“You Ain’t Talkin’ To Me” – Music & Stories of Charlie Poole at The Floyd Country Store

Join us for an evening of music and stories about Charlie Poole, Posey Rorer and the North Carolina Ramblers with Kinney Rorrer and the NEW North Carolina Ramblers. This is the first in a series of programs produced by the Handmade Music School and Floyd Country Store called Music of our Mountains. The series will feature different musicians from around Floyd, Franklin, Patrick, Carroll, and Grayson Counties in Southwest Virginia. These programs will feature lots of great music with stories told by scholars and musicians celebrating the rich history of string band music in and around Floyd County, Virginia. Music of our Mountains is a broader project underwritten by the Virginia Humanities that will be constructed and presented with compelling content and storytelling, this platform will serve as both a comprehensive educational resource and an engaging promotional platform by celebrating local music culture and crediting the contributions of those who helped to shape our local traditions. Learn More.

The New North Carolina Ramblers are an old-time string band who perform music in the tradition of such legendary artists as Charlie Poole, The Carter Family, and The Floyd County Ramblers. The band features Wayne Martin on fiddle, Margaret Martin on guitar, Darren Moore on guitar and autoharp, and Kinney Rorrer on banjo. They are inspired by the rural traditional recording artists and the back porch musicians who have entertained throughout the Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountains for generations.

“You Ain’t Talking To Me” is only one of the great story songs performed by the New North Carolina Ramblers who specialize in the sound of the original North Carolina Ramblers led by Charlie Poole, a legendary, colorful songster and busker, who played across the mountain communities of Virginia and West Virginia in the 1920’s with his fine Franklin County fiddler Posey Rorer.
Poole and spin-off bands produced more than 100 recorded sides for the major record companies selling hundreds of thousands of copies thus exposing an amazingly large number of people to the old time music from the southern hills. While the New North Carolina Ramblers focus on the music of Poole and his associates, they also perform traditional music of Virginia made popular by the Carter Family, Kelly Harrell, The Floyd Country Ramblers, Ernest V. Stoneman, Grayson & Whitter and others. The New North Carolina Ramblers not only play songs and tunes, but they also tell the great stories about the musicians and their songs.
Join fiddler Wayne Martin and his wife Margaret on guitar, along with autoharp player and guitarist Darren Moore and banjo player Kinney Rorrer performing as The New North Carolina Ramblers. It will be a fun evening at the Floyd Country Store on June 26th where “The Deal Won’t Go Down Until the Last Gold Dollar is Gone.”