Mom, son to perform at concert

The Garnet River Gals will bring their stringed instruments Friday to the outdoor grass stage of the Madison County Library for a concert under the setting sun.

Joining the quartet of female musicians will be Gabriel Kelley, a Madison County singer-songwriter now living in Nashville, Tenn. Kelley will give a solo performance without his band, which performs as Gabriel Kelley & the Reins.

The free concert is from 7 to 9 p.m. on the lawn behind the library. People are encouraged to bring a blanket or lawn chairs, along with a picnic. Vendors will have food and drinks on site as well for the concert, which is funded by a grant from the Grassroots Arts Program. In case of rain, the library can use a shelter in the adjacent park.

The concert is one of three planned for this month, with the Georgia Mudcats set for May 29.

The Garnet River Gals is composed of Dale Wechsler on fiddle, Annette Raymond on dulcimer, Mary Wooten on guitar and Beth Kelley Zorbanos on banjo.

The band formed a couple of years ago when the Womens Build program was building its first Habitat for Humanity house in Comer and music was needed for a dance.

"We put the band together to have a dance on Mother's Day weekend," Zorbanos said. "We had such a good time doing it, we decided to stay together."

The instrumentation is all stringed, without a lot of vocals. Zorbanos, who lives in Madison County, also coined the band's name, inspired by her finding garnet stones in the Broad River. She plays the banjo claw-hammer style, a form of fingerpicking.

"I've been a member of the Athens Folk Music and Dance Society since the beginning," she said of her love for folk music. "It took me years to get to where I had the time to learn a new instrument. Once I picked up the banjo, I knew that was it. I tried guitar back as a teenager, and I tried the dulcimer when I lived in the mountains back in the early '70s and never got past about three chords on either one of those."

Zorbanos' son, Gabriel Kelley, is visiting for Mother's Day weekend, so he accepted a chance to play during the same concert as his mother. In 2008, Kelley and his band recorded a CD, "Light at the Bottom."

In an interview last year, Kelley told the Banner-Herald his songwriting is going well.

"Tim McGraw likes my writing style, so I'm writing the same kind of material I've always written. ... I'm not being asked to write in a specific way, which is pretty unusual for Nashville," he said.

The Garnet River Gals will play old folk and mountain songs that go back decades.

Annette Raymond, who lives in Athens, said she had never played in a band before, except pickup bands for such events as square dancing.

"I'm 55 and it's my first band - so there you go," said the woman who plays an instrument identified with mountain music.

"I've been playing dulcimer since I was about 21. My sister-in-law at that time had a dulcimer, and I heard her play it and I was enchanted by the sound. When I saw a dulcimer in a store in Chapel Hill (N.C.), which is where we were living, I thought, 'How wonderful.' It was affordable and I got it," she recalled. "It's the dulcimer I play to this day."

Raymond, who was raised in North Carolina, said she likes the instrument's versatility. "You can accompany yourself singing, or you can play along for a square dance," she said.

She has listened to many dulcimer players and considers I.D. Stamper, who lived in Eastern Kentucky, one of the best.

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