Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Chris Jude is founder of the Fly Around Music & Arts Festival in Lansing, North Carolina. Now going on its second year, the festival has served as a fundraiser to support ongoing climate resilience and historic building preservation efforts in Lansing.
While Fly Around has been the crowning achievement of Jude’s work as a musical events organizer, his creative collaborations with rural communities are wide ranging. His deep appreciation for rural places extends from traditional music and folk arts to agriculture and small-batch distilling. Chris and I recently caught up online after having the chance to work together when I reported on Fly Around Fest’s inaugural year. Our conversation covered everything from the evolution of the festival in its second year, to Chris’ background in biodiesel and the story behind his signature apple brandy.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Yonder: How did you first develop a sense of personal connection to rural America?
Chris Jude: I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, my family’s from Chicago, so I didn’t have a clear connection to rural America growing up. When I was like maybe 19, I left and went out to Yellowstone and worked a summer there, and then ended up working four summers in California at Yosemite, so those were probably my first real experiences of rural places – of course, those are national parks – but Appalachian State is where I ended up transferring to college in Boone, around that time, and I did really fall in love with Watauga County, and this section of North Carolina. I’ve lived in cities. I lived in Seattle after college. I’ve lived in Chatham County, North Carolina, which is a county outside of the Triangle area. Spent about 10 or 12 years there, and really did enjoy that kind of small town community, similar in some ways to Boone.
Chris Jude at the Big Ears music festival, another local celebration of music and art in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo courtesy of Chris Jude)
I tend to get much more involved in the community when I’m in a rural place, and I don’t know, it’s not really saying anything about either, it’s just maybe that there’s not as many things happening, and I feel like there’s something I can kind of contribute to. In Chatham County, I got pretty involved with a nonprofit there called the Abundance Foundation, and we put on things like Pittsboro Mardi Gras, helped a little bit with their Pepper Festival, and then also the Shakori Hills GrassRoots Music Festival was something that I got involved with and learned a lot from.
DY: How did you initially get into organizing musical happenings in rural places, and what are some of your favorite events that you’ve helped put on?
CJ: It kind of started in Boone, when I was a student at Appalachian State. I worked at a restaurant where the owner would let us have concerts, so I was able to bring in local acts. And then I also brought in a musician named Jack Rose, who’s a pretty influential solo guitarist, and that was kind of the first time that I’d contacted a national touring musician and been like, “Hey, come to this kind of weird, out-of-the-way place,” and that was really inspiring.
Fly Around was definitely the largest event that I’ve organized, kind of solely. And last year was our first year. I was originally inspired by the school property, the old Lansing school campus there in Lansing, North Carolina. It’s a stone schoolhouse built by the Works Progress Administration projects in the late 30’s, part of the New Deal. It’s a building with a ton of character that’s gone by the wayside. I think it stopped being a school in the mid 90s, so it’s a little worse-for-wear.
I really like to put on an event that’s in a special place like the schoolhouse and its campus. Not just a normal nightclub or theater, but it’s kind of a bit funky, and you’re going to remember the location, and I think that is part of what makes me want to keep doing it. It just wouldn’t be as interesting to me if it wasn’t featuring a unique location.
The first year was a lot of fun. It was a lot to take on, but it was really great, even before the festival, but definitely after the festival, the town was very supportive, you know. I talked to the mayor, talked to a couple of the nonprofit groups, and everybody was like, “Yeah, let’s do that again. What can we do to help?”
Second Annual Fly Around Fest poster by Kelley Wills of Brainflower Design.
DY: What most excites you about this year’s edition of Fly Around? And what lessons learned from last year are you excited to apply this year?
CJ: I feel like we hit that nail on the head the first year, so a lot of the aspects are modeled after the first year, just with a new lineup. We’re expanding our stage. Last year it was very bare bones, so we’re putting some more energy into the production aspect and decoration and things like that. I’ve got a wonderful local artist, she just reached out, I swear, like a week ago, and was like, “Do you need painting?” And I was like, “Well, yeah, I’ve got this idea that I want to do, a three-dimensional photo booth based on our flyer design.” So she just jumped right in and is painting this awesome backdrop. So little things like that are, I think, what I’m excited about this year.
