Vocal Week 2025

Val Mindel – Advisor

Val Mindel is a longtime musician, teacher and workshop leader, known for helping singers achieve the sound they want and have fun doing it. She teaches a wide range of harmony styles from the buzzy sound of American old-time and early country harmony to the weaving harmonies of songs from across the ocean. In the process she addresses such indefinables as tone, ornamentation and lead singing. In addition to being a regular on staff at the Augusta Heritage Center, she has taught at numerous music camps elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad, including SongRoots, Targhee Music Camp, Ashokan Music and Dance Camps, Centrum’s Voice Works, Pinewoods and Sore Fingers. She is a founding member of the California-based Any Old Time string band (check out the band’s compilation album I Bid You Goodnight on Smithsonian Folkways), and has two CDs with daughter and old-time country musician Emily Miller (In the Valley and Close to Home). Val is also the author of So You Want to Sing Folk Music, part of the “So You Want to Sing” series for Rowman & Littlefield and the National Association of Teachers of Singing.

Penny Anderson

Penny Anderson is a life-long singer of choral music and traditional folksong. She is classically trained in music theory, voice, and piano, but not enough to ruin her singing. She has a repertoire of several hundred traditional folk songs from the American, British Isles, and French traditions. She has written dozens of original songs and choral pieces.

Penny’s musical obsessions at the moment are organizing the Pittsburgh monthly shape-note sing, singing a grab-bag of music from many eras as part of the duo Monongahela Harmony, composing and arranging choral pieces and solo songs, singing with the Compline Choir in the University of Pittsburgh’s Heinz Chapel, and playing the concertina. She would rather sing than do anything else.

Emily Eagen

A native of Cincinnati, OH, Emily lives and works in NYC as a performer, songwriter, and teacher, where she divides her time between folk music, early music, and new music. Emily has worked with artists such as Meredith Monk, Ann Hamilton, Annie Dorsen, and Bang on a Can, and is a teaching artist for Carnegie Hall, where she leads Lullaby songwriting workshops for parents and families and hosts the video series “Sing with Carnegie Hall.” As part of a Carnegie Hall commission, Emily co-wrote Nooma (2019), an immersive opera for babies ages 0-3, and co-wrote songs for the album A Colorful World by Falu, which won a Grammy for Best Children’s Album in 2022. Also a specialist in early music, Emily is the Assistant Festival Director at Amherst Early Music, and weaves elements of medieval and renaissance music into her original work. Emily teaches vocal harmony and vocal technique at the Jalopy Music Theater and School of Music, and is a professional whistler and two-time International Whistling Champion. Emily was a founding member of NYC’s old time/blues/bluegrass band The Whistling Wolves, and currently can be heard with the vocal improvisation ensemble Moving Star, the close-harmony trio Up At Dawn, and on her forthcoming album of songs for the young and young at heart.

Sara Grey

Sara grew up in New Hampshire but has lived in Scotland and England for 46 years. As a youngster in North Carolina she first heard a lot of mountain music and her love for the old time banjo music and songs developed from this experience. She has carried this interest into her adult life studying folklore and collecting and performing music from the various areas in which she has lived. Before she moved to Scotland, Sara was part of “The Golden Ring” with people like Ed Trickett and Gordon Bok. They were a well-known group of singers interested in traditional song.

Now, after many years of singing and playing her banjo in public, Sara’s repertoire is as fresh and relevant as ever. She has been concentrating for the last several years on tracing the migration for songs from the British Isles to North America. Sara lives for her music and works at her trade with the result that her music is not only technically excellent but also filled with her warmth and spirit.

Jefferson Hamer

Jefferson Hamer is a guitarist, songwriter, traditional musician, and producer of studio recordings. He is best known for his collaborations with Anais Mitchell (Child Ballads, recipient of a BBC2 Folk Award), Sarah Jarosz (as guitarist and harmony singer on her Grammy-nominated Blue Heron Suite), Session Americana, and other solo artists including Kristin Andreassen, Reed Foehl, and Laura Cortese. His original songs are featured on his self-released albums and singles, including the full-length Alameda. Perhaps his most enduring collaboration is The Murphy Beds, a harmony-rich folk duo with Irish musician and songwriter Eamon O’Leary, featuring a self-titled LP and the follow-up Easy Way Down.

Annalee Koehn

Annalee Koehn is a Chicago-based singer and musician. Her album Tools of an Unseen Hand was released in 2024 and she can also be heard on a variety of other recordings by The Old Town School of Folk Music, Blackest Crow, Mark Dvorak, Blue State Cowboys, Sweeter Gift, Urban Djin and others. She is a founding member of the fiddle-driven bands Blackest Crow and Ship of Fools, and her current collaboration with musician and producer Chuck Cox. She concurrently maintains an independent art and design practice and teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and created the artwork for her recent album.

