Join PineCone - The Piedmont Council of Traditional Music and the North Carolina Museum of History for the free Music of the Carolinas Series. This months show features The Happy Valley Pals performing a set packed full of fabulous old songs from the Southern mountains and the Piedmont, and part of the performance will also focus on the mountain holiday tradition "Breaking Up Christmas" and the dance tune by the same name. The catchy tune was frequently played in the Round Peak section of North Carolina's Surry County and in neighboring Virginia. It's still popular among old time fiddle and banjo players today.

The Happy Valley Pals share deep family and musical roots in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. The band’s bluesy fiddling, pulsating guitar, growling bowed bass, and lively fingerpicked banjo reflects their shared sense of time and place. Though the Pals have only recently performed under that name, individually Wayne and Margaret Martin, Gail Gillespie, and Dwight Rogers have played southern string band music for decades. They have all learned fiddle, banjo, and guitar tunes directly knee-to-knee from elder musicians as well from the wonderful 78 rpm recordings from the 1920s and ‘30s.

This concert is sponsored by WLHC-FM & WLQC-FM.
Canned food donations will be accepted for the Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC, a nonprofit organization that provides food for people at risk of hunger in 34 counties in central and eastern North Carolina. The Food Bank does this with the help of a network of 800 partner agencies such as soup kitchens, food pantries, shelters, and programs for children and adults. With warehouses in Durham, Greenville, New Bern, Raleigh, Southern Pines and Wilmington, the Food Bank distributed more than 44 million pounds of food and non-food essentials last year. This is PineCone and the Museum of History's fourth year pairing a food drive with the December Music of the Carolinas concert. Canned food with pop-tops and items that can be microwaved are particularly appreciated!