Tag: NC Surround Around

NC Surround Around

NC SURROUND AROUND

Stepping Up

Citizen Vinyl pressed into service

By Tom Maxwell

There’s a beautiful Art Deco building at 14 O. Henry Avenue in Asheville, located on a particularly high spot in that already elevated mountain city. Completed in 1939, it was built to house owner Charles Webb’s two newspapers (the morning’s Asheville Citizen as well as the Asheville Times afternoon edition) in addition to his newly-acquired-but-already famous radio station WWNC-AM. For the last five years, Webb’s glass brick, black granite and limestone behemoth has been home to Citizen Vinyl, a unique combination of record pressing plant, recording/mastering studio, record store, art gallery and café. But in October 2024, the place served as an altogether different kind of community hub.

“We were one of the few Asheville businesses that had both power and internet a couple of weeks after the hurricane,” Citizen Vinyl founder and CEO Garland (Gar) Ragland says, “so we immediately pivoted to becoming a community resource. We ran extension cords out of our space in the building and got the word out that we had internet available and power for people to charge their digital devices and cellphones. We had hundreds of people coming every day to power their phones and text or call their loved ones to let them know they were safe.”

In September, Hurricane Helene wiped large swaths of Appalachia off the map. Entire towns in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee in valleys near rivers or creeks were washed away. Marshall, a small town north of Asheville, was destroyed. To the east, Swannanoa suffered a blow from which it has yet to recover. The recently established Arts District, nestled alongside the French Broad river in West Asheville, was suddenly under 12 feet of water. The big Art Deco building that houses Citizen Vinyl was quicker to recover than most other businesses, thanks to its elevation and its proximity to NOAA’s Federal Climate Complex, which houses both the National Climatic Data Center as well as the country’s Climate Archive.

Soon, one of Citizen Vinyl’s food partners, Michelle Bailey, set up smokers and grills in their little parking lot and started preparing meals from food donated by far-flung friends and her regional farming network. “She started the weekend after the hurricane,” Ragland says, “and served about 1,500 hot meals every weekend for weeks. She had friends from Louisville, Kentucky, come over and bring hundreds of pounds of top-shelf smoked meats and barbecue. So, we pivoted — because we really didn’t have any other option than to just lean in and support our community in whatever way we could.”

Ragland is quick to point out that he and his friends weren’t the only people who met the moment. “There were many, many, noble efforts,” he says, “and what was revelatory to me was how unique and special this community of people is, how readily and instinctively people showed up to help one another. There were people on street corners with signs saying ‘Free Water Here,’ or ‘Hot Food.’ I was really impressed and inspired and proud to be a member of this community because we showed up for each other.”

Ragland, a native of Winston-Salem, started Citizen Vinyl in 2019. Inside Charles Webb’s three-story building, he established the pressing plant along with Sessions (the breezy bar and café) and Coda: Analog Art & Sound (a combination art gallery and record store). On the top floor, Ragland converted the hallowed space of WWNC into Citizen Studios, a recording and mastering facility. He can quote the building’s history, chapter and verse.

“Charles Webb designed and dedicated the top floor of the Citizen-Times building to be the new home for his radio station,” Ragland says. “It was state-of-the-art. He modeled it after the RCA Victor Studios in New York. By the time of the station’s construction, WWNC-AM had already become one of the most popular radio stations in the country. It was previously located a couple of blocks away in the Flatiron Building, and it was there that Jimmy Rodgers made his national radio premiere in 1927.” Immediately after the station reopened in its new location, bluegrass legends Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys debuted on February 2, 1939. The group played the daily afternoon “Mountain Music” slot until WWNC became a CBS affiliate.

At the time, artists from all over the country were descending on Asheville because of WWNC’s reach. “It was the highest elevation radio station east of the Mississippi,” Ragland says. “That 570 kHz radio frequency could throw from downtown Asheville all the way to West Texas and up into southern Canada.”

The amazing thing is, despite eastbound I-40 being washed out between Old Fort and Black Mountain — while half of its westbound lanes crumbled down into a gorge outside of Knoxville — Citizen Vinyl never stopped pressing records. “Our shipping and receiving did slow down,” Ragland notes, “and we had a couple slow months.” Not that big a deal, considering the town wouldn’t have potable water for 11 weeks.