Angie Richardson

Richardson grew up in Charleston, West Virginia where she began singing in church at age six. At age ten, she began playing the piano by ear. Born into a musically inclined family, Angie’s experiences with music in her church and with her family shaped her life. She has toured the world with the Ethel Caffie-Austin Singers, performed for the West Virginia Division of Culture and History’s Vandalia Gathering, been a special guest on Bob Thompson’s Public Broadcasting Christmas jazz special, and performed at dozens of special events and festivals across the country. As a gospel music workshop clinician, Angie travels throughout the country performing gospel music workshops for churches and choirs.

Kari Sickenberger

Kari has been leading singing classes and workshops since 2004. She is a founding member of the Original Roots Country band, Polecat Creek, and has been singing in the Asheville Honky Tonk band, The Western Wildcats, for over a decade. She has toured, recorded, and taught with Ginny Hawker and Tracy Schwarz, and leads singing workshops around the country and in Mexico. She draws on her vast experience as a Spanish and English teacher and her lifelong love for and experience with music to create a safe, encouraging, and FUN environment for new and experienced singers alike.

Nadia Tarnawsky

Nadia Tarnawsky has been studying Eastern European singing techniques for nearly two decades with leading teachers including Mariana Sadowska, Nina Matvienko, Lilia Pavlovska, Albanian singer Merita Halili and Bulgarian singers Donka Koleva and Maria Bebelekova.  In 2002 she received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship which allowed her to travel to Ukraine to collect folk songs and folklore for a ten week period.  Since 2008, she has been teaching Ukrainian village style singing in workshops for the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York city.  Upon moving to Seattle, she and Brandon Vance formed the ensemble Alchymeia.

Bob Walser

Musician, scholar and educator Bob Walser’s musical career spans decades and continents. In the early 1980s he made his living as a shantyman at Mystic Seaport, one of the largest maritime museums in the USA. Since then he has presented Folklore In Action folk music and dance programs as an artist-in-residence in schools across the USA, and performed as a singer, dance leader and dance musician from Maine to California and overseas.

As a scholar, Bob earned his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. His research in Folk Music and Music Education has been published in the Folk Song Journal (UK) and publications by World Music Press. Since 2002 he has worked with an international team of scholars on the James Madison Carpenter folksong collection in a project based at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. In addition, he has three CDs on The Old and New Tradition label to his credit as well as guest appearances on another dozen recordings in the US, France and England.

Abigail Washburn

If American old-time music is about taking earlier, simpler ways of life and music-making as one’s model, Abigail Washburn has proven herself to be a bracing revelation to that tradition. She — a singing, songwriting, Illinois-born, Nashville-based clawhammer banjo player — is every bit as interested in the present and the future as she is in the past, and every bit as attuned to the global as she is to the local. Abigail pairs venerable folk elements with far-flung sounds, and the results feel both strangely familiar and unlike anything anybody’s ever heard before.

Flawn Williams

Flawn Williams has led workshops and informal jams at Augusta every summer since 1982, singing shape note hymns, shanties, doo-wop, country gospel, and other sorts of songs from his eclectic repertoire. He coordinated Augusta’s Vocal Week program from 1997 to 2024.

He also has performed in many Washington Revels productions in the Washington DC area, and has sung in the choir for the Kennedy Center’s annual ‘Let Freedom Ring!’ concerts honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., backing up such luminaries as Aretha Franklin and Audra McDonald.

Flawn started out singing early, harmonizing with his parents and older sister around their South Carolina home and on road trips in their ’54 Ford. Other influences included church choirs, novelty records on the jukebox at the local A&W root beer stand, and both the reborn traditional songs and the socially-conscious new songs of the 1960s ‘Folk Revival.’

His recorded singing credits include harmony vocals on albums by John McCutcheon, Bryan Bowers, Ginny Hawker &; Kay Justice, Jennifer Armstrong, Ann Porcella, Pete Kennedy, and others, as well as singing on holiday special features for NPR’s All Things Considered. He also produced Cathy Fink’s solo album “The Leading Role”; and Ginny Hawker & Kay Justice’s duo album “Signs and Wonders.”

After three decades on the NPR staff, Flawn spent another decade teaching music recording and podcasting techniques at Georgetown University, wrapping up that chapter in 2019. From his home in Maryland he continues to produce podcasts for Malcolm Gladwell and other clients, and leads online singing sessions that attract singers from across the country.