October Heritage Series: Ballads and Songs of the Blue Ridge featuring Sheila Kay Adams, Bobby McMillon and the Whitetop Mountaineers Galax, VA –  On Sunday, October 23rd traditional singers from North Carolina and Virginia will converge at the Blue Ridge Music Center for a special, free, performance-talk: Ballads and Songs of the Blue Ridge. It will be the last heritage event of the 2011 season. Sheila Kay Adams is a seventh-generation bearer of her family's two-hundred-year-old ballad-singing tradition, and is the mother and teacher of the eighth generation. Her own teachers were her great-aunt Dellie Norton, cousin Cass Wallin, and other kinfolks in the Wallin, Chandler, Norton, Ramsey, and Ray families of Sodom, North Carolina, who have long been admired by ballad singers and collectors. Also a fine old-time banjo player, Sheila has recorded prolifically and performed extensively across the United States and in Great Britain. As a storyteller, Sheila also presents her family's heritage to a world audience. Her tales of life in Madison County are full of history and humor and have been published in two books she has authored: Come Go Home With Me, a collection of short stories drawn from life in Madison County, and My Old True Love, a novel of love and family in Civil War-era Madison County. In 1997, Sheila Kay Adams won the North Carolina Society of Historians' Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award, and received the North Carolina Folklore Society's Brown-Hudson Award for outstanding contributions to the folklore of her home state.   Robert Lynn "Bobby" McMillon, a North Carolina Folk Heritage Award recipient, was heir to numerous strands of Appalachian culture. From his father's family in Cocke County, Tennessee, he learned Primitive Baptist hymns and traditional stories and ballads. From his mother's people in Yancy and Mitchell Counties, North Carolina, he heard "booger tales, haint tales," and legends. Because these songs and tales have deep roots in his own family and experience, Bobby has a passion for them and for sharing them. "Eventually, I began to realize," he says "that if I didn't perform the songs I was learning, most of the repertories of the people I learned from would be lost because they didn't have family members of their own to hand them down to." His greatest gift is his rare ability to convey to listeners a feeling for the world from which the stories come. Musical duo, Martha Spencer and Jackson Cunningham, are known as the Whitetop Mountaineers. They both live in Whitetop, Virginia, in the highest mountains in Virginia and have been steeped in traditional music from a very early age. They are known internationally for their fine instrumental playing and beautiful duet singing. Martha has composed many moving songs about the Blue Ridge. Jackson is a well known as a luthier, (instrument maker), of the region. Both musicians also sing and perform with the Whitetop Mountain Band – one of the most popular stringbands in Virginia. The Whitetop Mountaineers have recorded two CDs: "Home on the Mountain" (2008) and "Go Away with Me: Songs from Virginia's Hills and Hollers"(2010). This is the first time that Martha Spencer, Jackson Cunningham, Sheila Kay Adams and Bobby McMillon have appeared on stage together and it sure to be an event not to miss. The Ballads and Songs of the Blue Ridge performance-talk will take place Sunday, October 23rd at 2pm. Seating opens at 1:45pm. Free admission. Phone (276) 236-5309 x112 to reserve seating. Those with reserved seats must show up 15 minutes prior to the start of each event. At start-time remaining seats are given to drop-in visitors.   All October Heritage Events are free thanks to support from Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the National Council for the Traditional Arts.   Upcoming events:   One more week before the Music Center closes for the season! The Blue Ridge Music Center is open 9-5 seven days a week through October 30. Come see the new Roots of American Music exhibition and sit awhile in our covered breezeway and listen to Mid-Day Mountain Music from 12-4pm daily. There is no fee for Visitor Center activities. The Blue Ridge Music Center is located at milepost 213 on the Blue Ridge Parkway.	Martha Spencer and Jackson Cunningham