The Blue Ridge Music Center presents the Jeff Little Trio with special guests DaShawn & Wendy Hickman Scared Steel live in concert in our spacious outdoor amphitheater at the base of Fisher Peak on The Blue Ridge Parkway, near Galax, VA, Mount Airy, NC and Sparta, NC.
Jeff Little is an award-winning musician from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. With few exceptions, the piano does not play a prominent role in Americana or Appalachian music and is rarely the lead instrument. But Jeff’s music is one of those rare exceptions. The pianist has not only been recognized as a critically acclaimed musician but also a true music innovator
The Jeff Little Trio includes Steve Lewis and Luke Little. Lewis is an award-winning guitar and banjo player from Todd, N.C., and is one of the most respected acoustic musicians in the country. Luke is a young and talented mandolin player whose musicianship and style expand well beyond his years.
Jeff and his trio travel the country performing with an energy and dedication to their music that is evident at every show. The trio has played The Smithsonian Institution, the National Folk Festival, American Piano Masters, The Barns of Wolf Trap and many theaters, performing arts centers, and festivals.
DaShawn Hickman, from Mount Airy, N.C., is one of today’s foremost players of Sacred Steel, a blues-gospel tradition started in the Pentecostal-Holiness churches of the 1930s. He grew up hearing the pedal steel in the tiny House of God church his family attended in Mt. Airy, and listening to his mother play lap steel at home. Hickman picked up the instrument at the age of five, and in his teens, formed a group with three of his cousins that found fame as The Allen Boys, North Carolina’s only touring Sacred Steel band.
Hickman, along with his vocalist wife, Wendy, and bass player Charlie Hunter have put their own spin on Sacred Steel, and love to share their soulful sound.