Qualla: Appalachian String Band Music Festival

Appalachian String Band Music Festival: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walk through the campground at Clifftop on a July night and you cannot tell where one tune ends and the next begins. A fiddle starts up under a tarp. Three campsites over, a clawhammer banjo joins in. Someone steps out into the dirt road and begins to flatfoot dance. A guitar player wanders over from the next loop. By two in the morning, the same melody may have traveled through six different campsites, picking up a bass, losing a fiddler, gathering a clogger. This is the Appalachian String Band Music Festival - the gathering everyone just calls Clifftop - and since 1990 it has been the place where thousands of musicians meet each summer to keep old-time music alive by playing it together until dawn.

Appalachian String Band Music Festival: Camp Washington-Carver

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The festival is held at Camp Washington-Carver, a New Deal-era complex in the village of Clifftop, in Fayette County, West Virginia, near the New River Gorge. The site itself has a story worth knowing: the complex was built between 1939 and 1942 as a 4-H camp for African American...

Appalachian String Band Music Festival: The Contests and the Campgrounds

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The official festival starts on the Wednesday before the first full weekend in August, but the field begins filling up days earlier with painted vans, hand-built canopies, and family camps that have returned to the same patch of ground for thirty years. There are contests - tradi...

Appalachian String Band Music Festival: A Living Tradition

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Over the decades the festival has drawn a remarkable cross-section of the old-time world. Nashville musicians like John Hartford and Tim O'Brien have played here, alongside Leftover Salmon's Vince Hermann. Legendary West Virginia fiddlers like Melvin Wine and Lester McCumbers car...

Appalachian String Band Music Festival: The Sound of the Mountains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Old-time music is older than bluegrass and quieter than country. The banjos here are usually played in clawhammer style rather than the three-finger roll. The fiddle leads, often in cross-tunings that turn the instrument into a small drone orchestra. Songs come down from the Cart...