Rising Appalachia

The sisters grew up in Atlanta, where their mother played fiddle and their father was a sculptor; the family went to contra dances, and banjos and harmony singing were part of their childhood. Leah came back to folk music in her early twenties while studying art and Indigenous activism in Chiapas, Mexico. Around 2005 the two recorded an album, Leah and Chloe, in a friend’s basement studio in downtown Atlanta as a gift for family and friends; the response led them to form a band. In 2006 they moved to New Orleans, about a year after Hurricane Katrina, and busked in the French Quarter, and they lived there for seven years. A second album, Scale Down, followed.

From mid-2008 to early 2010 they performed as R.I.S.E., releasing the live Evolutions in Sound, before taking back the Rising Appalachia name and keeping “Rise” for the Rise Collective, a circle of performers, educators and activists that works alongside the band. The Sails of Self (2010) brought in the percussionist Biko Casini and the bassist David Brown as members. Filthy Dirty South (2012) was paid for through Kickstarter, and Wider Circles (2015), which included “Bright Morning Stars,” “Cripple Creek” and “Oh Death,” was promoted with a tour made by Amtrak train. Leah Song coined the term Slow Music Movement for their way of touring: traveling by train, horseback, bus and sailboat, making handmade merchandise, and inviting local nonprofits, farmers and herbalists to set up at their shows.

The live album Alive appeared in September 2017, and the single “Resilient” in 2018. Leylines (May 2019), produced by Joe Henry with Ani DiFranco and Trevor Hall as guests, included “Cuckoo” and reached No. 22 on Billboard’s Heatseekers album chart. The Lost Mystique of Being in the Know (2021) was improvised and recorded in a single day, with Arouna Diarra of Burkina Faso on ngoni. A December 2020 livestream from Preservation Hall, with Aurora Nealand and Branden Lewis of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, was released in 2022 as Live from New Orleans at Preservation Hall, and Folk & Anchor (2024) is a set of covers. In the same years the sisters joined Tina Malia, Ayla Nereo and Marya Stark in the a cappella group Starling Arrow. By 2026 the band, with Duncan Wickel on fiddle and cello alongside Brown and Casini, had played the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Red Rocks and NPR’s Tiny Desk, toured in the Americas, Europe and Australia, and was based in western North Carolina, where the sisters volunteered for months after Hurricane Helene. Their sixteen-song album Trade My Troubles, with Aoife O’Donovan, Ayla Nereo, Bonnie Paine and Brittany Haas as guests, came out on 2 October 2026.