- Album list
- Singer Intro
Rising Appalachia is an American musical group led by multi-instrumentalist sisters Leah and Chloe Smith. Leah also performs as a solo artist under the name Leah Song. Based between Southern Appalachia and New Orleans, the sisters work with an array of international musicians and the band incorporates everything from simple harmonics with banjos and fiddles, to a wide variety of drums, kalimbas, beatbox, djembe, baliphone, congas, didgeridoo, tablas, spoons and washboard creating a full mix of world, folk and soul music.
History
In 2005, sisters Leah and Chloe Smith, decided one afternoon to record their first album, Leah and Chloe, in the basement studio of a friend in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. The album was meant as a gift for family and friends but they received so much support and recognition for it that they decided to officially start a band called Rising Appalachia.
In the early days, the sisters busked, in the French Quarter of New Orleans and elsewhere. They began to find their own natural interpretation of Appalachian music which brought together folk, soul, hip-hop, classical, southern gospel and other styles based on their upbringing on traditional Appalachian string band music, as well as on their exposure to urban music like hip-hop and jazz and the influence of roots music of all kinds which they experienced during their worldwide travels. They released their second album, Scale Down in 2007.
On June 29, 2008 the group played their last show under the name Rising Appalachia during Concrete Pandemonium III at the Eyedrum Art Gallery in Atlanta before it was changed to R.I.S.E. (sometimes written RISE). However, in February 2010 they announced they would reclaim the original name of the band, Rising Appalachia, but would incorporate RISE in the name of a supporting project, the Rise Collective.
Rising Appalachia is independent from the mainstream music industry. The sisters managed, produced and marketed the project themselves from the beginning and only later started to build up a small management team. Their first four albums have been self-produced and self funded. For their fifth album, Filthy Dirty South, they raised in 2011 within one month a total of $11,180.00 on the crowd funding web site Kickstarter.
Rising Appalachia has performed at many musical festivals throughout the United States but also in Colombia, Costa Rica, Canada, India, Puerto Rico, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Ireland and Scotland.
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