, and storytelling.
In 1995, Adams released her first publication, Come Go Home With Me with the University of North Carolina Press, a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories. The book was praised as "pure mountain magic" by Life Magazine and winner of the 1997 Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award, North Carolina Society of Historians.
Her second publication, the acclaimed novel My Old True Love, released in 2004 with Algonquin Books of Workman Publishing Company, was a finalist for the SIBA Book Award and praised by Kirkus Reviews as "Deeply satisfying storytelling propelled by the desires of full-bodied, prickly characters set against a landscape rendered in all its beauty and harshness."
Adams was named among eight North Carolina artists to receive the 2016 North Carolina Heritage Award for outstanding contributions to the state’s cultural heritage.
In 2013, Adams was one of nine individuals to receive a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1998 Adams received the Brown Hudson Award from the North Carolina Folklore Society in recognition of her valuable contributions to the study of North Carolina folk traditions.