This show is sponsored by Alpha Natural Resources, WCYB, and WETS. Additional support is provided by Courtyard Marriott, Bristol, Virginia Commission for the Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission, and National Endowment for the Arts.

The radio show taping will be held on Sunday, August 16 at the Paramount Theatre at 7:00 pm. Ticket prices for the evening are $25 and are available at the Paramount Center for the Arts box office at 423.274.8920 or visit www.TheParamountCenter.com or www.e-tix.com The $25 ticket is a reduction over past Mountain Stage tapings in consideration of today's economic climate.

Now in its 26th year, this will be the 700th show produced by Mountain Stage, a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting. A two-hour radio show recorded before a live audience, Mountain Stage has established a long tradition of featuring national and international acts in almost every style of music. Mountain Stage can be heard weekly on over 100 National Public Radio affiliates throughout the United States, Voice of America, and XM satellite radio. The television program has been carried on over 200 PBS stations nationwide. Since coming to Bristol - just 3 years ago - Mountain Stage has produced 4 radio shows and 6 HDTV releases that originated from Bristol and the Paramount Theatre, reaching millions of listeners and viewers across the nation and throughout the world.

Artists include:

Robert Cray Band - For thirty-plus years Robert Cray has laid down track after track of good-time, uptown, low-down blues. He's won five Grammys and been nominated for 11 more, inspired critics to praise his soulful vocal and instrumental artistry, earned respect from his peers, and sent young guitarists running back to the woodshed. He played the bassist in the fictional band Otis Day and the Knights in 1998's movie Animal House. His latest album, The Robert Cray Band: Live From Across The Pond, is his first full-length concert CD.

The Flatlanders - Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock have been friends for almost 40 years, and members of that not-really-a-band, life-of-its-own musical entity known as The Flatlanders for nearly as long. Thirty-seven years after their first recording project together The Flatlanders have released Hills And Valleys. Blending their own unique styles, the album's general theme is "the ups and downs, emotionally, of peoples' lives these days.”

Robin & Linda Williams -Robin and Linda Williams are like your next-door neighbors - assuming your neighbors are the salt-of-the-earth and top-flight performers to boot. You feel right at home at a Robin and Linda concert, and their music stays with you like an old friend. Favorites of fans and promoters alike, they have crisscrossed the continent (and beyond) for more than three decades, performing the tunes they love and a hearty blend of bluegrass, folk, old-time and acoustic country. They are first-class instrumentalists and superb songwriters, able to, as The Washington Post put it, "sum up a life in a few details with moving completeness."

Mike Seeger - the 2009 recipient of the Bess Lomax Hawes NEA National Heritage Fellowship, Mike Seeger stands out in a family of prominent scholars and musical performers as an advocate, a documenter, a teacher, and an artist. Recognized widely for his mastery of the guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and autoharp, Seeger has recorded musicians who were not known except in their own communities, and thanks to his work, artists such as Dock Boggs, Maybelle Carter, Kilby Snow, Sam and Kirk McGee, and Hazel Dickens reached a broad public audience. Seeger has produced more than 30 documentary recordings and has performed on another 40 recordings.

The Birthplace of Country Music Alliance is a non-profit organization dedicated to telling the story of the living musical heritage of the Appalachian mountains and the cultural traditions that sustain it. The BCMA is funded in part by grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission. For more information, call (276) 645-0111 or visit online at www.BirthplaceOfCountryMusic.org

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