In 1975, Roadside Theater began trying to figure out how to make original drama that would excite its home audiences on Appalachia’s Cumberland Plateau. Since then, Roadside has toured its local plays to 43 states and five European countries, performing in theaters as diverse as London’s South Bank Centre, the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, and the Brumley Gap (Virginia) Coon Hunting Club. Along the way, Roadside has helped other communities search for their unique voice.

The songs on this CD are part of Singing On The Mountain, a play by Roadside Theater. Wings To Fly tells a story about Appalachia, sung by those who grew up there – Kim Neal Cole, songwriter Ron Short from Dickenson County, Virginia and his cousins Bill, Myrtle, and Scott Mullins and Anna Bell Mullins Puckett. For 150 years, the Mullins Family has perpetuated a tradition of mountain harmony singing on the Cumberland Plateau. The selections here echo their history as they tell about the lives of the people who now live in these mountains: coal miners and farmers, sons and daughters of coal miners and farmers, preachers and teachers, banjer players and balladeers, saints and sinners.

The songs are new – written by Ron Short – but are drawn from a long, proud history of Appalachian music. The roots of this music stretch back to the British Isles from where a large number of Scots-Irish migrated to Appalachia in the 1700s. Today in the Old Regular Baptist Church, you can still hear the “lining-out” of long meter hymns sung almost unchanged from their Old World origins. Family harmony and gospel singing, fiddle jigs and reels, ballads and songs of protest still hold their own here.