A Farm, a Civil War, and Thirty Songs: Angela Easterling's Big Swing

Most singer-songwriters would kill for a story as good as the one Angela Easterling lives on every day. The Greer, S.C., Americana artist makes her home on a family farm settled in 1791 — land that has been in her family since before there was a South Carolina worth arguing over — and she has spent a career mining exactly that kind of deep-rooted Southern history for songs. Her next project may be the deepest dig yet.

First, the credentials, because they're real and they're heavy. Easterling is a four-time Kerrville New Folk Finalist. Her 2016 album Common Law Wife hit No. 1 on the Roots Music Report's Americana Country airplay chart. Her 2023 record Witness was named one of American Songwriter magazine's Top 24 Albums of the Year. She's played the Smithsonian and shared work with the likes of Lucinda Williams — a résumé that would headline a festival in most states and somehow still undersells how good she is in a room, working mandolin, fiddle and guitar with her musical partner Brandon Turner and usually not a drum in sight.

Now the swing. Easterling's seventh album, Songs from the Knoxville Project, is due out in September 2026, and it's less a record than an excavation. The songs tell the true story of her great-great-great-grandmother's Civil War–era journey — a dangerous crossing of the Appalachian mountains with ten children to reach Union lines in Tennessee. Easterling has reportedly written close to thirty songs for the project and envisions it eventually as a staged "Appalachian folk musical," which means the album may be only the first act of something considerably larger.

This is the kind of ambition an alt-weekly should shout about. Americana as a genre is thick with vague nostalgia — moonshine and dirt roads as set dressing. What Easterling does instead is genealogical and specific: a real ancestor, a real journey, a real war, turned into song cycles that treat Upstate and Appalachian history as living material rather than costume. That specificity is the whole reason her work travels beyond the region while staying utterly of it.

You can catch her live this run — FR8yard in Spartanburg has her on its live-tunes calendar — though the exact date is worth confirming, because venue and aggregator listings currently disagree. Either way, an open-air, mostly-acoustic Easterling set under the Spartanburg sky is about as Upstate as an evening gets.

A farm older than the country, a dozen kids crossing a mountain to freedom, and thirty songs to carry them: bet on the artist who found a musical hiding in her own family Bible. Then go hear where she takes it.

Sources: Angela Easterling — Bio; Angela Easterling @ FR8yard, Spartanburg (Bandsintown event); FR8yard 2026 Concert Schedule (Bandsintown)