The North Carolina Folk Tradition and the Public Good: Joseph Terrell, Madeline Dierauf, and Murphy Campbell in Concert and Conversation
Joseph Terrell spent 10 years singing, writing songs, and playing guitar with celebrated Americana quartet Mipso. A High Point, North Carolina native, Terrell founded Mipso as a student at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2011. After 1300 concerts across the US, Europe, and Asia—including Japan's oldest bluegrass festival, a December tour through Sweden, and a rolling concert down 6th Avenue during Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade—Mipso started an indefinite hiatus from touring in 2025. Joseph's debut solo album "Good For Nothing Howl" features members of Hiss Golden Messenger, Bon Iver, and Bonny Light Horseman. His recent singles are stripped-down folk gems showcasing his prowess on the acoustic guitar and his much-admired lyrics, which Indy Week called "dark and mature ... awash in mystical sound and symbolism."
Madeline Dierauf is a folk musician from Brevard, North Carolina, and a graduate of Davidson College. A sought-after fiddler and singer songwriter, she is a founding member of Appalachian group The Wilder Flower and Baltimore-based Irish traditional trio The East Coasters. She has loved fiddling for 16 years now, learning through mentorship from Beanie O’Dell, Ellen Lee at the Mountain School of Strings, Josh Carter and Owen Grooms, Elizabeth Bahnson, and Grammy-winning violinist Nicky Sanders. In 2020, she released her debut EP, Walk On By, with producer Mike Ashworth, and in 2019, 2020, 2022, 2024, and 2026, she wrote for and fiddled on albums with The Wilder Flower, The East Coasters, Pretty Little Goat, Dave Desmelik, and Susto String Band. She holds a Master’s degree in American Studies with a thesis on the British roots of Appalachian ballads, and she is currently pursuing a second Master’s in Musicology as a Rhodes Scholar at The University of Oxford.
Murphy Campbell is on a mission to preserve the sound of Yancey and Mitchell counties. It's also the sound of her family. On her 19th birthday last year she stumbled into a lost collection of ballads from the region that were written hundreds of years ago, some of them by her distant family members. She just recorded them for her first album, Revenant, produced by Riley Baugus, and she’s going on a European tour with them this winter.
Co-sponsored by the Bacca Foundation Visiting Scholar and Artist Program, the D.G. and Harriet Wall Martin Institute for Public Good, the Department of Music, and the Department of English