Jeni and Billy will play at Charles and Myrtle's Coffeehouse on Saturday.
Jeni and Billy will bring Appalachian Folk to Charles & Myrtle's Coffeehouse on Saturday at 8 p.m. The coffeehouse is inside Christ Unity Church at 105 McBrien Road. There is a $10 suggested donation at the door. Call 892-4960 for more information or visit www.christunity.org.
Review for Jeni and Billy:
You have to watch where you sit at a Jeni and Billy concert, because that ordinary-looking folding chair might just turn into the back seat of a big ole Buick hurtling down the switchback of a coal truck road.
That barstool might turn out to be the rock-hard sinners pew of a white-washed mountain church. That couch might be a marble stoop on a gritty street in Baltimore, and that velvet theater cushion could just be the well-worn driver's seat of a wagon headed across the windswept Texas plains.
The high twang of a banjo starts it off -- or maybe the mournful lilt of the mandolin. Then, a train comes barreling down the reeds of a harmonica. The guitar catches fire and lifts two voices into the high lonesome harmonies of the Appalachian mountains, painting pictures of miners and millworkers, roustabouts and revival preachers, Buicks and beauty queens.
From Nashville to LA, from Chicago to Tampa, from Beverly, Yorkshire to Conwy, Wales -- Jeni and Billy have traveled more than 150,000 miles in four years, just to paint pictures in song for thousands of people. At festivals and fiddlers' conventions along the way, they have picked up ribbons in songwriting, traditional folk-singing, guitar-picking, and flatfoot dancing.
Jeni and Billy bring to their work distinct musical backgrounds that draw from the deep well of Appalachian roots music.
Jeni Hankins traces her vocal style to Virginia Lowe, the blind music minister of the Friendly Chapel Church on Smith Ridge, the Appalachian community in which Jeni spent her childhood summers. A natural storyteller and prolific writer since childhood, Jeni trained formally with Pulitzer-Prize-winning Northern Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, and earned a Masters in English Literature. While her singing has been compared to the lonesome voices of Maybelle Carter and Iris Dement, her writing has been likened to that of Southerners Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Lee Smith.
Billy Kemp, a Baltimore native, embraced the sound of country music in the nearby community of Oella — the home of Appalachian migrants who came to the city looking for work in the mills. Fired on by dreams of the Grand Old Opry and his passion for the sound of Flatt & Scruggs, Billy headed to Nashville and toured with country bands all over the US, Canada, Germany, and right onto the stage of the Opry. He honed and shared his skills as both student and instructor at the University of Maryland, and built a producing career working with roots artists.
Mountain roads and mountain churches, moonshine and oxycodone, snake handlers and sherbet cake -- you get to know them all at a Jeni and Billy concert. You might arrive a stranger, but you'll leave a member of the family.
More information on the duo is available at
jeniandbilly.com; their CDs are available on
CDBaby.com.