ABOUT
“Nora has a passion for the music of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee… with a thirst for storytelling.”
Nora Brown started learning music at the age of 6 from the late Shlomo Pestcoe. From his tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn, Pestcoe instilled in her the belief that music is meant to be shared.
Nora plays traditional music with a focus on Southern Appalachian banjo and guitar playing. Along with mentors in the northeast like the late John Cohen she also has traveled and learned directly from master musicians including Alice Gerrard, George Gibson and the late Lee Sexton and Art Rosenbaum.
She has played numerous venues and festivals in the US and Europe including the Newport Folk Festival, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Trans-Pecos Festival of Love in Marfa Texas, and Folk Holidays in the Czech Republic. She has performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk, TED Salon, WNYC’s Dolly Parton’s America Podcast and an official showcase at the 2022 Americana Fest in Nashville.
Nora has been interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition, WBUR Here and Now and she’s been included on Bob Boilen’s All Songs Considered.
Since 2019 she has released 3 albums on Brooklyn’s own Jalopy Records Label and all records have charted on the Billboard Bluegrass Charts during the first week of release.
The New Yorker called her most recent record Long Time To Be Gone - “A disarming collection of traditional laments and exquisite banjo instrumentals”.
Fretboard Journal called her 2nd album Sidetrack My Engine - “Some of the most interesting and haunting Traditional music we’ve heard… impossibly talented”
She has won numerous banjo and folk song competitions at various fiddlers conventions including the Clifftop Appalachian String Band Music Festival and The Grayson County Old-Time and Bluegrass Fiddlers Convention.
Nora performs solo but also as a duo with award winning fiddler Stephanie Coleman. She also continues to collaborate with singer songwriters Jackson Lynch and Hannah Read.
“Recorded in a historic church, the minimalist folk songs on Long Time To Be Gone are shadowy and sublime, imbued with a sense of the space in which they were recorded and treated by Brown with the care they deserve.”