Dearest Home

Dearest Home is the perfect blend of authenticity and originality! Whether they’re engaging audiences from the concert or festival stage, providing fun from your back porch, gracing your wedding, involving folks at a retirement village, leading sing-alongs and demonstrating instruments at your school, or accompanying dancers, celebrating American for a National Holiday, or serenading your winery, brewery or restaurant, they play and sing with passion and finesse! Supportive and encouraging teachers, they present a large number of workshop topics on various genres and instruments. Our Christmas and New Year’s programs are extremely popular in a wide variety of settings.

You won’t find a group more able to play for your wedding, as Dearest. Home has years of experience working with wedding couples and families and friends! They can even provide an officiant, and an organist/keyboardist, plus classically trained soprano and violinist!

Not only does the band present a vast array of traditional American folk music, but they also perform in music of Ireland, Scotland and the Celtic Nations under the name Cormorant’s Fancy. They excel at St. Patrick’s Day shows, Burns Suppers, and Highland Festivals. And they’re always happy to play a mix of both American and Celtic trad music. They even present Civil War Era music in period Costume, portraying civilians of the time, and presenting workshops that include Music of the Abolition Movement, Civil War dances, and Civil War hymn sings.

Expressive vocals with rich, next-of-kin harmonies interweave with sprightly dance tunes, as Dearest Home brings traditional American music to life—Appalachian and Old Time music, especially from the Samuel Bayard Folk Song Collection (PA and WV) and historically authentic US Civil War era music (in period costume). They sing other great American folk songs, including favorites from Jean Ritchie and the Carter Family, Southern Appalachia and the Ozarks! Don’t be surprised when they share a related tune from Scotland, Ireland, or England. Passion for these traditions shines in every note! They present a wide array of workshops, and they delight in playing for dances! They are skilled and thought provoking keynoters for corporate events. They are adept at playing joyfully and romantically at weddings, and can even provide clergy!

Folk Alliance Triple Crown Winner Si Kahn describes our music:
If ‘home is where the heart is,’ then the singers and musicians who together make up Dearest Home have clearly poured their hearts into their new self-titled album. Deeply steeped in the traditional music of Pennsylvania, my own home state, they have chosen wisely from their wide repertoire of Civil War songs, Appalachian ballads and fiddle tunes. Singing with passion, skill and the resonant matching of voices that seems born in the blood of next-of-kin, Dearest Home presents us with close harmony in many senses of the phrase, on stage and on CD. In their voices, you can hear the peaks and valleys of the landscape, feel the past and future marching together, and sense the shadows of the mountains.

Dearest Home is happy to play acoustically or amplified. The band has our own sound amplification system (power required) or will work with your sound engineer. When