Rising Appalachia
Rising Appalachia Takes to the Sea
For the past decade, Rising Appalachia has made a career out of challenging the status quo of the music industry while maintaining the authenticity of their music. The duo—sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith (with band members Biko Casino and David Brown)—have just returned from their “Seed to Sea” tour, which took the band by sailboat (at three miles an hour) through the gulf islands of British Columbia to perform nine shows and promote local sourcing and ethical farming.
Rising Appalachia
The band also just released an eight-minute documentary short, Come To Life: Rising Appalachia, filmed by Emmy award winning Cyrus Sutton. The film delves into the unique upbringing of the sisters by a family of radical musicians and artists in a region with a troubled history and deep musical roots.
In the documentary, the musicians from the Song and Smith’s childhood gather in a circle to play their banjos, fiddles, and didgeridoos, which reveals the source of their music, ethos, and spirit of collaboration and unity.
The film also weaves reenacted scenes of the Song and Smith's childhood in Appalachia with shots of present day New Orleans, giving us a taste of the band’s live performances and grassroots efforts. With earthen pots in hand and muddy fingers, the women work side by side with the local community sprinkling seeds directly into the soil. “With our tours,” Song explains, “we've been very interested in taking the music off the stage. We're doing a lot of work right now with permaculture and a lot of the ideas behind permaculture are recycling and reusing energy systems so that they all work together. We want to do that with our music. We're building all of this steam and passion and people power. How can we get it back into the places that we visit?”
Fans of Rising Appalachia are already deeply familiar with their “Slow Music Movement,” a term coined during Song’s Ted Talk. Dedicated to sustainable touring practices, the movement emphasizes dining on farm-to-table food, reducing waste, and creating Permaculture systems (sustainable farming solutions) at each performance location. On the Sea to Seed tour, the band added a partnership with Over Grow the System, an organization “dedicated to raising awareness around our food system, sustainability, and how to live a life that is more in tune with nature.” Permaculture is a philosophy of farming that aims to work with and mimic natural ecosystems as a solution to the vanishing resources and threatened food source issues that our world faces today.
There are plenty of musicians who happen to be activists but rarer are those musicians who actually make touring part of their activism.
There are plenty of musicians who happen to be activists but rarer are those musicians who actually make touring part of their activism. That Rising Appalachia is experimenting with the old-school touring model is truly activism at work.
Rising Appalachia
To learn more about the Sea to Seed Tour and the philosophy behind it, Rawckus spoke with the band:
How was the experience of touring by sailboat?
We packed our small bags and joined a crew of 20 visionaries and mystics, sailors, song slingers, and farmers on a great Slow Music Movement journey, sharing music to the people who grow the food, learning local lore and history, and listening to the children sing. From port to port, we carried our spirits and songs by boat and by foot to tiny centers of community and timber-framed stages, front porches, and off-the-grid farmhouse dwellings. It was a great reminder of what sparked this great creative fire in the first place.
Were there any notable performances and experiences that were particularly memorable on the tour?
Each and every show of the “Sea to Seed” tour was an immaculate, wild, slow-food, cultural exchange. We celebrated birthdays, sang to orcas, danced with children, learned local native customs, broke farm bread, laughed until we nearly cried at sailor jokes on the open waters, and generally immersed ourselves in the slow pace of the sail. It was something we will never forget, and something we hope to create again in the near future.
How did you come to choose the gulf islands of British Columbia for the tour?
For 11 years we have tried to find places off the beaten path to make music. We went to San Juan last year on an invitation from an art center there, and we totally fell in love with the culture and the pace and just the spirit of the islands. We said for sure we were going to figure out how to come back in a bigger way. So, as we put this together.
Share the story behind the song “Wider Circles,” featured in Come To Life: Rising Appalachia
We were very taken by Joanna Macy's activism and her interview on Krista Tippett's On Being podcast, particularly when she [Macy] recited her translation of the Rainer Maria Rilke poem, “I live my life in widening circles.” That poetic reference to one’s life being widening and widening circles that “reach out across the world” resonated so much with our work as troubadours and globetrotting musicians. Thus, we wrote the song in its honor.
What's next for Rising Appalachia?
Musically, we are excited to be touring more overseas in coming years and building more relationships outside of the US. There are so many global styles of singing that we will never run out of places to go study and harvest. Additionally, our travels always fuel our original material as well, and poetry comes out thick from the road. Right now we are song collecting and songwriting for a new album and are excited to see which ones come through and make their mark.
