David Brower

The Celtic powerhouse band Solas will kick off the 2013 Back Porch Music concert series in Durham.  Bluegrass, local blues, and much more will be a part of the four Back Porch concerts scheduled between May and October.

The crowds at the annual Back Porch Music concerts On The Lawn at American Tobacco Campus in Durham have grown so much that "the lawn" can no longer contain the anticipated numbers. This spring and summer  the concerts will be in a much bigger space and have a more festival like feel.

WUNC's Back Porch Music hosts, Keith Weston and Freddy Jenkins, join Eric Hodge to chat about this past year's memorable acoustic and roots music releases and to remember some of the important musicians who left us this year.

Picks mentioned in the conversation:

Artist - Album Title
I Draw Slow - Redhills
Midtown Dickens - Home
Darrell Scott & Tim O'Brien - Live: We're Usually A Lot Better Than This
The Grass Cats - The Mountains My Baby and Me
Matt Flinner Trio - Winter Harvest
 

Last Saturday, we launched an experiment we’re calling WUNC’s Pop-Up Music Club. It’s a series made possible by a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council – a statewide non-profit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Our series from the WUNC Youth Radio Institute concludes this morning with a story from Fontezia Walker. She's 19 and had a number of setbacks while working towards her high school diploma. As you'll hear in this report, she and her sister struck out on their own -- by deciding to stay home.

Fontezia Walker: I live in a 3-room apartment in North Durham. Our home is filled with squeaky stairways, and the sounds of noisy neighbors. I live with my older sister, her son - and the memory of my mother.

On Fridays we've been listening to a series produced by young people involved in WUNC's first ever Summer Youth Radio Institute. This week 15-year-old Akib Khan tells the story of his sister, who decided to start wearing the hijab, the traditional Islamic headscarf, when the family immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh. As our youth reporter tells us it's a decision that was met with some skepticism.

Country legend Vince Gill plays the Durham Performing Arts Center this Sunday night. After nearly 20 records, 14 Grammys and a truckload of Country Music Association Awards, he's back playing bluegrass again. And Gill tells WUNC's Eric Hodge it feels right to be doing it in North Carolina.

WUNC is a part of the American Graduate Project. It's a public media initiative looking at the drop out crisis across the country. As a part of this project we commissioned slam poets Kane Smego and Will McInnerney to teach a writing workshop at Northern High School in Durham. Over the last 10 weeks, Kane and Will taught a group of students how to use poetry to tell their own stories. Today is graduation day at Northern and three of the students from our workshop will be receiving their diplomas.

The dB's are back. This week, the legendary band releases Falling off the Sky. It's their first studio album in more than 30 years. The dBs began life in the late 70s in New York after growing up in Winston Salem. After several critically acclaimed records, members of the band went their separate ways -- but the music they recorded continued to influence fellow musicians.