As those who live here in the High Country know, there are many different regions and smaller areas in North Carolina where great music still originates.
An hour or so south of Boone, for example, is the part of Western North Carolina that includes the town of Cherryville, home to the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) award winners Darin and Brooke Aldridge. Just 12 miles further west, you will come to the town of Shelby, where the legendary Earl Scruggs grew up. Scruggs is the musician who singlehandedly changed the way the banjo was played while being a member of the first true bluegrass group known as Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. Not far from Shelby is the region where newgrass legends Acoustic Syndicate are based.
Unspoken Tradition is a bluegrass band from Cherryville that has topped the bluegrass charts multiple times during their almost two decades in existence.
The group features Audie McGinnis on guitar and vocals, brother Zane McGinnis on banjo, Ty Gilpin on mandolin and vocals, Tim Gardner on fiddle and vocals, and Sav Sankaran on bass and vocals. The band has just released a new album called Heartwood on the Mountain Home Music Company label.
Audie McGinnis and his brother Zane grew up in Cherryville in a family that loved bluegrass music.
“With my Dad in the house, we grew up listening to a lot of Tony Rice,” said McGinnis. “Whether it was the Skaggs and Rice album or Manzanita or some of his jazzier stuff, like the Acoustics album; Tony’s music was always on. My Dad also listened to a lot of Newgrass Revival and David Grisman Quintet recordings as well, which was a little more on the progressive side. But then, we’d go over to my Papa’s house where we heard the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe and Del McCurry. So, between the two places, I heard a pretty consistent timeline of bluegrass music in many of its various forms.”
McGinnis began to play the guitar at a young age. After high school, however, he arrived in Boone as a student at Appalachian State University, where he got an English degree. After graduation, he worked as a schoolteacher for about 18 years. Over the years, the band Unspoken Tradition also began to make their mark in music after soaking up the musical legacy of their region.
“There’s a local spot in Cherryville where this gentleman has a fallout shelter on his property that his father built during the Cuban Missile Crisis back in the 1960s,” said McGinnis. “It’s dug into a hillside and made of cinder block. They have a freezer door from a grocery store in the front of it, and when you open it up and walk in there, every Wednesday night you’ll find an open bluegrass jam. There’s sort of an old-school, storytelling liar’s club of old men that are usually having some drinks and chilling in there, and when I was young, I was going down there and watching and learning. After my Dad saw that I was interested in the music, he eventually tricked me into going further with it when he said, ‘I’ll buy you a Martin guitar if you wanted to play bluegrass.’ When I did get my guitar, I started taking lessons from Darin Aldridge for a couple years and the rest is history. But, it all kind of started from that bomb shelter relationship.”
Over the years, many future top bluegrass musicians played in the bomb shelter jam facility, including Boone’s own hometown musical hero.
“When you go down there, you quickly see that everybody that’s ever been in there has written their name on the wall or signed something,” said McGinnis. “When you walk through there and looking at the signatures, most of them are people you don’t really know; some of them are from people that I do know from Cherryville, but then you look closer, and there’s Doc Watson’s signature right there amongst all the other names and that is very cool.”
With Unspoken Tradition’s new Heartwood album, they have tried a new approach to their recording process by bringing in producer Jeff Collins to oversee the sessions. The album also features songs like ‘Rhythm of the Ridge,’ written by Milan Miller, Cathedral Pines’ written by Tim Stafford, and the cut called “Ross and Rebecca” penned by Audie McGinnis, which is based on a very old Appalachian tale. The latter song is about a newlywed couple who entered their freshly built log cabin home on their honeymoon day, which was constructed over a stone hearth. As they lit their first warm fire in their homestead, the heat unfortunately unleashed many deadly snakes from underneath the granite slab that would kill both of them. Sometimes the story is told as “The Bride and the Serpents.”
There are also compositions on the recording written by an array of great songwriters, including Rick Lang, Mark Bumgarner, George Ducas, Radney M. Foster, Jeff Daugherty, and Aaron Bibelhauser.
More information can be found at unspokentradition.com.