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Serving Cabot and the Region with Quality Arts Experiences
"Community is what we do together!"
The Green Mountain OldTime Workshop Weekend
ARTISTS
The Moon Shells
The Moonshells are a Connecticut and Massachusetts-based quintet featuring Brain Slattery, Maggie Shar, Laura Murawski, Molly Merritt and Charlie Shaw. Grounded in the Appalachian fiddle tradition, drawing on Louisiana, West Africa, and Eastern Europe, they create a fusion of traditional oldtime stringband music with deep rhythms and joyful songwriting. https://www.themoonshells.com/
Brian Slattery
Brian has been playing traditional American music for 30 years, most notably with the Moon Shells and Mississippi fiddle scholar Harry Bolick. He has taught at Augusta Heritage Center, the Dance Flurry, Spice on Snow, and regional festivals, and has a number of private students. He’s also the arts editor for the New Haven Independent.
Maggie Shar Born and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and now living in western Massachusetts, Maggie teaches private and group banjo classes to people of all ages from all over the world. She has offered banjo workshops at Ashokan Music and Dance Camps, Augusta Heritage Center, Banjo Camp North, Suwannee Banjo Camp, and Midwest Banjo Camp. She won 1st place at the 2018 Northeast Fiddler’s Convention Banjo Contest and the 2018 Oldtone Roots Festival Banjo Contest; and received 3rd place in the 2022 Online Oldtime Banjo Competition. In 2023 she was a finalist in the Appalachian Stringband Competition (Clifftop), as well as The Fresh Grass Awards. Maggie plays banjo in two bands: The Moon Shells and The Ephemeral Stringband; she is also co-creator of Little Roots, an early childhood music program. All three of these ventures have issued multiple CDs (see her website maggieshar.com for listings).
Laura Murawski
Laura Murawski’s first instrument was the African drum, which she learned how to play in the basement of the Paramount Theater in Peekskill during the early 2000s with teacher Kazi Oliver. It was 10 more years before she picked up the fiddle. Drawn to the rhythmic playing of Jon Bekoff and Judy Hyman, she spent countless hours trying to figure out how they were getting that sound. Finally somewhere around 2015, she met Brian Slattery and sank into hours of double fiddling exploring those rhythmic ideas and learning more about music in general.
Matt Flinner
Multi-instrumentalist Matt Flinner has made a career out of playing acoustic music in new ways. Starting out as a banjo prodigy who was playing bluegrass festivals before he entered his teens, Flinner later took up the mandolin, won the National Banjo Contest at Winfield Kansas in 1990, and took the mandolin award there the following year. Since then, he has become recognized as one of the premiere mandolinists as well as one of the finest new acoustic/roots music composers today.
Katie Trautz
Katie Trautz (www.katietrautz.com) is a native Vermont fiddler who has toured nationally and internationally sharing traditional music and original folk songs. Katie plays fiddle, guitar and banjo crossing genres with her numerous ensembles. She has studied with some of the greatest fiddle players in the US including Dirk Powell, Pete Sutherland, David Greely and Bruce Molsky. Katie has released a number of albums in the past seven years with her various bands (Mayfly, Chaque Fois, Wooden Dinosaur and more).
Charlie Shaw
Moon Shells bassist and drummer, Charlie Shaw has played bass and drums in roots and bar bands since the Pleistocene Era, and Old Time guitar and bass (and annoying 6 chords) almost as long. He is particularly fond of busking Old Time at NYC green markets
Mollie Merrett
Molly started learning guitar at the age of 12 and first was exposed to old time music in her late teens. She instantly loved the sound and the participatory nature of old time music, and went on to learn banjo, fiddle and harmony singing. Guitar has remained her main instrument, and she plays guitar with the Moonshells as well as the Ephemeral Stringband. She lives in Greenfield MA with her partner and two babies (one of them human and the other the fur variety).
Dana Robinson
Dana (www.robinsongs.com) has been playing fiddle and string band music for 30 years and teaches in a southern, Round Peak-inspired style. In a former life, Dana toured relentlessly as a singer-songwriter on the national folk circuit and in Great Britain for over 20 years. Now, Dana hosts the weekly Cabot jam session, serves as the Executive Director of Cabot Arts and enjoys coming up with all sorts of fun and wacky music events for people to enjoy!
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