Abigail Dowd’s Songwriter Series featuring: Abigail Dowd, Jonathan Byrd, and Alexa Rose

JONATHAN BYRD: Jonathan Byrd is a preacher’s kid, Gulf War veteran, and award-winning songwriter with a near-cult following. With twenty plus years of touring and over a dozen albums, Byrd’s deceptively simple, working-class songs have become campfire standards and crowd favorites for artists like Sam Bush and Tim O’Brien. A Jonathan Byrd show will take audiences on a journey from hell-raising sing-alongs to heart-wrenching ballads and back across the backroads of his native North Carolina. A lifelong collaborator and innovator, Jonathan Byrd’s latest project is Song Miners, a project to not only write and release new songs, but also to teach others how it’s done. Leading powerful online songwriting workshops and creating free songwriting education for social media, Byrd seems on a mission to fill the world with great songs- not least, his own. Not to be missed.

ALEXA ROSE: Alexa Rose was born in the Alleghany Highlands of western Virginia, raised in the tiny railroad town of Clifton Forge. Though no one in her immediate family played or sang, she inherited a deep musical legacy. That sense of place and storytelling spirit became woven into Rose’s voice and songwriting. In 2019, she released her debut album Medicine For Living, the title track of which won Merlefest’s revered Chris Austin Songwriting Contest. Her 2021 follow up Headwaters garnered national attention from American Songwriter and Rolling Stone, among others. Rose wrote most of the album in the early stages of the pandemic, which she astutely characterizes as having “that weird lucid feeling of not-time.” Perhaps following in the steps of her great grandfather, Rose’s songs feel like oil paint landscapes of her own life in the mountains, often wringing out the beauty in mundanity and exploring timeless topics. Her earnest, well crafted stylings are a multi-layered merger of old country music and traditional folk songs, colored by rock and roll and mountain soul. 

ABIGAIL DOWD: singer/songwriter/guitarist AND host of the songwriter series, Abigail is  grew up under the longleaf pines of North Carolina and comes from a long line of musicians. Known for her storytelling and command of an audience, she has been called “a writer of the highest caliber” (All Scene Eye).  Her soulful voice and unique classical guitar style have been described by Acoustic Guitar Magazine as “The guitar-driven introspective folk of the 1970s is a touchstone, but so are blues and roots rock ’n’ roll.”