All across Appalachia, communities have historically leaned on music to help get work done. Whether tending the garden or marching along the picket line, music has been a way to keep people motivated and rally them around a cause. In the small town of Lansing, North Carolina, members of the local folk arts community recently hosted the first annual Fly Around Music and Arts Festival. The event was a celebration and continuation of a months-long effort to recover from Hurricane Helene, which hit western North Carolina in 2024.
Fly Around Fest took its name from the song “Fly Around my Pretty Little Miss,” a traditional tune recorded by old-time giants Frank Blevins and Ola Belle Reed, who were both from around Lansing. With a nod to the area’s musical roots, the festival was a testament to the endurance of a community bound together by interconnected traditions of community work and musicmaking.
On the festival’s first night, dozens of attendees gathered in the Old Orchard Creek General Store on the town’s main street. The space is usually set up as a coffee shop, but tables and chairs were pushed to the side to make way for revelry. Stepping on stage to introduce the next act, Chris Jude, the festival’s principal organizer, offered a reflection on the hurricane that left the business decimated only months ago.
“This store, if y’all can’t tell, it’s kinda the lifeblood of Lansing right here. And water was pretty high up in here last September during the storm,” Jude explained. “A number of courageous folks including this gentleman right here got hard to work and put this place back together in pretty much record time.”
Jude was referring to Trevor Mckenzie, a musician and Appalachian Studies educator. He grew up in Southwestern Virginia and now lives in Lansing. McKenzie sat in on fiddle with a few acts over the course of the weekend, but on night one he offered up some old-time classics with his longtime collaborator, Steve Kruger. Less than a year ago, the stage they performed on would have been submerged in the storm surge that spilled out of nearby Big Horse Creek.
Trevor McKenzie performing at the Old Orchard Creek General Store. (Photo by Rusty Williams)
Steve Kruger performing at the Old Orchard Creek General Store. (Photo by Rusty Williams)
Lansing is located in Ashe County, North Carolina, the state’s northwestern-most county, bordering Virginia and Tennessee. Ashe is part of a cluster of counties historically known as the Lost Provinces. “It was called that because people literally thought of this place as if it was disconnected from the rest of North Carolina. So resources don’t come easy,” McKenzie explained.
The counties that make up the Lost Provinces are physically isolated from the rest of the state by the Eastern Continental Divide, creating a sense of disconnection that still lingers today. As a result, people in these places have developed traditions of community care-taking. Those traditions compelled scores of neighbors to spring into action in the wake of the hurricane.
The Lost Province Center for the Cultural Arts (LPCC)—a craft school and cultural preservation nonprofit—served as one of the festival’s primary coordinating organizations. The organization is headquartered on the campus of the historic Lansing School, just uphill from the Old Orchard Creek General Store.
The two greystone school buildings served as the main venue for festival activities on day two of Fly Around Fest. Caroline Renfroe, a local artist who helps run LPCC’s Buddy Holler Recording Studio, oversaw the green room where musicians jammed and took it easy in between sets. Renfroe is one of the many Fly Around Fest workers who was there on the frontlines of flood recovery efforts last September.
Renfroe was out of town working on a documentary project with several other Ashe county locals when Helene made landfall in Lansing. “It wasn’t until Saturday that the images of the town being flooded came out,” she remembered. “It was stressful and scary, and we all wanted to get home as quickly as we could.”
When she got back home, Caroline helped LPCC shift their resources in service of flood recovery. “We had a huge building on dry ground,” she said. “And we ended up becoming probably the largest distribution center in northwest Ashe, if not Ashe county. And we ran that distribution center for about six months.”
All proceeds from Fly Around are being directed toward continued recovery efforts in the region. As a benefit festival, the event served as a continuation of the recovery efforts that took place at the Lansing School after Hurricane Helene surged through the county in September of 2024.
Nearly a year removed from Hurricane Helene’s landfall, festival staff like Renfroe, as well as many of the musicians and attendees, had more than earned the right to party for a weekend. Hands formerly put to use clearing wreckage were now gliding along the necks of banjos and fiddles. Out on the dance floor, boots that hit the ground post-Helene were stepping in time with the tunes that helped this small town bounce back in short order.
The act of intertwining work and music was familiar to many of the musicians who participated, including Clover-Lynn. Alongside her band, the Hellfires, Clover-Lynn plays stringband standards in minor tunes, inflected with her goth aesthetic.
Trevor McKenzie, Jackson Lewis, Clover-Lynn, and Nano Seegert Wilkinson. (Photo by Rusty Williams)
Clover-Lynn grew up in Floyd and Franklin counties, in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. She didn’t start playing music until her twenties, but traditional stringband music was in the air she breathed growing up. “I’ve been into Ralph Stanley forever,” she said. “I think I probably heard Ralph Stanley in the womb, just ‘cause I think that’s almost all granny listened to.”
