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TICKETS 🎟️ truewest.info/RA27Tickets On Sale Friday, October 9 at 10am PT
This Event is All Ages
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In Appalachia, farmers still practice the ancestral tradition of companion planting. Corn grows tall as a trellis, beans climb the corn, and squash provides the ground cover. Rising Appalachia cultivates a similar symbiosis in their music, where Southern folk traditions, New Orleans swamp culture, and Atlanta’s street spirit strengthen each other. Known for their seamless harmonies, songcatching and storytelling, the band has released ten albums and toured throughout North America, South America, Europe, the Celtic Isles, Australia and beyond — performing everywhere from the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and Red Rocks to NPR’s Tiny Desk. All the while, the band has cultivated a devoted grassroots following traveling to communities big and small by train, horseback, bio-diesel bus and sailboat.
Sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith were raised in Atlanta in a blue collar bohemian family. Their mom was a fiddler, their dad a sculptor. They went to contra dances, wandered the neighborhood forests and had a childhood filled with banjos, harmony singing and other folkways. In her early twenties, while studying art and Indigenous activism in Chiapas, Mexico, Leah returned to her love of folk music. The two sisters then began a wildly creative and successful career that has included busking in New Orleans, traveling with a circus from Southern Italy to Northern Sweden, and collecting songs in Ireland, Bulgaria and Colombia. Rising Appalachia also features the creative musicianship of Duncan Wickel (fiddle, cello), David Brown (upright bass, baritone guitar) and Biko Casini (drums, percussion) — each tradition keepers in their own right.
Rising Appalachia’s forthcoming album, Trade My Troubles, is a soft light glowing from a quieter, more introspective time. It features songs that celebrate rest, restoring your spirit after burnout, and replenishing yourself in the wilds and in tradition. The generous 16-song record is bookended by a traditional Irish traveller song and an Appalachian fiddle tune, both nods to their ancestral lineages. In between, there are songs about motherhood, moonlight, heartbreak and birdsong. “The album tilts towards our inner experiences,” Chloe reflects. “I wanted to write about love and how it expanded and broke open in new ways after I became a mother.” Due out in October 2026, Trade My Troubles features special guests Aoife O’Donovan, Ayla Nereo, Bonnie Paine, and Brittany Haas.
Rising Appalachia bring their full humanity to the stage. Audiences are entranced by their honey-hued voices and moved by the deep yearnings, fierce questions, and unshakable hope that courses through their music. Their shows are communal gatherings where people remember their connection to the earth, each other, and the old songs that have carried us through every season of being human.
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Event venue
Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave, Portland, OR 97202-2426, United States
Tickets
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.