Folksinger Jodi Jones is determined to boldly dream a better tomorrow in the wake of a broken and weary world. Deeply rooted in the musical traditions of her childhood home in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, her work is a poetic and unflinching account of the beauty and hardship of working class experience in America. With defiant wit and innate musicality, she beautifies the bitter truths of our modern age into song as an act of love and solidarity. Art may not save us from our problems, but Jones believes it is crucial to surviving them with our humanity intact.

To sing is to live, to live is to hope, and to hope is to find the strength to fight another day in these dark and uncertain times. With guitar, banjo, fiddle, and even dulcimer in hand, she seeks to alchemize pain into purpose and break old ground to plant new seeds of hope and change.

Brendan Macie wields the five string banjo like an extension of his arm - he is guided by tradition but never bound by it, bringing a unique sensitivity to old-time repertoire tunes and contemporary protest songs alike. In his hands, the banjo is a catalyst for connection across different walks of life. His musical journey has taken him from the plasticine middle-class suburbs of Central North Carolina to Johnson City, Tennessee where he enrolled in and subsequently walked away from ETSU’s bluegrass program in favor of a path outside of the Nashville system’s rigid norms and rigorous marketing standards.

Alongside Jones, he seeks an honest truth beneath the rhinestone shimmer and neon lights of his predecessors in the humble origins of bluegrass music as an art form by and for ordinary folks seeking solace from hard times, hard luck, and hard labor.

Together as Sugaree String Society, they are a creative force of nature around which talented musicians like fiddle player Nick Tutwiler and bassist Jake Cochran orbit, lending their own unique voices to the band’s upcoming debut album, Bread and Roses - a contemporary return to the tradition of labor music by a new generation of artists hungry not only for life’s barest necessities, but also its limitless beauty and potential.

Self-funded and slated for release by the end of 2025, this record - laden with Jones’s prolific songwriting and tied together with a handful of traditional favorites - is the embodied cry of a generation raised up for a world that no longer exists; a search for collective meaning against the backdrop of war, political corruption, and the merciless suffering of late stage capitalism.

Their music invites listeners to ask brave and difficult questions about the world around them with songs that do not offer an escape from our troubles - but provide instead a sacred space to understand and transcend them together.

Sugaree String Society carries the torch of Pete Seeger’s boundless optimism and Woody Guthrie’s critical and clever tongue, accompanied by blistering mountain banjo and a truly high lonesome sound in the tradition of bluegrass trailblazers such as Earl Scruggs and Dr. Ralph Stanley. They’ve had the honor of performing on stages alongside contemporary greats such as Willi Carlisle and The Resonant Rogues, and can be found peddling their radical style of roots music wherever they’ve been called to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.