The Kentucky Wesleyan Singers will host and perform with the Chuck Nation Band, called “the South’s best Bluegrass band,” on Feb. 20 and 21 at 7 p.m. in the Jack T. Wells ’77 Activity Center at 3300 Frederica St.
The band will begin the concert with their own set of original and traditional Bluegrass tunes and the Kentucky Wesleyan Singers will then join the band for the performance of “Come Away to the Skies: A High, Lonesome Mass” with Visiting Assistant Professor Patrick Ritsch conducting. He is director of Choral Activities and Music Education.
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Written by Tim Sharp and Wes Ramsay, “Come Away to the Skies” is an extraordinary piece of sacred music transcending time, geography and genre. This setting of the Ordinary of the Roman Mass combines American frontier folk hymns from the “Sacred Harp” and “Southern Harmony” in a bluegrass idiom. The folk hymns used come primarily from the Scots-Irish theological and musical traditions found uniquely in the American South and published in these hymn collections. Such hymn collections flourished throughout the American South in the mid-nineteenth century and are repositories of some of the greatest hymns of that era.
The ballad and song tradition that migrated with early Irish, Scots-Irish, Welsh, and English settlers into the southern Appalachian areas of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee was as natural as the transposition of their verbal languages and customs. The thousands of songs that flooded into the valleys of the Cumberland River and Tennessee River came from the lips of generations of folk performers of Southern Appalachia and found their way into the culture and ways of the American South.
The Chuck Nation Band, from Gainesville, Ga., was founded in 2010 and made their Carnegie Hall debut performance in New York City in 2015. They have performed in concert at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and were the 2016 Georgia Music Awards nominees for Artist Of The Year.
The band has toured internationally to Ireland, Japan, China and Argentina. They performed in Inner Mongolia as representatives for the USA at the International Folk Festival.
Close harmony singing and superb instrumental playing are the hallmarks of their distinctive sound, and their repertoire includes originals, traditional, gospel and instrumentals.
The band will conduct workshops at several elementary schools in Owensboro.
Tickets are available at kwc.edu/event/come-away/.