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Bluegrass & Gee's Bend 2025

One of our most popular events is back with great workshops in bluegrass music, traditional crafts, and a Gee's Bend quilting retreat. This four-day workshop series provides a truly immersive experience with a fun and enthusiastic community of musicians and artists.

Registration Coming Late January 2025

2025 Workshop Offerings:

  • Guitar I: Allen Tolbert
  • Guitar II: Jim Hurst
  • Banjo I: George Guthrie
  • Banjo II: Alan O'Bryant
  • Fiddle I: Robbi Podrug
  • Fiddle II: Fred Carpenter
  • Mando I: Jason Bailey
  • Mandolin II: Isaac Eicher
  • Upright Bluegrass Bass: Skip Ward
  • Gee's Bend Quilting Retreat: Mary Ann Pettway & China Pettway
  • Bark Basket Weaving: Sarah Bell
  • Natural Dyes: Aaron Sanders Head
  • Hand-Forged Heads: Quinn McKay
  • Foraged First Aid: Cameron Strouss

Made possible in part the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

PRICING:

Music Workshops are $255.00

Craft Workshops are $280.00

Lodging prices (including meals) range from:

Lodge Room & Meals for 2: $600.00

Lodge Room & Meals for 1: $450.00

Cabin Bunk Bed & Meals for 1: $170.00

Commuter Fee & Meals for 1: $80.00

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Guitar I: Allen Tolbert

Guitar 1 will be a comprehensive course that will cover all the essentials necessary for the beginner to learn to play to guitar, while also touching upon advanced techniques and ideas to help foster long term growth in the individual student. Students will learn chord structures, basic improvising techniques, how to properly tune and maintain a guitar, how to properly change strings and many other essentials for the aspiring guitarist. The objective will be for the student to be able to play multiple songs proficiently at the conclusion of the camp and be well versed in the essentials of the guitar. The hope is this will create new guitarists to enrich all of our musical futures!

Allen Tolbert has toured professionally in the southeast for over 20 years. A veteran of Birmingham-based Glenn Tolbert & Company for 17 years, Allen has made hundreds of appearances ranging from festivals, weddings, churches and private parties to radio and television appearances. He appeared as a featured guest on a special youth edition of the nationally-syndicated radio broadcast of the Woodsongs Old-Time Radio Hour, as well as performing numerous times on the Country Boy Eddie Show on WBRC TV in Birmingham with many guests including Hank Williams III. His festival appearances include Horse Pens 40, opening for such acts as Ricky Skaggs, The Del McCoury Band, Peter Rowan, Jerry Douglas, Blue Highway and The Whites. Allen also performed at the Foggy Hollow Bluegrass Gatherin' nearly 20 different times, opening for acts such as Alison Krauss and Union Station, The Tony Rice Unit, J.D. Crowe and the New South, IIIrd Tyme Out, the Osborne Brothers and Claire Lynch. His debut solo CD is scheduled to be released soon. Allen also teaches guitar and mandolin in the greater Birmingham metropolitan area, as well as throughout the world via Skype and FaceTime.

Guitar II: Jim Hurst

Banjo I: George Guthrie

Banjo II: Alan O'Bryant

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Fiddle I: Robbi Podrug

A Milwaukee, WI, native, Robbi spent time in Cincinnati, OH, and Birmingham, AL, soaking up the local musical cultures and playing in various bands (Brew County Rounders, Herb Trotman Band), before landing in the Twin Cities in 2008. A friend once commented that you can always tell what she's feeling while she plays. The emotion comes right through the fiddle. She's been fortunate to play with a lot of bands in several genres (bluegrass, western swing, country, singer-songwriter duo) in different parts of the country. The result is a playing style that is textural as well as musical. Her current band is King Wilkie's Dream.

Fiddle II: Fred Carpenter

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Mandolin I: Jason Bailey

Mandolinist Jason Bailey has been performing and teaching professionally for 25 years. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Jason relocated to Nashville shortly after completing his third solo album release, Mandolbug in 2010. This record, produced by mandolinist extraordinaire Matt Flinner, expresses Bailey’s talents in new grass, jazz and celtic inspired genres. Bailey currently has five album releases.

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Mandolin II: Isaac Eicher

Advanced Bluegrass Mandolin. Isaac enjoys teaching a variety of styles to all levels of mandolin students. In my classes, we typically work on theory, scales, arpeggios, shifting positions, improvisation, chords, technique and repertoire. I like it when students ask questions! You can bring paper and pencil to take notes.

Isaac Eicher is a mandolin player and teacher known for his unique sound on the mandolin, which is influenced by many genres like bluegrass, jazz and latin music. Originally from Oklahoma, Eicher is a two-time national mandolin champion and currently resides in Nashville.

