This week, prodigious purveyors of the past, multi-instrumentalists, singers and story tellers, Anna & Elizabeth recorded live at the Ozark Folk Center State Park. Also, interviews with these unique performers.

The collaboration between Anna & Elizabeth spans worlds — between their homes in Brooklyn and rural Virginia -- between deep study of mountain ballads with old masters and explorations into the avant garde — between music, performance, and visual art. Anna & Elizabeth have performed across the country and in Europe. Highlights include: The Newport Folk Festival; NPR's Tiny Desk Concert; The Chicago Folk Festival; The High Museum of Modern Art (Atlanta); and the Cambridge Folk Festival (UK.)  Their work has been featured on BBC Radio 2 and BBC3's Late Junction, Vice’s Noisey, the Huffington Post, and No Depression. They have shared the stage with Alice Gerrard, Mick Moloney, Sam Lee and Riley Baugus, Bruce Greene, Abigail Washburn, Wayne Henderson, and also National Heritage Award winners Sheila Kay Adams and Billy McComiskey.

Elizabeth Laprelle lives on a farm in Rural Retreat, Virginia, where she grew up, and  has pursued her interest in mountain ballads for over a decade. Since the release of her debut album at age 16, she’s been hailed as one of the most dedicated students of the traditional unaccompanied style of her generation. The student of master singer Ginny Hawker and National Heritage Fellow Sheila Kay Adams, Elizabeth was the first recipient of the Henry Reed Award from the Library of Congress at age 16, and won the 2012 Mike Seeger Award at Folk Alliance International. She has released three solo ballad albums, and was called “the best young Appalachian ballad singer to emerge in recent memory” by UK’s fRoots Magazine. 

Anna Roberts-Gevalt is a voracious and curious multi-instrumentalist originally from Vermont, described by Meredith Monk as a "radiant being." She fell in love with the sound of banjo in college, moved to the mountains, and learned with master musicians in Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina, becoming a blue-ribbon fiddler and banjo player (WV State Folk Fest, Kentucky Fiddle Contest.) She was a fellow at the Berea College Archive, a 2014 OneBeat fellow (Bang on a Can's Found Sound Nation,) artistic director of Kentucky’s traditional music institute, the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School, and curator of Baltimore's Crankie Festival.  She has recently delved into new musical worlds, including recent work with composers Brian Harnetty, Nate May and Cleek Schrey, Matmos, David Rothenberg, Susan Alcorn, and saxophonist Jarrett Gilgore. She has contributed writing to No Depression and The Old Time Herald.

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, musician, educator, and country music legacy Mark Jones offers an archival recording of Ozark originals The Hall Family, performing the traditional song “Cowboy’s Dream,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

Author, folklorist, and songwriter Charley Sandage presents an historical portrait of the people, events, and indomitable spirit of Ozark culture that resulted in the creation of the Ozark Folk Center State Park and its enduring legacy of music and craft. This episode focuses on world renowned cowboy poet, balladeer, and story teller Glenn Orhlin.