We have room to grow an audience. Getting more folks up here. We are happy to have local support, but we are really trying to bring folks up to the mountains, and get some of those tourist dollars in. I think Lansing accepts its fate as a tourist town as industries have changed over the years, and what I want to do is make events that draw good people and interesting people, and kind of bring them into the community, so it’s a nice way to try to do that.
I’m pretty excited about refining the lineup over time, and kind of continuing to delve into this genre I’ve made up, which is sort of folk traditionalists mixed with experimentalists. So it’s not another Fiddler’s Convention or folk festival per se. It is a bit of a mash up, which I find interesting. We are bringing a different angle to that idea of what mountain music is, and I hope people catch on.
Chris Jude with his still at Fair Game Beverage in Pittsboro, North Carolina 2016. (Photo courtesy of Chris Jude)
DY: Let’s talk about another passion of yours, distilling. How did you get into that, and can you share a little bit of your knowledge around the rural roots of that practice?
CJ: I studied renewable energy at Appalachian State, and my focus was biodiesel, so biofuels, and kind of a corollary to that is ethanol production, which is distilling. So I was familiar with it from college, and when I was living in Chatham County, I started growing sweet sorghum with a friend of mine at his farm. And we got all the equipment to press sorghum cane and cook sorghum down to syrup, which is kind of a traditional sweetener of the South, in the Appalachians, especially. And that got me interested in distilling. Sorghum is related to sugar cane, which is what’s used to make rum. So I was interested in this sort of sorghum rum idea, and that was pretty direct from my Appalachian State/Boone connections, I think, just being introduced to sorghum and sorghum molasses. The biofuels company that I worked for, the owner of that was interested in a distillery, and he tried some of my homemade sorghum rum and offered me the job, so I helped start a distillery in Pittsboro, in Chatham County.
The Chatham County, North Carolina sorghum cane growing and distilling operation Chris helped run. (Photo courtesy of Chris Jude)
We did apple brandy and rum and some other things. And I got very interested in the history of apple brandy. This area, you hear it called the Lost Province sometimes. It was called that up here because it was very difficult for folks to get down to Charlotte or down to Greensboro, down off the mountain. So in the 1800s, if you’re an apple farmer, you weren’t taking fresh apples to market, you were making brandy, and that was much easier to move, to ship, to sell, to store.
I ended up in Charleston working for High Wire Distilling, which was a bourbon distillery. I was there for about six years. We specialized in an heirloom red corn called Jimmy Red, which is native to the coastal Carolinas – it did really well in that environment, and it made a really good bourbon. I definitely love distilling. To me, distilling is an agricultural value added product. And of course, most bourbon that you’re drinking is made out of commodity corn that comes from whatever giant farm. It was great working at Highwire, where we contracted with three farmers, and we controlled the seed stock, and we controlled the genetics, and we’re able to work directly with the farmers. So I always really like that, and even living in Charleston, that kind of gave me a bit of a rural connection there.
DY: Why, for you, have rural places in particular been fruitful places for pursuing your creative and cultural interests?
CJ: I grew up in the suburbs, and kind of hated it. And when you grow up in the suburbs, you think, well, I got to run to the city and find my place. And I did some of that and did some cool stuff, but being in touch with the natural world, that’s really what draws me into a place. And it’s sort of easier to get your foot in the door and get things started, in a sense, in a rural community. and I do feel that connection with agriculture. I feel that connection with the music and culture up here. I mean, I’m not born and raised in the Appalachians, like some folks, but it definitely attracts me. But then I also, in a sense, feel like I’m bringing some of the encounters that I’ve had to the area.
I like being able to explore in a place like Lansing. It’s a beautiful town, and I mean Lansing’s got a special community. It was 126 people, I think, according to the [2020] census. It’s just a dedicated group of folks who want to help improve this town, but keep its identity. We’re not trying to build a resort community, or something. We want it to be like it is, but want to give folks opportunities at the same time.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Q&A: Chris Jude on Organizing a Rural Music Festival appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
