Hello from Room 105 at the Holiday Inn Express in Macon, Georgia. It’s 73 degrees outside with a slight, refreshing breeze. Quite the contrast from just a couple weeks ago when I was jogging down the snowy, frozen backroads of the North Country in my native Upstate New York. 

The Haywood Community Band is a welcoming haven for musicians of all skill levels rekindling their love of creating powerful music.

If you played a band instrument in the past, you’re welcome to attend rehearsals and see if the community band is where you’d like to perform in a respected music group.

It’s safe to say that the whirlwind sounds and vibrant tones of Town Mountain (now referred to as “Americana”) were ahead of their time when the band first came to fruition in 2005 in the mountains of Western North Carolina. 

Sunny sea-level Savannah, Georgia, is known for a lot of things — historic colonial beauty, low country cuisine and a wide-open bar culture that benefits from/endures one of the nation’s few open container laws — but it also has a rich musical legacy that locals are now using to help victims of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina. 

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, there has been numerous initiatives put forth by local Western North Carolina musicians to raise funds and provide aid to those in need in our backyard. 

With the recent floods ravaging Western North Carolina due to Hurricane Helene, there’s been countless avenues by which artists and musicians have come together to not only raise funds for those in dire need, but also to provide melodic solace and comfort. 

The Haywood Community Band will present “Frightacular” at 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 27, at the First United Methodist Church in Waynesville. 

The sheer beauty and fundamental foundation of bluegrass music resides in one simple truth about the tones, textures and talents within the “high, lonesome sound” — its timelessness. 

Any live music fan knows the feeling of the energy in a crowd before a show begins. And, despite its newness in only its second year of existence, that energy was in full effect at AVLfest this past weekend in Asheville. 

With their latest album, “Songs of Our Grandfathers,” rising Asheville Americana/folk duo Zoe & Cloyd decided to take a different approach to this most recent musical endeavor.