Bluegrass was a key part of the chores Clover-Lynn did with her grandmother as a kid. “Growing up…our work was breaking beans, or doing garden work,” she said. “And we always had music playing in the background.”
McKenzie is an important mentor of Clover-Lynn’s, and he backed up her point about Appalachian’s habit of relying on good music to get a job done. “If you’ve heard the term breakdown before, like ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown,’ or any of these things that are associated with bluegrass or old-time fiddle music, that all goes back to these community events—things like corn shuck-ins, where you’d break down the corn when it came in in the fall. And people would all get together and have these community parties where you needed the labor of everyone.”
McKenzie said that in the wake of Hurricane Helene, music was a critical part of flood recovery in the Lost Provinces. “At the end of those days, those long days of cleaning up, we would have these small parties. We would sit around and listen to music and talk and celebrate in a way.”
On the second day of Fly Around, Sammy Osmond struck up his band, the No-Hellers, for an afternoon set on the Lansing School lawn. The band was mostly made up of Gen Z players. Some, like Osmond, are from nearby Boone, North Carolina. Others call Lansing home.
While quarantining at his parent’s place in Boone when his college classes went online during the Covid-19 pandemic, Osmond found an old banjo lying around. Learning the instrument eventually led to him finding community at local jams.
From left to right, Trevor McKenzie, Sammy Osmond, Jackson Lewis, and Grayson McGuire. (Photo by Rusty Williams)
When Hurricane Helene rolled through North Carolina’s Lost Provinces, Osmond’s newfound love for traditional music became bound up in the work of rebuilding. He remembered attending a river clean-up with several other young people from the region. When the work crew broke for lunch, he and his bandmate, Grayson McGuire, found themselves picking up instruments out of instinct.
“It doesn’t feel like a performance,” said Osmond. “It doesn’t even feel like, ‘All right, now we’re gonna play music.’ It just feels right. It’s not a forced thing. It’s just kind of like, this is what we’re doing in this moment.”
This intertwining of music and flood recovery was a theme that ran through many of the sets at Fly Around Fest. During their performance at Old Orchard Creek General Store, McKenzie and Kruger offered up their rendition of a regional ballad known as “The Brushy Mountain Freshet.”
“It’s a really painful ballad,” McKenzie told the gathered crowd. “And within the time of what we all went through with Hurricane Helene in the last year, we thought that it might be a good time to actually put it out there.”
“The Brushy Mountain Freshet” tells the story of a major flood that hit western North Carolina in 1916. When troubled waters raged again in 2024, the ballad gained new relevance.
McKenzie said traditional songs like this one can play an important role in troubling times. Honoring the past, grounded in the present, and looking ahead, he was excited by the living legacy being carried forward by the young people like Clover-Lynn and Sammy Osmond, who he’s had the good fortune to teach and play with.
“I have so much hope for that group,” McKenzie said. “I see such an interest in this music…Sammy always says that we’re in a folk revival now. Folk revivals in the past [have come during turbulent times]. In the 1920s and ‘30s, the 1960s–we’re in a time like that now. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the world, and these traditions and the reinterpretation of them leaves a lot for people to latch on to.”
Guitarist Liam Grant performs on the indoor stage at the historic Lansing School. (Photo by Rusty Williams)
The Fly Around Music and Arts Festival raised thousands of dollars for local organizations focused on flood recovery. Local businesses saw thousands more in new revenue—an important economic boon as the town continues to bounce back from the costly devastation of the hurricane.
According to Osmond, there’s also the priceless benefit of drawing a community closer together in an era when natural and manmade disasters are increasingly forcing us apart. “The hurricane, you know, horrible in all these ways, but I think a lot of people clung onto it in this way, as an opportunity to become closer as a community and come together. And music, of course, is inevitably a facet of that.”
Several Fly Around performers participate in a festival-closing jam led by the Magic Tuber Stringband out of Durham, North Carolina. (Photo by Phillip Norman)
By leaning on song to overcome struggle, neighbors in North Carolina’s Lost Provinces turned a moment of crisis into an opportunity for cultural connection. And after a successful inaugural edition, the Fly Around Music and Arts Festival is set to return next year.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misspelled Sammy Osmond’s name.
This article is part of the Living Traditions project, featuring an assortment of stories and podcasts about folklife in central Appalachia.
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The post In Lansing, North Carolina, A Music Festival Used Stringband Tunes To Drive Ongoing Hurricane Recovery Efforts appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
