A Vibrant American Musical Career, far From America's Cultural Capitals

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http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/from-american-bandstand-to-mountain-stage-music-as-cultural-connector/383650/

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A program with one host since its debut in the 1980s ( Mountain Stage )

In the early 1970s, a young singer-songwriter named Larry Groce was launching his career in the music business. He had grown up in Texas, moved to Los Angeles, started recording albums, and in 1976 had a Top Ten hit with the novelty song "Junk Food Junkie."

After that song came out, Dick Clark invited Groce onto his American Bandstand show. You can see a clip from that below—and down at the very bottom of this item, a different clip of Groce singing the "Junk Food" song. But what Clark mainly asks about in this clip is Groce's recent role as a "musician in residence," sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, in rural areas of West Virginia.

After that first, half-accidental exposure to West Virginia when he was in his early 20s, Groce decided to stay. Last month, my wife Deb and I spent time with him in Charleston, where he has continued his recording career (he has now done 23 albums, including some very successful children's albums for Disney) and where he and his wife Sandra Armstrong, also a musician, have become major cultural and civic figures. For the past decade Groce has been the founding executive director of FestivALL, an annual ten-day arts festival in Charleston. He has also run a ballet school. And for the past 30 years he has been host of (and performer on) the National Public Radio music show Mountain Stage.

We got to see a live Mountain Stage performance at the Civic Center in downtown Charleston, before an enthusiastic and youngish full-house crowd, with tickets arranged through Bob and Suzanne Coffield of Charleston. It was two hours of music by a range of established and rising artists. James McMurtry—a singer-songwriter, whom I first met when he was a teenager hanging around in his father Larry's bookstore in Washington—ended the show. Before him came the acoustic rock/folk/jazz band The Devil Makes Three, based in California; and the "progressive bluegrass" group Yonder Mountain String Band, from Colorado. And opening the evening, for a bewitching 20+ minutes, were two teenaged sisters from Indiana, Lily and Madeleine. You can get an idea of their approach from the look of their site and this studio video of one of the songs they performed: