This week on eTown, we present Part Two (of Two) of a very special show from 2019 featuring Anders Osborne and Chatham County Line and making a surprise appearance: the amazing McIntosh County Shouters!
Anders Osborne

Anders Osborne was born in 1966 in Uddevalla, Sweden and at a young age knew that he spoke the language of music and poetry well. He fell in love with everything from Vivaldi, Chopin and Black Sabbath to Robert Johnson, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Cat Steven’s to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley. “Blues connected everything together for me,” Osborne recalls. “The early rock, the R&B, the jazz, the singer-songwriters. Blues was like a thread running through everything.” He began playing in open D tuning which gives his fretwork a signature sound and feel. “I first heard Open D on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and my fingers just fit the tuning.” Osborne travelled around Europe in his late teens and in 1986, when he was nineteen years old, he visited New Orleans. He fell in love with the city, and never left.
Chatham County Line

Launched a little more than twenty years ago in Raleigh, North Carolina, Chatham County Line built a devoted local following on the strength of their genre-bending live show—an intoxicating blend of bluegrass, folk, country, and rock and roll—before breaking out internationally with their 2003 self-titled debut. In the years to come, the band would go on to release eight more critically acclaimed studio albums, top the Billboard Bluegrass Chart four times, collaborate with the likes of Judy Collins, Sharon Van Etten, and Norwegian star Jonas Fjeld, earn two gold records in Norway (where they were also twice nominated for the Spellemannprisen, Norway’s equivalent of a Grammy), and share bills with everyone from Guy Clark and Lyle Lovett to Steve Martin & Martin Short and The Avett Brothers.
NPR hailed the group as “a bridge between bluegrass traditions and a fresh interpretation of those influences,” while Uncut lauded their “powerful melodies and gorgeous harmonies,” and Pitchfork dubbed their music “timeless.” Nothing lasts forever, though, and when Chatham County Line shared their 2020 album, Strange Fascination, they announced it would be their final release with banjo player Chandler Holt.
McIntosh County Shouters

The McIntosh County Shouters are the renowned performing artists of the authentic ring shout. It is North America’s oldest living African American musical tradition. The ring shout was part of the Gullah-Geechee culture formed by enslaved people brought from West Africa to the coastal regions of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Florida.
Freed people continued to pass the ring shout to their descendants following the Civil War. But by the 20th century, it was feared that the tradition had been lost. In 1980, music historians discovered a family living in the Briar Patch Community of Bolden, Georgia, who were still practicing the ring shout as their ancestors had.
The McIntosh County Shouters and the congregation of the Mt. Cavalry Baptist Church strive to keep the original, unbroken ring shout tradition alive. Our mission is to preserve and share Gullah-Geechee culture and the ring shout with a new generation.