In Appalachia, farmers still practice the ancestral tradition of companion planting. Corn grows tall as a trellis, beans climb the corn, and squash provides the ground cover. Rising Appalachia cultivates a similar symbiosis in their music, where Southern folk traditions, New Orleans swamp culture, and Atlanta’s street spirit strengthen each other. Known for their seamless harmonies, songcatching and storytelling, the band has released ten albums and toured throughout North America, South America, Europe, the Celtic Isles, Australia and beyond — performing everywhere from the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and Red Rocks to NPR’s Tiny Desk. All the while, the band has cultivated a devoted grassroots following traveling to communities big and small by train, horseback, bio-diesel bus and sailboat.

Sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith were raised in Atlanta in a blue collar bohemian family. Their mom was a fiddler, their dad a sculptor. They went to contra dances, wandered the neighborhood forests and had a childhood filled with banjos, harmony singing and other folkways. In her early twenties, while studying art and Indigenous activism in Chiapas, Mexico, Leah returned to her love of folk music. The two sisters then began a wildly creative and successful career that has included busking in New Orleans, traveling with a circus from Southern Italy to Northern Sweden, and collecting songs in Ireland, Bulgaria and Colombia. Rising Appalachia also features the creative musicianship of Duncan Wickel (fiddle, cello), David Brown (upright bass, baritone guitar) and Biko Casini (drums, percussion) — each tradition keepers in their own right.