David Holt, David Wilcox and David Lamotte to perform Three Davids concert, Feb. 20

From the Three Davids

Press release

Please join three of Asheville’s favorite award-winning songwriters and entertainers, David Holt, David Wilcox, and David LaMotte, on Saturday February 20, 2016 at 8pm at the Diana Wortham Theatre in downtown Asheville for their second annual ‘Three Davids’ concert, featuring all new original and insightful songs woven with warm-hearted 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 (last year’s show in Asheville sold out in advance) 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 ($25 for students and children under 12), and are available online by visiting: http://www.dwtheatre.com/performances/calendar/2015-16-rentals/the-three-david

About David Holt

Four-time Grammy Award winner David Holt is recognized as a multi-talented musician. He performs and honors the traditional tunes he has collected for over 40 years. Few realize that he is also an accomplished songwriter.

Says Holt, “I have always performed a few of my own songs in concert, but my main focus has been to showcase traditional mountain music. With The Three Davids, I get to feature my original songs and work with two of my favorite singer songwriters, David and David. “LaMotte, Wilcox and I have great fun performing as The Three Davids. The concerts give us a chance to back each other up as a band, plus stretch out and present our original songs.”

Holt writes songs when inspired. “I like to wait until something really catches my attention. I met an old fellow who said he’d been married 77 years. I asked him what his secret was. He said, ‘Always make sure the man has the last word: ‘Yes, Dear.’” That started me on a song I call “Let It Slide.”

“I traveled with Doc Watson for fourteen years. We ate over six hundred meals a year in restaurants. The last thing we wanted to eat was fast food. We were constantly looking for home-cooked meals. That inspired me to write a song called “Slowfood.” When he is not on the concert trail, Holt is a television host for the PBS series David Holt’s State of Music as well as his long running Folkways series.

About 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.

About 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 lauds 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 is also the president of PEG Partners, Inc., 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.LaMotte is currently recording a new CD, The Other Way Around, which will include eleven new original songs, and will feature musicians from Guatemala, Australia, Germany, India and other countries that have become close to his heart in recent years.