This event has already taken place
Back to Concerts

Concert: Lone Piñon (New Mexico Folk) *Dinner with the Ark Food Truck at 6:15

When

Monday, Aug 04, 2025

7:00 PM – 8:00 PM EDT

Where

John C. Campbell Folk School

1 Folk School Road

Brasstown, NC 28902


About.

Audience: Faculty & Staff,General Public,Student

Cost: suggested $5-15 donation, per adult

Folk School Locations: Festival Barn: John C. Campbell Folk School, 1 Folk School Rd, Brasstown, NC 28902

Link: https://www.lonepinon.com/video

Photo Credit: Jesse Littlebird

Lone Piñon is a New Mexican string band, or “orquesta típica”, whose music celebrates the integrity and diversity of their region's cultural roots. With fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals, they play a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico.

The Norte has long been a crossroads of cultures, and centuries of intersecting histories, trade routes, migrations, and cultural movements have endowed the region with an expansive and rich musical heritage that weaves together Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, European immigrant, Anglo-American, and Afro-American musical influences. The oldest strands of this tradition have survived in continuity, renewed by each new generation’s contribution to core style and repertoire that has been passed from musician to musician, in some cases over many centuries. Though rapid cultural change since the ‘50s has led to these sounds becoming scarce in their home territory, they never fully disappeared--thanks to the elders and past generations that lovingly and tenaciously carried them forward, renewing the voice of their musical ancestors at each step into changing circumstances.

The musicians of Lone Piñon learned from elder musicians who instilled in them a respect for continuity and an example of the radicalism, creativity, and cross-cultural solidarity that has always been necessary for musical traditions to adapt and thrive in each generation. In 2014, Lone Piñon was founded as a platform for creativity around the oldest sounds of traditional New Mexico string music, sounds that had all but disappeared from daily life in many Northern New Mexico communities. Through relationship with elders, study of field recordings, connections to parallel traditional music and dance revitalization movements in the US and Mexico, and hundreds of local and national performances, they have brought the language of the New Mexico orquesta típica back onto the modern stage, back onto dance floors, into a contemporary aesthetic/artistic conversation, and into the ears of a young generation.

The musical landscape of Northern New Mexico bears the record of interconnecting musical movements that cross state, national, generational, and ethnic borders. Lone Piñon’s active and recorded repertoire reflects that complexity, and has included a wide range of regionally-relevant material (Western swing, conjunto, New Mexican Spanish and Mexican ranchera, Central Mexican son regional, country, onda chicana, etc.) around the core New Mexican violin and accordion-driven polkas, cunas, inditas, valses, and chotes learned from elders.

The Folk School features some of the finest regional and national acts performing eclectic roots music. We’ll have standard seating available, first come first serve. We also have a family-focused social area of picnic tables in the back. You’re welcome to bring your dinner, card games, carving, sewing project, or set up on the grass and let your kids play.

A donation of $5-15 per adult is suggested, but all are welcome regardless of contribution. Folk School Students and Staff are not asked to donate. Any funds raised support traditional arts and help us strive for equitable pay for performers.

*Lineup, schedule, and venue are subject to change, for the most up to date details check the schedule at www.folkschool.org/calendar

Stay in the Holler.

Get a monthly note from Catberry. New jams, good folks, and what's coming up in your neck of the woods.