Leva, Greely & Watson at The Floyd Country Store

James Leva, David Greely & Cedric Watson Live

Join us Saturday, October 21, 2017 at 7:30pm for Acadia to Appalachia, featuring James Leva, David Greely & Cedric Watson, exploring the kinship between the traditional music of Southwest Louisiana and the traditional Old Time and Bluegrass music of Appalachia. Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 day of show.

James Leva is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter whose music is deeply rooted in Appalachian tradition. He learned much of his fiddle, banjo and vocal repertoire from great traditional masters such as Tommy Jarrell and Doug Wallin. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he performed with seminal traditionally focused groups that were exploring the boundaries of Appalachian music. Bands such at Plank Road (with Al Tharp and Michael James Kott), Ace Weems and the Fat Meat Boys (with David Winston and Chad Crumm), and the Hellbenders.(with Bruce Molsky and Dave Grant) performed throughout the US and Europe and their recordings were widely influential.

David Greely is the long time fiddler and vocalist for Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, David Greely’s French Louisiana music is opening a new wing in his tradition. David has taken the swampy syncopations of Cajun music and its renaissance French dialect to new level of sophistication without losing its urgency and texture. In solo acoustic performance, he sounds like two or three fiddles, weaving accompaniment to his vocals as if it’s someone else singing. Presenting his concerts in English or French, he embraces all the aspects of his heritage that a fiddle and voice can reach- ancient ballads, cane field blues, yearning waltzes and fiery two steps, and melds his ancestral legacy with his own adroit compositions and stories of the rich souls who kept this music and language alive.

Cedric Watson is a brilliant young African-American singer, fiddler, accordionist and one of the brightest young talents to emerge in Cajun, Creole and Zydeco (Louisiana French) music over the last decade, Cedric Watson is a four-time Grammy-nominated fiddler, singer, accordionist & songwriter with seemingly unlimited potential.