In the best of times, people tend to think of things like music and food as ephemera, as if they’re mere ornaments to the real work of producing wealth. But you’d be hard pressed to think of two things more deeply woven into the fabric of community than a mother singing a lullaby to her drowsy infant, or the connections made and deepened by a shared meal in a desperate moment.

“Being part of this community and serving as a cultural hub has been a really important part of our ethos and business,” Ragland says. “The hurricane, full disclosure, put into jeopardy our ability to sustain the café and the event space. But that said, the challenges only reinforced the values and the ethos that we’ve constructed this business to be, evidenced by our name.”

The word “citizen” has been with us since the late Middle Ages, and has specific meanings in different areas of law, religion and the military. Ragland is well aware of both the promise and potential risks of using that word.

“Obviously, there’s a history that we wanted to honor by calling the business Citizen Vinyl,” he says. “But the term itself is a very provocative name to title your business because it means different things to different people. For the undocumented person, it’s a loaded word. It can be an alienating and divisive term. But on the flip side, ‘citizen’ asks the question: What does it mean to belong to a place?’ We were intrigued by the opportunity to help shape and define what it means. We’re music nerds, not music snobs. We don’t judge people’s music tastes. We want to celebrate music, art and community. We don’t pass judgment on anyone. We want to operate our business in a way that defines ‘citizen’ in the most positive of ways. The hurricane, if nothing else, created an opportunity for us to put into practice a lot of the things that we aspire to be as members of the Asheville community.”

The quote “We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us” is often attributed to O. Henry, the author Citizen Vinyl’s street is named for. The catastrophic destruction caused by Hurricane Helene may have kept you away from Asheville, but it’s time to go back, to witness firsthand the climate of resilience and community achieved by its citizens.

NC Surround Around

NC SURROUND AROUND

Dropping In

Return of the Carolina Chocolate Drops

By Tom Maxwell

It all started in April 2005, at the first “Black Banjo: Then and Now Gathering.” The event, held at Appalachian State University in Boone, was part scholarly pursuit and part throwdown, featuring four days of “lectures, jams, workshops, down home frolics, and performances” with a view to bringing the “funky, plunky instrument” back home to Black America. Dom Flemons, a 23-year-old student at Northern Arizona University, attended.

“I was the young person at the event,” Flemons says. He had been playing banjo for a few years already, busking on street corners and devouring records by the Memphis Jug Band and Dave Van Ronk, as well as ’20s songster music of people like Gus Cannon and Henry Thomas.

So, like many young people who fall in love with old music, most of Dom’s musical heroes were dead — even if their music was very much alive. But in Boone he was about to enter the musical land of the living.

“When I met Joe Thompson, a light bulb went off in my head,” Flemons says. “I heard him playing at the opening ceremony for the Black Banjo Gathering, and all of a sudden I understood the music that connected people like Henry Thomas to Gus Cannon. When I heard Joe’s music, I heard that flavor of fiddle and banjo music that these guys were referencing, playing and living next to generationally. And that inspired me to move out to North Carolina. I sold everything I owned, packed up my car, took Route 66 east and headed for North Carolina to be near the music.”

Thompson, born in 1918, had been playing African American string band music for 80 years by the time Dom Flemons heard him perform at the Black Banjo Gathering. An Orange County native, Thompson joined his family on fiddle (after studying his father’s old-time technique, which was handed down by his own father, a former enslaved person) playing square dances, parties and dances after corn shucking or tobacco stripping. Joe considered quitting music after his cousin and musical partner, Odell Thompson, died in the ’90s, but picked it back up basically by popular demand. Even a stroke in 2001 couldn’t slow him down. “I got to sit with Joe and play music,” Flemons remembers, “and it was a powerful experience just to be in his presence. I knew that I was connected to the tradition from there. It’s something beyond just music. It’s a feeling as well and, if you’re deep in the culture, you understand the nuances of that feeling.”

Two years after his performance at the first Black Banjo Gathering, Joe Thompson became a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow. He also started mentoring Dom Flemons’ new band. Local musicians Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson also saw Thompson at the Black Banjo Gathering and had been playing music at his Mebane house for several months by the time Dom, newly graduated from college, moved to North Carolina. The three youngsters decided to form a band of their own. “These are the years leading into Obama being elected,” Flemons says, “and culturally, people were ready for a Black string band. They could handle it.”

