Alice Gerrard

Old-time and bluegrass musician Alice Gerrard has championed traditional music for close to 60 years. Beginning with her trailblazing early duo recordings with Appalachian singer and activist Hazel Dickens, the 89-year-old’s music has always been grounded, anti-establishment, and heartfelt. On Sun to Sun, her first solo album since 2014’s Grammy-nominated Follow the Music, Gerrard channels many modes of creative expression pulled from her unmatched archive of inspiration. “When you’ve been playing for as long as I have, you can start from scratch – using just the music you’ve heard over your life,” she says.

She cut her teeth in D.C. and Baltimore’s politically-informed folk revival and bluegrass scenes of the 1950s and 1960s and toured in the early post-Jim Crow South with the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Anne Romaine’s groundbreaking racially-integrated coalition of traditional musicians.

Alice Gerrard’s eclectic repertoire of songs and focus on community has drawn in devotees like Rhiannon Giddens (who in a recent New York Times retrospective of Gerrard’s career called her “inspiring as hell”), Le Tigre (who referenced Gerrard and Dickens by name in their dance-punk anthem “Hot Topic”), and Emmylou Harris (to her, Gerrard is “the real deal”). Inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association Hall of Fame in 2017, and the subject of the 2019 feature documentary You Gave Me a Song (The Groove Productions), there are few living artists who have touched so many parts of the bluegrass and old-time music world in the U.S, not to mention the greater tapestries of popular and folk music, as Alice Gerrard.

Bio by Joesphine McRobbie

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