Sheila Kay Adams

Written by Eddie Huffman

In the family Sheila Kay Adams grew up with, nothing got in the way of a good story.

“Daddy was the best storyteller I’ve ever heard in my life,” she says, “and if you tried to interrupt him when he was holding forth, he would say, ‘No. I’m holding forth right now, and if you’ve got anything interesting to say, you can hold forth here in a minute,’ and he’d go on with his story.”

Adams grew up to become a master storyteller herself, as well as an accomplished clawhammer-style banjo player and ballad singer. She earned a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2013 and has received two major awards from her home state of North Carolina. She has recorded a dozen albums, written two books, and appeared in the movies “Songcatcher” and “Last of the Mohicans.”

Appalachia has been home for all of Adams’s 72 years. Songs and stories from the British Isles have been passed down in her native Madison County since the 1700s. Adams grew up around accomplished ballad singers such as Dillard Chandler and Cas Wallin.

She learned her first songs from a great aunt, Dellie Chandler Norton, who Adams knew as “Granny.” Sometimes the lessons were informal, such as when Norton repeatedly sang “Young Emily” while milking cows. Other times they would sit facing each other, knee to knee, with Norton singing a verse and Adams singing it back to her, piling new verses atop old ones.

“Even if it was one with 40 verses to it, I would have caught the song by the time it was over, ’cause I would have repeated it, however many verses were in the song,” Adams says.

Madison County was one of many places devastated by Hurricane Helene in September 2024. Adams is one of the first recipients of a grant from the Carolina Music Makers Fund, created by the Music Maker Foundation to help musicians affected by the storm and its aftermath. She is using the grant money to serve a dual purpose: providing gigs for an aggregation of performers and keeping the ballad tradition alive well into the 21st century.

Adams and her accomplices hold a Ballad Swap at least once a month. Her crew ranges from 27-year-old Eleanor Chen, a California transplant who first came to the Swannanoa Gathering at age 4, to 76-year-old Analo Phillips, a lifelong Madison County resident who worked at a sawmill for 50 years. They perform regularly at Zadie’s in the Madison County town of Marshall.

Now Adams has started taking the Ballad Swap across Appalachia to places like Floyd, Virginia, and Knoxville, Tennessee. Their first road performance took place at Homeplace Beer Co. in Burnsville, a community that, like Marshall, was hit particularly hard by Helene.

“What astounded us was the number of people that came,” Adams says. “The guy up there said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen as big an audience as we had that night.’ It solidified my
intentions, I’ll tell you that much. Because these young people – and older people – are my family now.”

Sheila Kay Adams was born on March 18, 1953.