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| Friday February 08, 2008 |
Event: Andrew McKnight House Concert
Location: Blacksburg, VA
Time: 7:30 PM
Reservations required: yes |
Website: www.andrewmcknight.net
Feedback: Please join us as we welcome Andrew to Blacksburg! His friends, Dana and Susan Robinson, www.robinsongs.com will be joining him as well. $10 suggested donation. www.andrewmcknight.net
Since permanently leaving his corporate environmental engineering
career in 1996, singer, writer and guitarist Andrew McKnight’s
musical journey has traced over a quarter million miles of blue
highways and small towns across the country, crafting his cinematic
vignettes of Americans and their landscapes in music, poetry and
prose in between 125 performances each year.
The performing songwriter
Wherever McKnight takes the stage, audiences are at once spellbound
and relaxed by his entertaining stories delivered with just the right
touches of down home humor, the literary thread that connects
his diverse array of artfully crafted songs from his four CDs, all
wrapped in his warm and supple voice and effortless guitar grace.
His seemingly boundless energy moves around, one moment in
dancing fingers, the next the impassioned delivery of a poignant lyric,
followed by a playful rhythmic foot stomp to keep time; here is a man
who clearly loves his work.
Whether performing his epic ballad “The Road to Appomattox”,
teaching a workshop to a group of creative writing students, or
writing an essay for Blue Ridge Country or "A Road Warrior's Journal"
on his website, McKnight has a rare gift of engaging and effective
communication with pen, voice, and body.
In tune with his surroundings
While he is the first to say that his life’s work and calling as a
performing songwriter are full of blessings, McKnight is deeply
committed to giving something back every day, both individually and
collectively with his record labelmates at Falling Mountain Music.
Spending most of his adult life living at the foot of the Blue Ridge,
he has watched massive developments near his home swallow
all of Loudoun County’s remaining dairy farms. He has become a
passionate advocate for the preservation of rural heritage as well as
its landscapes, and uses his words and music to tell those stories with
heartfelt reverence.
It is a passion McKnight feels directly, living in the heart of land once
patrolled by the legendary Confederate guerilla, John Mosby, and it
often colors his characters’ personal relationships with their changing
landscape. His song “Company Town” leads off the acclaimed Moving
Mountains: Voices of Appalachia Rise Up Against Mountaintop Removal
Coal Mining CD and he is one of 50 citizen activists profiled in the
pictorial book SAVING THE BAY: People Working for the Future of
the Chesapeake (Johns Hopkins University Press).
A continuing musical journey
In the hallowed marble halls of the John F. Kennedy Center, on a
festival stage under a fair summer sky, or in the intimacy of a house
concert, an evening with Andrew McKnight's songs and stories is
an experience waiting to be savored like a fine wine by a crackling
fire. With the release of Beyond Borders, Andrew boldly begins the
next phase in a long and beautiful journey through the heartland, an
odyssey barely a quarter million miles young.
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