- Details
-
Tuesday, 05 November 2024
-
Written by Crissy Neville
Pumpkin spice, cool temps and … country music? Yes, indeed!
Fall favorites and tantalizing tunes unite in Fayetteville, home to Southeastern North Carolina’s biggest country music showcase. Presented by John Hiester Chrysler Dodge Jeep and John Hiester Chevrolet, the WKML Stars & Guitars Concert comes to the Crown Coliseum for the 12th year on Nov. 11 at 7:30 p.m. Featuring a mixture of hitmakers and newcomers to the country music stage, the popular promotion stages five artists in a unique, acoustic setting.
Fans will enjoy a spectacular night of great music, engaging live entertainment, a few surprises and the opportunity to support a good cause. A portion of the ticket proceeds benefits St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Here's the lineup for this year’s SOLD-OUT show:
• LOCASH
• Zach Top
• George Birge
• Kameron Marlowe
• Tigirlily Gold
If you can’t pick just one favorite, the good news is you don’t have to! Compliments of The Big 95.7 ‘KML, Today’s Country, and Stars & Guitars’ generous sponsors, Fayetteville gets them all!
Chart toppers, record makers, social media sensations and no strangers to country music fans, these artists have and are making names for themselves across radio and other platforms.
As no one performer headlines, opens or closes the Stars & Guitars show—all the artists are on stage simultaneously and perform individually in rounds—concertgoers experience a true cross-section of talent. The artists sing songs, share stories, tell jokes and wow audiences year after year. The show’s “Unplugged, Unscripted and Unforgettable” tagline best describes the scene.
Beasley Media Group Digital Programming Director and Marketing and Promotions Director Brandon Plotnick explained the “why” behind the WKML Stars & Guitars event.
“The idea here is to celebrate country music with our listeners and market audience. We have a unique position in the industry, and we can put together something with a relatively big-name lineup every year. The affordable show is the biggest country show in our market,” he said.
The concert is also part of the station’s mission to assist St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. This is the 38th year WKML and the Beasley Fayetteville team have proudly supported St. Jude's families and children.
This November’s Stars & Guitars concert and the December St. Jude Country Cares, the longest continuous radiothon campaign in the country, are among several ways the company supports this cause.
The station’s listening audience, covering Raleigh to Myrtle Beach and concentrated in Cumberland and Robeson counties, has filled the house for Stars & Guitars for 12 straight years, and this year will be no exception. During the Aug. 30 early pre-sale, available to members of the WKML free All-Access Club, the limited number of tickets sold out in three minutes.
The in-person regular ticket buyers—another sold-out situation—celebrated at the WKML’s Parking Lot Party at the Crown. These sellouts have not prevented fans from winning tickets in several other ways, including Ticket Stop opportunities and online and on-air contests—with chances still remaining.
Three Ticket Stops—chances for YOU to win tickets—remain before the Nov. 11 concert: Nov. 7 at the Holly Day Fair, hosted at the Crown Expo Center, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Nov. 8 at Timely Treasures, 1003 Honeycutt Rd., from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; and Nov. 9 at John Hiester Chrysler Dodge Jeep of Lillington, 940 N. Main St., Lillington, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Get all the details, including info on the Grand Prize VIP Experience, featuring front-row tickets, VIP pre-show passes and an autographed poster, at https://wkml.com/listicle/2024-stars-guitars-ticket-stop-calendar/.
Named “country music’s iconic feel-good duo” by PEOPLE, LOCASH, Preston Brust and Chris Lucas, levels big-hit sounds reminiscent of tunes from the 2000s.
Pumping up the crowds with Florida Georgia Line kind of energy, LOCASH has a pop-country feel that gets audiences singing and shouting for more. The circa 2015 band has eight charting singles, two successful albums, nearly 800 million global streams and a history of industry award recognitions. Announcing their 2024 partnership with 44 Farms, LOCASH recently supported Kane Brown’s DRUNK OR DREAMING TOUR.
Stars & Guitars attendees are likely to hear the duo’s smash hits, “I Love This Life,” “One Big Country Song” and “I Know Somebody,” along with other big-name collaborations.
The classic country sounds of Zach Top channels 90s nostalgia that wins with the WKML audience, according to Plotnick. Top released his first radio single, “Sounds Like the Radio,” at the top of 2024 via Leo33; he will join CMA Entertainer of the Year, Lainey Wilson, on her “Country’s Cool Again” Tour throughout the year following the release of his debut record, Cold Beer & Country Music. The Sunnyside, WA, native grew up ranching, tending to livestock and playing bluegrass music—the backstory to his love for country music today.
A TikTok sensation after the posting of “Beer Beer, Truck Truck,” George Birge is an original songwriter with two records currently on the radio: the chart-topping “Mind on You” and “Cowboy Songs.” Country artist Clay Walker and country rapper Colt Ford, among many others, have recorded Birge’s songs, and Walker even released Birge's co-write “Need a Bar Sometimes” as his new single.
“George Birge has a modern, gritty country feel to his music and is particularly appealing to the 20-something young female audience,” Plotnick said. “He has a Morgan Wallen kind of vibe.”
Kannapolis, North Carolina, native Kameron Marlowe, who formerly rocked Fayetteville’s Dogwood Festival, is happy to return to the city to play Stars & Guitars. Described by Plotnick as an “earthy, sort of alt-country artist with tension and meat behind his music,” Marlowe’s biggest hit, the Platinum-certified single “Giving You Up,” earned over 57 million views on YouTube. He’s also had hits with “Girl on Fire” and this year with Ella Langley on the song “Strangers.” The rising star from Season 15 of The Voice, who grew up singing in church, is currently touring alongside some of country music’s biggest stars. Marlowe is considered one of Nashville’s most exciting emerging voices and songwriters.
The duo Tigirlily Gold—North Dakota sisters Kendra and Krista Slaubaugh—have played music together practically since birth. They officially formed their band in high school and toured the mid-west, selling out amphitheaters across their home state of North Dakota.
Nashville was their next residence, where they earned a weekly spot at Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row on Nashville’s famous lower Broadway. The emotional pop country sounds of Tigirlily Gold propelled the band onto the country scene, where their debut single, “Shoot Tequila,” reached the Top 40 and went viral.
The duo’s hit single, “I Tried A Ring On,” released earlier this year, is currently finding huge airway success. Tigirlily has already debuted on the Grand Ole Opry and the TODAY Show, so why shouldn’t Fayetteville be next?
The 2024 WKML Stars & Guitars concert is a can’t miss! Tap into all your chances to win by tuning into The Big 95.7 and visiting https://wkml.com/.
(Graphics courtesy of Beasley Media Group)
- Details
-
Tuesday, 22 October 2024
-
Written by Soni Martin
The newest exhibition at Gallery 208 brings together many of the artists who have been a part of the gallery’s history during the past ten years. Chronicles of Time: A Retrospective Exhibition is the last exhibit of the 2024 season, opening Oct. 22, 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Visitors to the exhibit will experience the ongoing discourse on the role of image and object-making that is taking place by 18 artists. The exhibit is a celebration of 16 artists who have exhibited before and two artists exhibiting at Gallery 208 for the first time. The artists in Chronicles of Time: A Retrospective Exhibition all contribute to the larger dialogue taking place in visual art today.
Visitors will see a painting hanging next to a digitally generated image, a mixed media alongside a photograph. The mix allows for comparisons, to observe common themes or differences in an artist’s approach — deepening our engagement with the artwork and the possibilities of art and creativity.
There are other advantages of a large group exhibit. We are able to compare and observe common themes or differences in what artists choose to focus their work on. Emerging and mid-career artists are exhibiting with established artists — providing an accessible and affordable way for collectors to discover new talent and acquire unique pieces.
Johanna Gore and Shane Booth are examples of an emerging artist exhibiting with a professional artist. Gore, a young artist, has explored identity in the last two years with a series of self-portraits. The work titled Life Mirrors Reality is a blurred digital image floating between the mark-making above and below the portrait.
Gore’s self-portrait hangs next to established artist Shane Booth — an artist known for his years of investigating the self-portrait as a theme in his work. Both artists are exhibiting portraits that hang next to each other in the gallery. Looking at the two portraits, we see the influences of very different historical and cultural experiences between each portrait.
Not all art is a self-portrait. But for many artists, their unique perspectives, preferences, and worldview can be interpreted as reflecting the artist’s identity and, therefore a self-portrait. Leslie Pearson is such an artist who imbues the work with her love of nature, the cycle of life (skeletal remains), and a fascination with our ecosystem.
In the exhibit, Pearson is showing small handmade books. In Pearson fashion, part of a bone or a lock of hair is submerged in a clear epoxy window on the surface of her hand-sewn books. Thick in depth, the books are journals for the owner to take notes in a work of art - each page is part of the greater aesthetic of the functional, abstracted, sculptural book form.
Dwight Smith and Vicki Rhoda both bring the self-portrait to their work. You cannot separate the artist from the image. Smith is exhibiting a small mixed media and is known for his large abstract paintings with references to African and African American symbols.
In Elizabethtown, North Carolina, Vicki Rhoda grew up with a church named Lula’s Temple located across the street from her house. Her recent body of relief prints interprets her memories of the pastor of Lula’s Temple. Rhoda shares her experiences in the print titled Lula’s Temple: Redemption.
One of two digital artists, Jonathan Chestnut used technology and AI to explore known texts. Chestnut’s print titled Genesis 3:24 is an interpretation of a quote: "So he drove out the man, and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." Using technology, AI, his drawing and digital skills, Chestnut is creating new visual interpretations on an old subject religion.
Abstracting nature is a theme by two artists: Katey Morrill and Callie Farmer. Farmer has shifted her interest in capturing the beauty of nature to abstracting it in graphic patterns of color and shapes. Morrill is exploring “the process of abstracting observed landscapes by emphasizing southern terrain patterns through color and shape.
Beauty is a theme we still see in a contemporary art world filled with conceptual art and spray paint. Jaden McRae is exhibiting a pencil study of an aged cherry tree in front of a building and its set of stairs. In the drawing titled Nappy Canopy, McRae reduces his subjects to value and planes.
Beverly Henderson is another artist who brings her love of nature as a subject. In the exhibit, Henderson is showing a mixed media work that explores not only the beauty of nature, but the potential of the unseen.
Titled Unconditional Love, Kyle Harding brings the beauty of childhood in a photographic portrait of her daughter Savannah with one of her large dogs. Throughout the years Harding’s two children are a perfect subject to capture the magic and fleeting essence of childhood. In this image, Harding has captured the ineffable: “the joy we experience from unconditional love and trust.”
In contrast, Angela Stout’s portrait painting titled Self-Embrace is filled with a sense of angst, but it also evokes beauty. Not only is it painted beautifully, but as Stout shares: “we can find beauty in the midst of despair.”
Leslie Pearson and Skylor Swann are the only two artists exhibiting three-dimensional works. Swann’s ceramics contrast with Pearson’s organic books. Swann’s recent work has shifted from his well-known organic forms, delicate tendrils emerging from protruding surfaces. His new work is the opposite. Beautifully crafted, the work is a play on minimalism and the everyday object. Made out of clay, Swann has created the illusion of an opened paper bay, standing upright, the open end reveals the negative space of the interior of the bag.
The two artists who have never exhibited at Gallery 208 are Adrienne Trego and Bobbe Garcia. Trego is a fiber artist exhibiting a triptych titled Entangled: Mycelium, Veins and Roots. Visitors will see how Trego uses different colored threads as her medium and focuses on nature and detail. The artist stated: “my work concentrates on the minute, the detail, the minuscule patterns, which we are interconnected in their own forms and with the larger world.”
In the long list of artists, Bobbe Garcia’s prints are another example of a fresh interpretation of beauty and nature around us. Her compositions of patterns and color move across the surface of her paper, reminding us of the patterns of color that can be lost in a moment when the light changes.
A refreshing exhibit, Gallery 208 welcomes the public to view the Chronicles of Time: A Retrospective Exhibition. The gallery is located at Up and Coming Weekly, 208 West Rowan Street in Fayetteville. Gallery hours are Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The exhibit will remain until Dec. 11. For more information call 910-484-6200.
(Photo: Jonathan Chestnut print titled Genesis 3:24 is a piece using both AI and Chestnut's drawing skills.)