The Three Davids (Holt, Wilcox and LaMotte) in Concert, Feb. 21

From a press release:

The Three Davids in Concert

Who: David Holt, David Wilcox, and David LaMotte

What: The Three David’s in Concert

When: February 21, 2015 8pm

Where: Diana Wortham Theatre

Tickets: $35/$25 for students and children under 12

Please join three of Asheville’s favorite award-winning songwriters and entertainers, David Holt, David Wilcox, and David LaMotte, on Saturday Febrary 21, 2015 at 8pm at the Diana Wortham Theatre in downtown Asheville for an auspicious evening of insightful songs, woven with warm-hearted, meaningful stories and an abundance of laughter. These three internationally-known musicians have harmonious roots in Western North Carolina, which will echo in their musical conversation. Each of these musicians is accustomed to entertaining large audiences by themselves, and the spontaneous musical and personal interaction between them promises to multiply the fun and make for an exceptional evening to remember.

Tickets are $35 and ($25 for students and children under 12) available online by visiting here.

About The Three Davids

David Holt

Four time Grammy award winner David Holt has lived a life of musical adventure. In 1968, David started his journey in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. With a passion to become an old-time banjo player, David traveled to remote mountain communities like Kingdom Come, KY and Sodom, NC searching for the best traditional musicians. Holt found hundreds of old-time mountaineers with a wealth of folk music and stories. There was 100 year old banjoist Wade Mainer, ballad singer Dellie Norton, fiddler Tommy Jarrell and 122 year-old washboard player Susie Brunson as well as Doc Watson and Grand Ole Opry stars Roy Acuff and Grandpa Jones. In 2002 Doc and David won Grammys for their classic Legacy three CD set. With interviews, music and a live concert Legacy covers the inspiring life and music of Doc Watson.

For over three decades, David’s passion for traditional music and stories has fueled a successful performing and recording career. He has hosted numerous television shows including Fire On The Mountain, the PBS Folkways series and Great Scenic Railway Journeys and has performed and recorded with many of his mentors including Doc Watson, Chet Atkins, Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. He can be heard each week on public radio’s Riverwalk Jazz and seen in the movie O Brother Where Art Thou.

His new recording is Let It Slide featuring David’s original songs and slide guitar work.

Called “Exceptional, full of humor and heart…a sure fire cure for the blues” by Dirty Linen magazine

Let It Slide was #1 on the Folk Roots charts for 4 weeks this year. Just out is his new self titled

recording with his band David Holt and the Lightning Bolts. David lives in Asheville, NC and tours

solo, with the Lightning Bolts and with his new group Deep River Rising with Bryan Sutton, T. Michael
Coleman.

David Wilcox

Cleveland-born David Wilcox is a father, a husband, a citizen and a songwriter. He is also a traveler – an adventurer at his core, always on his way somewhere. So how appropriate is it that the career of David Wilcox, celebrated songwriter and creator of more than 18 albums, began with a bike ride through North Carolina when he was just a teenager?

“As my friend and I bicycled the full length of the Blue Ridge Parkway we were asking people that we met, ‘Where can we find musicians?’ because we were traveling light and didn’t have our instruments, and they told us about this a hippie school, Warren Wilson College,” he says. He spent a week in Asheville, and decided to attend. After hearing a fellow college student playing in a stairwell Wilcox began to study and purse his new calling. “There was this cute little music venue, like 150 people max, and that was the perfect size for me. I was playing there every Tuesday and really learned how to make it fresh, not to just play the same set, but how to respond to the crowd and be spontaneous.”

Considered a ‘songwriter’s songwriter’, his songs have been covered by artists such as k.d. lang and many others. In addition to his writing prowess, his skills as a performer and storyteller are unmatched. He holds audiences rapt with nothing more than a single guitar, thoroughly written songs, a fearless ability to mine the depths of human emotions of joy, sorrow and everything in between, and all tempered by a quick and wry wit. His lyrical insight is matched by a smooth baritone voice, virtuosic guitar chops, and creative open tunings, giving him a range and tenderness rare in folk music.

As Wilcox notes in his liner notes, blaze is a “complex blossom of contradictions that is held together at the center by this blissfully focused state of mind that I first came to know while pedaling across the country.” The blossom of this record has petals that go out in different, seemingly contradictory directions. “Working with the bigger sonic choices that this rhythm section brought gave me a broader emotional palette and meant that I could go beyond those introspective, soul-searching songs and actually state some strong opinions.” This led to blaze’s first single, the driving protest anthem Oil Talking To Ya, a rallying cry against environmental neglect.

From songs like Guilty By Degree and Bail My Boat, where the writer finds himself navigating the shoals of life, through It’ll Work On You, where he slyly uses a story about cars to describe the therapy of songwriting, to the haunting finale of Single Candle, the songs on blaze create a path that Wilcox invites you to follow. As Wilcox describers that last song, Single Candle is about Martin Luther King and the words that struck a match and lit a flame that is still bringing light to the world. “This song is my way of making peace with how little each one of us can do. No single match burns for very long, but it is enough.”

With blaze, David Wilcox has stayed true to himself, and artistically alive no matter what, leaving only the path ahead and the trail to blaze.

David LaMotte

David LaMotte is an award-winning songwriter, whose music has taken him around the globe, performing 2500 concerts to devoted fans on five continents. Along the way, he has had the chance to perform with many of the artists who inspired him as a young man, including Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie and the band America. The Boston Globe says he “pushes the envelope with challenging lyrics and unusual tunings, but he also pays homage to folk tradition,” and BBC Radio praises his “charm, stories, humour, insightful songs, sweet voice and dazzling guitar ability,” while the Washington Times laud his “guitar-spanking open-tuning grooves as well as gentle folk-tinged pop, ” saying, “his lyrics range from insightful image-driven stories to equally insightful humor.”

LaMotte’s eleven albums include one for children, S.S. Bathtub, which led to the publication of his first children’s book, based on its award-winning title song. That was followed by a second illustrated book for children, White Flour. In 2014 he published his first book for adults, Worldchanging 101: Challenging the Myth of Powerlessness.

LaMotte also works hard to put the hopeful ideas he sings about into action. He suspended his music career in 2008 to accept a Rotary World Peace Fellowship, earning a master’s degree in International Studies, Peace, and Conflict Resolution from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. As part of that program, he also spent three months in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, working with a Gandhian development organization. He also works with PEG Partners, the non-profit organization he co-founded to support schools and libraries in Guatemala, and is the Clerk (chair) of the Nobel Peace Prize Nominating Task Group for the AFSC (Quakers).

In addition to a dense calendar of musical events worldwide, LaMotte speaks and leads workshops on bridging the gap between caring and actually making a difference. His many talks last year in Europe, Central America and across the United States included one at the Scottish Parliament building.

In 2015, LaMotte is turning his attention to recording a new CD, scheduled to be released late in the year.