Bass: Skip Ward

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Gee's Bend Quilting with Mary Ann Pettway and China Pettway

This Gee’s Bend quilting retreat at the Alabama Folk School provides a rare opportunity for quilters of all levels to sew alongside two of Alabama's famed Gee's Bend Quilters. China Pettway and Mary Ann Pettway are available to assist with hand and machine-stitching, and share tips for creating in the style of the Gee's Bend tradition. While everyone works, they sing gospel style spirituals and tell stories from their lives in the community of Boykin, Alabama. Quilters bring works in progress or fabric scraps to start something new. Depending on skill level, you'll go home with some quilt blocks or a full pattern and many good memories.

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Mary Ann Pettway is the manager of the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective. She made her first quilt for the collective in the summer of 2005. The seventh of 12 children, Mary Ann Pettway was born and raised in Gee's Bend. After graduating high school in 1975, Mary Ann took college bookkeeping and accounting classes before working in a sewing factory for 20 years. Pettway is one of the lead singers of the Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church and began quilting again after hearing about the trips the quilters of the community went on. "Before I started back to quilting, I was with (friend) Sabrina's grandmother Arlonzia a lot and heard about these trips they would go on (to other cities through The Quilts of Gee's Bend traveling exhibition.) So I told her, "I'm tired of hearing how good of a time y'all are having. I want to start having a good time too." So she told me, "well then start quilting!" And Mary Ann is, thankfully, still quilting today.

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In addition to being a famed quilter, China Pettway is one of Gee's Bend's leading gospel singers. Singing is her beloved hobby. She is one of the few Boykin locals who attended college and returned to live in the community. Now a home healthcare provider, Pettway enjoys working with the elderly. "I love my patients and I think they are the most sweet and beautiful people you can meet." China was taught to quilt by her mother, Leola, at the young age of eleven. "We had to quilt until ten at night. Then, she would let us stop and get to bed. That was every evening except Saturday and Sunday. I made my first quilt, it was a 'Star.' And I still have it,” she says. She and Mary Ann began teaching at the Alabama Folk School fifteen years ago.

Photo credits: Jenna Mobley

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Bark Basket Weaving with Sarah Bell

Sarah Bell is a fiber artist, sculptor, farmer, and educator based in Birmingham, Alabama. Descended from Chinese and American ancestry, she grew up using art and creativity as a way to find a sense of connection to her experiences of familial migration, grief, and home. She is greatly influenced and inspired by the use of natural and sustainable materials, ancestry of people and land, as well as ancient craft processes and land tending techniques that interweave into her daily engagement with place, materiality, and its impermanence.

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Natural Dyes with Aaron Head

In this 4 day workshop, Aaron will guide participants through the world of natural dyes. Using both garden-grown and foraged plants--including marigolds, sumac, black walnut and indigo--we'll learn the basics of bundle dyeing, as well as resist dyeing techniques for creating patterns on fabric. We will also make our own clay paste resist to use with indigo. Participants will learn to prepare their fabric for dyeing, and how to employ pH shifts to increase their natural palette.

Aaron Sanders Head is a Southern, Alabama-based textile artist. Aaron was raised in rural Grady, AL and Hope Hull, AL, as the youngest of three children from an artist mother and an agricultural worker father. His grandparents were both rural mail carriers, and the times Aaron spent accompanying them on those trips cemented early on a fondness for rural areas and the importance of connection however it can be found. That learned sense of observation combined with inherited family traditions of textile and agriculture inform the unique visual language Aaron works in today, that exists in the worlds of quiltmaking, handwork and natural dyes. Aaron creates quilts and hand-stitched, naturally dyed textiles that explore the lived experiences of rural Alabamians.

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Blacksmithing: Hand-Forged Heads with Quinn McKay

Quinn McKay’s creative energies are rooted in a love of Architecture from an early age, blended with a deep connection to nature. Elements of his designs are inspired by the clean lines we surround ourselves with and the natural forms outside of that. Throughout much of his work, the use of nature’s proportions are present. Attending the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, SC solidified Quinn’s love of forging metal. He celebrates the material in his pieces by preserving its natural displacement when forged, leaving the evidence of each manipulation of the material. Acting with this sense of preservation is his homage to the tradition of forging. Through his time spent here, Quinn explored many different styles within his ironwork taking the most influence from Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement. Quinn is currently working as an artist blacksmith and fabricator at Iron Horse Metalworks in Birmingham, AL and independently as McKay Forged Metals.

(additional small supplies fee for blacksmithing paid upon arrival)

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Foraged First Aid with Cameron Strouss

Cameron is the owner and founder of The Deep Roots School of Herbal Medicine (formerly Deep Roots Apotheké & Clinic) and has been a professional in the field of herbal medicine for 15 years. She has 9 years of experience in Clinical Practice and has over 4,000 hours of training in the Sciences and Herbal Medicine. Cameron is a graduate of the University of Montevallo with a Biology Degree and Environmental Studies Minor with Honors, the Southeastern Institute for Traditional Herbal Studies ( Darryl Patton, 2008-2011) and The Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine (Thomas Easley, RH(AHG), 2012-2013) with her Clinical Herbal Certification. In 2018 she was awarded the professional distinction of Registered Herbalist with the American Herbalist Guild (denoted RH, (AHG)) and Functional Herbalist from the Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine.