Residency Artist - Traditional Arts
Residency Artist - Music

Russ Childers

1555 Old St. Rt. 74
Batavia, OH  45103
Phone: (513) 236-2271
Email: RussChilders@fuse.net
Website: http://home.fuse.net/russchilders

I am a traditional Appalachian musician, storyteller, and dance caller. I focus my residencies on music and its role in the Appalachian community. I teach cultural history through the vehicle of song, story, and dance. My banjo talk includes its journey from Africa and complements curriculum standards for American social history and music history. My fiddle talk demonstrates how the violin became the main instrument of the pioneers settling frontier areas and preserved customs of the British Isles in the New World. I also give a quick physics lesson in sound and vibration with the fiddle. I use the Appalachian lap dulcimer to show beginning playing technique to novices as well as basic mechanics of instrument building in my dulcimer residencies. Process is important to children, so I use props such as a groundhog skin to illustrate how my ancestors manufactured everyday items like shoelaces to banjo heads from the resources around them. My square dancing classes allow students to explore the total Appalachian music experience from calling instruction to dancing to live music. Besides supplying multiple layers of cultural learning, square dancing underpins and supports math concepts such as patterning and music concepts of time signature and rhythms. My storytelling and song sessions enhance the literacy concepts of listening, vocabulary and prediction appropriate to all age levels. The ideal grade level for the dance experience is 4th and above. Eigth grade students and above are ideal for instrument building residencies.

I work in three musical venues. I am the banjo player in a quartet called Rabbit Hash String Band performing old-time Appalachian string band music in the tri-state area. I play banjo and fiddle with my wife in a musical duet called Bear Foot. I present solo programs as a teaching artist in traditional arts and music throughout the region. One of my favorite memories is the four weeks in 2007 when I went to Liuzhou, China, to give English instruction to Chinese schoolchildren via Appalachian music and dance!

A self-taught musician, I have been making music for almost fifty years. I learned aspects of my eastern Kentucky heritage, singing and dancing, from my parents and grandparents. I studied the fiddle playing of northern Kentucky fiddlers Tom Taylor and Carl Leming and the banjo playing of the late Elmer Bird of West Virginia. My Appalachian music and stories recycle earlier times. I demonstrate musical instruments made from reclaimed materials, which echoes the lifestyle of my ancestors who often reused, recycled, and repurposed when materials were not plentiful. I regularly perform at the Cincinnati Appalachian Festival, Tall Stacks Festivals, branches of the Cincinnati Public Library and most of the school systems in the Greater Cincinnati tri-state area. My deep commitment to the traditional arts as is shown by my affiliations with the Ohio Arts Council (Artist in Residence), the Cincinnati Urban Appalachian Council (Cultural Advisory Committee), and the Cincinnati Arts Association (Adventures in the Arts). I am a master banjo artist through the auspices of the Ohio Arts Council and Kentucky Arts Council. I received an Appalachian Community Development Association (ACDA) grant to purchase a traditionally made gourd banjo to illustrate the pathway of the Appalachian banjo from its African roots to North America. I received the 2000 ACDA Appalachian Heritage Award for my artistic, musical, and volunteered talents to promote and contribute to the success of Cincinnati's Appalachian Festival. In 2009, I received the prestigious ACDA Ernie Mynatt Award for dedicating my life and career to entertaining and educating about Appalachia's rich musical traditions. I received 2nd place in old-time fiddle at the 2010 Appalachian Mountain Music Festival in Waynesville, Ohio.