George and Brooke Buckner are performing artists who play the mountain music they grew up with in Western North Carolina, sharing their heritage through ballads, banjo tunes and handed down family traditions.
George Buckner is from a small town called Barnardsville in Buncombe County. Brooke Windsor Buckner’s family is from the Grapevine community in neighboring Madison county. Today they live at Buckner Farm in the Jupiter community on the Buncombe and Madison county line.
Brooke and George work as a duo playing traditional mountain music and are part of the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area Traditional Artist Directory. Both George and Brooke started singing and playing at early ages and this has led them to play on many stages including Merlefest, Bascom Lamar Lunsford Festival, Smokey Mountain Folk Festival, Bluff Mountain Festival, Biltmore Estate, Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, Haywood Arts Repertory Theater, Barter Theater, Lake Eden Arts Festival, Southern Highlands Craft Guild, and the Blue Ridge Parkway’s Folk Art Center.
When not playing the banjo, George also enjoys working on classic cars and trucks and wreck repair at his auto body shop. Brooke is a long time member of the Folk Heritage Committee, working to preserve and continue the region’s traditional music and dance. Brooke has proudly served as Folk Heritage Sub-Committee’s Chair for Shindig on the Green, a highly acclaimed and widely attended weekly summer traditional mountain music and dance celebration in downtown Asheville, NC and is a registered nurse. They are richly blessed with four incredible daughters, Windsor, who lives and works in Boston as co-founder of Hercampus.com, Kelsey, a doctoral candidate at the University of Miami and the younger two, CarlyMae and Lily who are members of the Cole Mountain Cloggers. CarlyMae is a fiddle player and a student of fiddle legend Arvil Freeman. Brooke and George also share their lives with three cats, five goats, eight hens, two roosters and a very vocal donkey named Moonshine.
For booking information please contact George and Brooke Buckner at bucknermtnmusic@aol.com or 828-658-8899.
Fabulous talents– both Brooke & George! A highlight of my life in NC was hearing Brooke’s own song, “Jesus, don’t come until I’ve been to Ghost Town”– & my mother saying (when they played for her 90th Birthday Bash) “I may not be ‘musical,’ but Yee Gods… that banjo player!”
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