Flemons, Giddens and Robinson called their band the Carolina Chocolate Drops. “With the combination of all three of the original members of the trio, we created a sound that was very authentic and raw, but also landed right,” Flemons says. “We always had a rock solid rhythm. I leaned 100 percent into that, because being a fan of the Grateful Dead, I understand that give and take with the audience.”

All traditions, an accomplished jazz musician once observed, meet at the root. In their career, the Carolina Chocolate Drops were seamlessly able to blend Civil War-era Black string band music, ’60s folk-rock, jazz and hip hop. It’s no surprise — but still an absolute delight — that the band covered Blu Cantrell’s 2001 R&B Top 40 hit “Hit ’Em Up Style (Oops!)” on their Grammy-winning album Genuine Negro Jig.

“I was a fan of Old Crow Medicine Show,” Flemons says, “so I always thought about fast old-time as being a genre. Fast old-time is something that people have always enjoyed, and it was becoming very popular at that time. When we were arranging songs with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, they would usually do a Joe Thompson number. I came up with the jug and took a combination of what I thought about with traditional jug bands, as well as people like Charles Mingus, and applied that to ‘Georgia Buck.’ That gave us a unique sound from a traditional old-time string band.”

The Carolina Chocolate Drops went on to have a stellar career, releasing five albums, opening for luminaries like Taj Mahal and Bob Dylan, making numerous television appearances, and performing several times at the Grand Ol’ Opry. But as all fiery combinations do, they burned bright, then out. Robinson left in 2011; Flemons followed suit two years later. By 2014, the group functionally disbanded. Until now.

“Rhiannon wants us to do this festival she’s putting together, Biscuits & Banjos,” Flemons says. The festival will be held in Durham April 25 – 27 and will feature not only a reunited Carolina Chocolate Drops, but also solo appearances by Flemons and Giddens. Rounding out the stellar lineup are legacy acts like Taj Mahal, promising newcomers Infinity Song, Tar Heel native Shirlette Ammons and many more. In the tradition of the Black Banjo Gathering — and countless others since time immemorial — there will be artist talks, workshops, a biscuit bake-off (Giddens is a self-described “avid biscuit baker”) and a community square dance.”

Indeed, all American musical traditions do meet at the root. Blues, jazz, rock-and-roll — and a sizable chunk of country music — owe their very existence to African American musical idioms and cultural expressions. We are all the better for it, and when you combine this history with Southern food and an old-school hootenanny, life gets very good indeed. And North Carolina is one of the few places in America where something like this could happen.

“North Carolina is such a wellspring of culture in general,” Flemons says, “and I believe that it has done a lot of things right when it comes to expressing the culture of the state. I think it’s something in the way that the land is structured and the way people are raised. Because a lot of times they have this particular connection to the land, and a foot in both the country and the city. The Carolina Chocolate Drops did school shows in almost every city and town in North Carolina, so I got to see everything from Edenton all the way up to Asheville and Black Mountain and Hot Springs. Every part of North Carolina has something beautiful and unique, and the music reflects that.”

2025 Department NC Surround Around

NC Surround Around

NC SURROUND AROUND

Making Music in the Woods

And putting money in artists’ pockets

By Tom Maxwell

There’s a 63-acre compound on Borland Road, out in the rolling Orange County countryside near Hillsborough. On it is situated a log cabin, a barn and several other outbuildings stuffed with the kind of gear that only true believers would collect: a Neve 88R mixing desk originally commissioned by New York’s Electric Lady Studios; a live reverb chamber; several isolation booths; and, aurally immersive Dolby Atmos mixing capabilities. This particular compound goes by the name of Sonark Media, and it’s a thoroughly modern complex offering recording, performance and streaming capabilities.

Sonark is the brainchild of Steven Raets, a Belgian-born polymath. Up until 2012, Raets had been working for the “big three” investment firms: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. That all changed the following year, when he retired.

