CONCERT
Prize-winning fiddler from Tennessee shares his deep knowledge of fiddle music learned directly from the old masters.
website: http://josephdecosimomusic.virb.com
June 21st, 2018
6:30pm doors
7pm show
Concert Tickets:
$20
$15 before June 7th. Enter SPSBIRD6 at checkout!
All Kalabash and Southern Pacific Session students get $7.00 off! Enter SPSPUPIL at Checkout! All student tickets will be verified at the door!
BYO Refreshment
JOSEPH DECOSIMO
Raised in southeast Tennessee, Joseph Decosimo is a traditional musician and folklorist with a deep respect and love for the older music of his home state and the broader South. His old time fiddling and banjo playing has introduced listeners to the richness and vibrancy of the region's musical traditions. Based out of Durham, NC, he currently performs and teaches old time music anywhere that people are willing to listen. When not playing music, he is writing a dissertation of aesthetics, musical learning, and sound technologies in old time music.
In seventh grade, he purchased a banjo from a neighbor and quickly found his way to the backrooms of the local Friday night opry where he encountered older musicians from the region. At sixteen, he began making regular visits to learn from old time fiddler Charlie Acuff. He has dedicated himself to spending time with the master fiddlers living in the region, including National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow Clyde Davenport and Charlie McCarroll. By grounding himself in a regional repertoire and style, he crafts music for the present with a deep understanding of place and a reverence for the past.
Joseph's attention to the tradition has not gone unnoticed. In 2007, he won the National Old Time Banjo Championship. His fiddling has earned him blue ribbons at prestigious contests from the Appalachian Stringband Festival (Clifftop) to the Tennessee Valley Fiddlers Convention. His band, The Bucking Mules, comprised of guitarist, singer, and fiddler Karen Celia Heil, banjo player and fellow Tennesseean Luke Richardson, and bassist Joe DeJarnette has won first place in the stringband contest at Clifftop in 2012 and 2014. They continue to perform at festivals and workshops at home and abroad, delivering driving, regionally-inflected music.
A sought-after teacher and performer of old time music, he has taught and performed at the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, WA; the Swannanoa Gathering in Swannanoa, NC; the Blue Ridge Old Time Music Week in Mars Hill, NC; the Nimble Fingers Bluegrass and Old-Time Music Workshop in Sorrento, BC; the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, WV; the Ashokan Southern Week in Olivebridge, NY; and the Bekeley Old Time Music Festival in Berkeley, CA. From 2012-2013, he served on the faculty of East Tennessee State University's Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies Program, teaching Appalachian Studies, Old Time Fiddle and Banjo, and working with student bands.
In 2012, he earned an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina, where he explored transformations in the fiddling tradition of the McCarroll family of East Tennessee. Currently writing a dissertation on the music, he deeply engages with traditional music through his scholarship and performance, making sure that it never reduces to an academic exercise.