JD Simo & Luther Dickinson, Kyle Tuttle Band, and more on Mountain Stage

GUEST ARTISTS: JD Simo & Luther Dickinson, John Craigie, Kyle Tuttle Band, Wayne Graham, and more TBA (click each artist to read more)

marshall.edu/theatre 304-696-ARTS (2787)

Public ticket sales begin on Sept. 9 at 10am ET

Since 1983, Mountain Stage has been one of the most beloved programs in public radio history. Eclectic, authentic and unpredictable, the show’s varied guests have included iconic artists from John Prine and Townes Van Zandt to Wilco and Phish. Under the leadership of Grammy Award-winning country and bluegrass star Kathy Mattea since 2021, Mountain Stage continues to bring surefire energy and mountain music magic to parts known and unknown.

Produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed by NPR Music, each two-hour episode is recorded in front of a live audience and can be heard every week on nearly 300 stations across America, and around the world via NPR Music and mountainstage.org.

Portland, OR-based singer, songwriter, and producer John Craigie adapts moments of solitude into stories perfectly suited for old Americana fiction anthologies. Instead of leaving them on dog-eared pages, he projects them widescreen in flashes of simmering soul and folk eloquence. On his 2022 full-length album, Mermaid Salt, we witness revenge unfurled in flames, watch a landlocked mermaid’s escape, and fall asleep under a meteor shower.

After selling out shows consistently coast-to-coast and earning acclaim from Rolling Stone, Glide Magazine, No Depression, and many more, his unflinching honesty ties these ten tracks together.

The album comes from the solitude and loneliness of lockdown in the Northwest. Someone whose life was touring, traveling, and having lots of human interaction is faced with an undefinable amount of time without those things. So, he began writing new songs and envisioning an album that was different from his past records. The sound of everyone playing live in a room together was traded for the sound of song construction with an unknown amount of instruments and musicians—a quiet symphony.

Rather than steal away to a cabin or hole up in a house with friends, Craigie opted to set up shop at the OK Theater in Enterprise, OR with longtime collaborator Bart Budwig behind the board as engineer. A rotating cast of musicians shuffled in and out safely, distinguishing the process from the communal recording of previous releases. The core players included Justin Landis, Cooper Trail, and Nevada Sowle. Meanwhile, Shook Twins lent their signature vocal harmonies, Bevin Foley arranged, composed, and performed strings, and Ben Walden dropped in for guitar and violin plucking parts.

“Instruments were scattered around the theater and microphones placed in various spots,” he recalls. “It’s hard to say who all played what exactly.”

As such, the spirit in the room guided everyone. On “Distance,” warm piano glows alongside a glitchy beat as he softly laments, “I could lose you to the loneliness, vast and infinite.” Then, there’s “Helena.” A jazz-y bass line snakes through head-nodding percussion as he relays an incendiary parable of a mother and son in exile. He croons, “She said fire was how we’d make ‘em pay. As I ran across the fields, she would scream, ‘Light it up son’,” uplifted in a conflagration of Shook Twins’ harmonies. Strings echo in the background as his vocals quake front-and-center on “Street Mermaid.”

Elsewhere, the guitar-laden “Microdose” beguiles and bewitches with an intoxicating refrain dedicated to a time where he “Microdosed for months and months, dissolve my ego in the acid.” Everything culminates on the glassy beat-craft and glistening guitars of “Perseids” where he sings, “There’s always a new heart after the old heart. Maybe a new heart is enough.”

During this period, he explored the environment around him “from the Oregon coasts to the waterfalls” and read books about Levon Helm, Billie Holiday, and Ani DiFranco.

“I got time to silence all the noise and chaos of touring and look inward,” he observes.

Craigie had reached a series of watershed moments in tandem with Mermaid Salt. Beyond headlining venues such as The Fillmore and gracing the stage of Red Rocks Amphitheater, his 2020 offering Asterisk The Universe earned unanimous tastemaker applause. Rolling Stone noted, “tracks like ‘Don’t Deny’ and ‘Climb Up’ bridge a Sixties and Seventies songwriter vibe with the laid-back cool of Jack Johnson, an early supporter of Craigie,” while Glide Magazine hailed it as “one of his best records.” Perhaps, No Depression put it best, “For many weary and heavy- listeners hearted, the album might be exactly what they need.” Along the way, he generated over 40 million total streams and counting, speaking to his unassuming impact.

In the end, Craigie offers a sense of peace on Mermaid Salt.

Equally comfortable picking pristine progressive bluegrass and electric jamband solos, Kyle Tuttle is a rare and virtuosic banjo player known for his work with GRAMMY-winning guitarist Molly Tuttle, and former Yonder Mountain String Band mandolin player Jeff Austin. His third album Labor of Lust will be released on February, 16th, is very different from his first two albums

On his new record, Tuttle explores a wide range of sounds and possibilities for the banjo, while his songwriting gives insight into a tumultuous time in his own life; losing a mentor and going through a divorce. “A life in professional music, or performance of any kind really, is often painted in glamor... but the man behind the curtain can exist in a difficult duality. An attempt at putting a saddle on success can eat a person up and wreck the things they hold dear. In reality, any pursuit of the love of the masses can easily become a Labor of Lust.”

Growing up in Georgia, Kyle Tuttle first began singing and playing folk songs with his grandparents. After studying at Berklee College of Music and moving to Nashville, TN, Tuttle played in the band of Yonder Mountain String Band mandolinist Jeff Austin until Austin’s death in 2019.

Now playing full-time with Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, (Kyle) Tuttle has been busy touring while finishing his newest album, Labor of Lust. The album was recorded over two sessions in Nashville with engineers Daniel Rice and Megan McCormick, and features a stacked cast of musicians including Golden Highway bandmate Dominick Leslie, The Infamous Stringdusters Travis Book, singer/songwriter Lindsay Lou, and many others. Sonically, the music moves from straightforward bluegrass (Trailer in Boulder Canyon, to electric funk-jams (Ghost), to song-based folk numbers (Turn On Your Radio).

Kyle has also worked closely with Jamgrass legends Larry Keel, Travelin’ McCourys, Leftover Salmon, Greensky Bluegrass, Billy Strings, Railroad Earth, and many more.

Wayne was a renaissance man. Curiosity and good hand-eye coordination are a deadly combination. He was an electrician, a locksmith, a mechanic, a coal miner, a guitarist, and a singer, but the roles that took the highest priority in his life were husband, father, brother, and son. He approached life with a laughable optimism and proved over time he was right. He made sure to be my earliest memory and I have consulted him, wherever he is, with every major decision in my life. Over the years, I've met many strangers who knew him. Their tall tale is the same as those I've heard before. He was a legendary man with more soul than his body could hold.

Graham was the first one of his brothers to own a car. He was able to buy it because he started working when he was very young. When his younger brother graduated from high school, he drove him to college. He left his car with him and headed home to Pine Creek.

He married my grandmother and bought a small shack on Pine Creek. They moved in in February, a logging trail covered in snow, to a shack with quarter inch slits between the slats.

He slowly bought that mountain, acre by acre, building more rooms on his house for his growing family. He was the neighborhood farmer, old regular Baptist, democrat, World War II vet, coal miner, romance novel patron, Kentucky Wildcats fan. His image flashes in my periphery at least once a day, reminding me his constant refrain when he and Mamaw kept me in my early years, "This boy is gonna make me president."

Event Venue

Joan C. Edwards Performing Arts Center - Playhouse Theater, 1655 5th Avenue, Huntington, United States