“Then basically the question was, what was gonna be the rest of my life?” Raets says. “I’ve always had a big passion for music. I’ve played in all kinds of bands since I was 12 — party bands, original bands, when I lived in Belgium and London. I’ve always been involved in music; that’s always been my destiny. I just happened to be really good at mathematics and statistics, so I ended up in a trading role, but I knew I was going to go back to music. That moment happened in 2013.”

Raets built a home studio in the basement of his Chapel Hill home — he’s married to a UNC professor — and started producing records. Once the kids were out of the house, the couple decided to scale down. They bought a farm not far from where they lived and began fixing up the old log cabin on the property. But Raets wanted to move up, literally, from the basement.

“I said to my wife, ‘You know, I want to keep doing music,’” Raets says. “‘So, if we’re moving from this house, then you have to allow me to build a proper studio.’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’”

Raets’ idea of what constitutes a “proper” studio might differ a little from most industry entrepreneurs. For one thing, he and his partners run three full recording studios on the Sonark property: Studio A, with a huge live room, high ceiling and three isolation booths; the smaller Studio B; and a renovated barn dedicated to rehearsals, live performances and streaming. The rooms sound amazing, and the gear is impeccable. If this was all the Sonark gang did, it would be more than enough. But these people are true believers.

“I think we’re uniquely set up to help the music industry rethink how music should be made, distributed, enjoyed and monetized,” Raets says, “and that is basically what keeps us awake every day. How can we help our musicians make more money in this world where music has become worthless? That’s our mission at Sonark.”

The fact that this question is even being articulated is refreshing. Without getting too technical about it, many of the fundamental revenue streams for musicians have dried up over the last few decades. Unless you’ve established a national touring base, it’s tough to make enough money at each gig to put gas in the van to get to the next town. Vinyl records have made a comeback, but they’re considered merchandise, to be sold along with band T-shirts, posters and hoodies — and many clubs take a percentage of this money. Merch is welcome supplemental income, but it will hardly keep body and soul together. That leaves digital streaming.

In the past year and a half, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has made over $345 million, with his top executives coming in a close second, leaving megastars like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift in the dust. This is because a generous calculation of Spotify’s payout is about $0.003 per stream, and that’s allowing for the artist having complete control over their intellectual property, which is seldom the case. So even Swift — the most streamed artist on the platform — has yet to earn the kind of dough Ek has made.

Raets and his colleagues have spent a lot of time on the issue of putting money into musicians’ pockets, and they’ve come up with PIE TV, a subscription platform that allows users to stream Sonark-produced live performances on demand.

“It is inevitable that, as our technology advances and becomes more sophisticated, and as the bandwidth of our wireless devices increases, music will be viewed as well as listened to,” Raets says. “For years, I’ve been thinking of how to do that in a way that could be packaged and make sense for both the artists and those who help produce it. We finally came up with this idea where we would start producing intimate shows with bands but produce them as if you are in the PNC Arena, except with maybe 150 people there. We give the band a very controlled environment with enormous amounts of production value.”

Sonark performances are shot on at least a half-dozen high-definition digital cameras, while the audio is sent to Studio A for mixing. Edited audio and video are then synced and sent out for broadcast on the PIE TV app. Artists are paid guarantees for their performance, and they own part of the intellectual property of the broadcast and so are entitled to an ongoing royalty share from future streaming.

Compare this to the hugely popular YouTube live performances where none of the revenue generated from those videos goes to the artist. Admittedly, this is no different than live television performances in days of yore. “If you were going to play Jimmy Kimmel or Saturday Night Live or Austin City Limits, you would have to do it for cost,” Raets says. “You get very little out of it as a band except for a huge platform and promotional value. But the monetization goes entirely to the network.”

PBS NC has taken note, broadcasting a season of Sonark Sessions: Live from the Barn featuring 10 North Carolina-based artists. As far as Raets is concerned, there’s no reason to stop there. “North Carolina is an incredibly fertile ground for talent,” he says. “But we really don’t have an industry. There’s not a lot of jobs around. I want to create awareness of the fact that the music industry is not a hobby; it’s a valid center of revenue. You have only to look at Austin, Texas, to see how that worked out for them. Twenty-five years ago, it didn’t exist. Now, the music industry contributes hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues to the city. My dream is to do something similar to that for North Carolina. There’s a lot of potential here and you can feel it bubbling everywhere.”

2025 Department NC Surround Around