Making hay: On their website, The Avett Brothers claim humble beginnings: They grew up on a small hobby farm, grumbling often over the fact that they had never seen the likes of Hall & Oates, David Lee Roth, or El DeBarge anywhere near a pasture or a chicken house. But things are looking up. The […]
Adding up: Mason Ramsey has always been a precocious child—his family says he was crooning and harmonizing before he could talk. By age 4, Ramsey was singing at the Kentucky Opry, and he got on stage with country music legend Kenny Rogers at age 7. So in 2018, when a video of the 11-year-old yodeling […]
New trad: Explorations in indie, jazz, pop, and bluegrass turn the bilingual songs of Rosier into sophisticated, emotional journeys. It’s not surprising that the Montreal-based band has a facility with reinterpreting age-old folk songs. The group takes its new name (it was formerly known as Les Poules à Colin) from a traditional song, and its […]
What do we really see when hues are subdued, diminished, or deleted outright? Tough question. If you’re like me—colorblind—that’s kind of how you go through life. Art’s power when deprived of its full spectrum of possibility is difficult to gauge, since most of us who live the difference are simply born this way and have […]
After the harvest rain-out of 2018, this year’s Virginia wine vintage brings especially welcome news: a healthy, plentiful crop of ripe reds and whites, now bubbling merrily away in fermentation tanks before their long winter’s rest. Wineries are preparing to celebrate with harvest parties scheduled for the weekend of October 19, including events at Valley […]
Whiskey goes way back in Virginia. In 1620, English settler George Thorpe made the first batch of spirits in Jamestown using corn—not barley, as was the tradition in Europe—obtained in a trade with the indigenous Powhatan people. George Washington added to the commonwealth’s whiskey heritage, distilling a rye mash in Mount Vernon in the 1770s. […]
The only thing better than working in the C-VILLE Weekly newsroom is leaving it to get a drink and a bite to eat. The paper’s writers and editors are just like you: Our pockets aren’t very deep but we love the city’s vibrant and diverse food scene. Here are a few of our favorite places […]
Just off of Route 29, about 25 miles north of Charlottesville, a two-lane road gently rises and falls with the rolling terrain, leading west toward Shenandoah National Park. As you approach the distant mountains they appear to grow bigger. It’s an ethereal scene, relaxing and more than a little distracting, so you might have to […]
Food trucks offer some of the most creative and culturally diverse cuisine in town—but they can be elusive. Stumbling upon one is often a happy accident—a bonus while attending a festival or visiting a vineyard. We wanted to see if we could turn that on its head and provide a guide to finding your favorite […]
Living in Gordonsville while working in Charlottesville, as my girlfriend and I did for many months, had a certain romance to it. With the windows down and fresh air swirling inside the car, we enjoyed the winding morning commute through fields of grazing cattle and sheep. After nightfall, when we returned to the old dairy […]