note: Tift Merritt will play the first set and Chatham County Line will close the show.

Tift Merritt keeps getting better and better, and she’s been great from the start. Her first album, Bramble Rose, made Top Ten lists at The New Yorker and Time, and the Associated Press named it the best debut album of 2002. Nick Hornby featured one of its songs, the haunting “Trouble Over Me,” in his book 31 Songs. Her second album, Tambourine, was nominated for a Grammy. Her third album was nominated for an Americana Music Association award, and her fourth album won great acclaim – Emmylou Harris praised her for standing out “like a diamond in a coal patch.” Recently, though, her music has grown even stronger, with three outstanding albums, Traveling Alone, Traveling Companion, and Night, recorded with classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein. Her original songs are artfully crafted, emotionally rich, and beautifully sung. She embraces complexity, not settling for any sort of simple message, but striving for the full story, and capturing so much beauty in the process. Her aim, says the Washington Post, has been “to record something ‘real and raw,’ but Traveling Alone is far more than that.” In the words of the Huffington Post, “It could not be more timeless, less trendy. It has just the right proportion of kick-ass songs to whispered meditations.”
 
Tift grew up in North Carolina, moved to France for a while, and now makes her home in New York. “The first person that I wanted to be like was Eudora Welty,” she said in a recent interview, “and then of course I found Joni Mitchell and Emmylou Harris and Carole King, and that was really who I wanted to emulate—those leading ladies who had a point of view and a lot of dignity and purpose.” The New Yorker has called her “the bearer of a proud tradition of distaff country soul that reaches back to artists like Dusty Springfield and Bobbie Gentry,” and she’s extending that legacy of soulful searching and beautiful truth-telling. Don’t miss Tift Merritt at the Freight!

Chatham County Line is a four-man American roots band that emerged from the bluegrass scene in Raleigh, North Carolina at the turn of the millennium. In their matching suits and ties, gathered around a single microphone, they look like a traditional bluegrass band, but in the words of the Washington Post, “the minor chords, patient tempo, and bittersweet irony owe more to Neil Young than to Bill Monroe. This blend of bluegrass arrangements and folk-rock songwriting has led to five terrific, if underappreciated, studio albums from the North Carolina quartet since 2003.” Their most recent album, Sight and Sound, is a live album that captures their rich blend of bluegrass, country, and folk, and they’re about to release a new studio album, Tightrope, which should extend their string of excellent recordings.

Visit Tift Merritt's website

Visit Chatham County Line's website

Listen to a track from Tift Merritt:

Listen to a track from Chatham County Line:

Chatham County Line photo by Kirk Johnson