About Us

Anita Schuneman

Fiddle

Anita is a powerful and expressive fiddler as well as a wonderful entertainer! She has been playing Appalachian fiddle for over 25 years, beginning in the late 70s with Old Mother Logo, a California based all-woman string band. 

Anita with Melvin Wine

She has a deep appreciation for Appalachian music and culture, developed through frequent trips to Appalachia where she studied and stayed with older musicians such as Melvin Wine, the National Heritage Fellowship award winner. In addition to the West Virginia tunes learned from Melvin Wine and others, she plays a number of unusual and haunting tunes from Kentucky, and of course, many rousing hoedowns!

Kate Lawrence

Banjo

Kate's interest in old time music began in her toddler years when she first heard records of old time bands that her dad enjoyed in their home. He had a fiddle on which he played a few tunes occasionally, but it was clawhammer-style banjo that became her passion. In her 20's, inspired by the genius of Virginia banjo legend Wade Ward, she began her study in earnest.

In 1985, through the sponsorship of a nonprofit youth organization for which Kate volunteered as a music teacher, she released a professionally recorded banjo album. The album, used as a fund-raiser for the nonprofit, was comprised entirely of her original compositions, and showcased the singing of the children she taught.

In the intervening years she has picked up tunes and instrumental licks from some of the country's finest traditional banjoists. In 2003 she brought West Virginia musician Dwight Diller to Colorado for the first time to give a five-day banjo master class. She has played for dances and concerts along the Colorado Front Range since 1998. 

Doug Rippey

Guitar

Our guitar player is Doug Rippey, an obsessive multi-instrumentalist whose  collection of recordings, printed music and instruments (some of  which he actually knows how to play) threatens to drive him out of house and home.

Doug's southern musical background grows out of his family connections to a road-house/livery stable established on the Central Turnpike in Lawrence County, Middle Tennessee near the Natchez Trace shortly after the Civil War.  He imagines the Old Rippey Stand as being a connection between local farmers and travelers heading west where tunes, tales and ballads were exchanged.

Doug's grandfather, Polk Rippey, grew up at the Stand, and later became manager and part owner of the Davy Crockett Theater in Lawrenceburg, the county seat. He would cheerfully promote any kind of entertainment, from dances, to balloon ascensions, to touring opera stars.

Doug has performed on stages from Berkeley to Boulder to Beirut,
including the Newport Folk Festival. He grew up in a house full of music of all kinds. His dad played piano, uke and guitar; his mom played piano and organ. He continues to sing songs he learned at his mother's knee, and a variety of  other low joints.

Click here for more about Doug on the Colorado Friends of Old Time Music and Dance web site.

Keith Akers

Bass

I am the one band member who can actually claim to be from Appalachia -- I grew up in East Tennessee, so I'm quite familiar with the area.  However, I never heard "old-time" music when I was growing up there, and when I go back there, I have to explain to people what "old-time" music is.  My musical background is in classical piano.  As a teenager I was so fanatical about practicing that my parents had to tell me when NOT to practice!

The traditional bass is pitched too low for old-time bands -- makes the band sound like a 60's rock band or bluegrass.  My bass is pitched about half an octave higher, which Dwight Diller says is better for old-time music. The bass should fill in a rhythmic and melodic counterpoint to the other instruments.  At a slightly higher pitch it is able to do this without drowning out the other instruments.