As a Writer/Musician, he conjures a world nearly lost with poetry and stories rooted in the Appalachian foothills of his birth and complementary old-time mountain music played on the guitar, banjo, and mountain dulcimer.

27 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Traditional Folk, SPOKEN WORD: With Music



Details:
Born in Byrdstown, Tennessee, midway between Music City and the Smoky Mountains, Jim Clark grew up on a farm on the Cumberland Plateau surrounded by music - from the unadorned a capella harmonies of the Church of Christ, to the old-time country of his father's guitar and mandolin playing. A writer and a scholar, Clark has published two books of poems, Dancing on Canaan's Ruins and Handiwork; written a play, The Girl with the Faraway Eye, staged at the Portland Actors Conservatory Theatre, Portland, Oregon; edited Fable in the Blood: The Selected Poems of Byron Herbert Reece; and served as an editor of such literary journals as The Denver Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, and The Vanderbilt Poetry Review. Combining his talents as a singer and musician with his abilities as a writer and an interpreter of his own work, Clark has crafted a unique multi-disciplinary performance of poetry and stories rooted in the Appalachian foothills of his birth and complementary old-time mountain music played on the guitar, banjo, mountain dulcimer, and autoharp. This cross-fertilization of genres culminated in his CD, Buried Land, featuring poems and music, much of it related to the flooding of his parents' family farms in the 1940's by the TVA Dale Hollow Dam project. Clark is currently an associate professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Barton College, in Wilson, North Carolina.