Audio Book of the paperback book "Appalachia: Ballads, Bloodlines, and the Long Journey Home"
$24.99
Appalachia: Volume One
Ballads, Bloodlines, and the Long Journey Home
In the hills, truth don’t always come printed on a page. Sometimes it shows up in the way a porch plank creaks under a familiar pair of boots, or in the way a fiddle cries a note that ain’t written in no songbook. Around here, stories don’t end—they echo. Through hollow logs, rusted fence posts, and the voices of folks who still remember.
This book ain’t meant to be a textbook. It’s a torch. One passed from the calloused hands of mountain preachers and midwives, moonshiners and mandolin pickers, all the way to you. Inside, you’ll find tales that might be half-true and wholly felt—about kinfolk who wrestled God and each other, who bled into red clay and carved their names into these ridge lines with nothing more than stubbornness and song.
Appalachia ain’t a place you can find with just a map. It’s a rhythm. A way of being. A kind of knowing passed down in rocking chairs and revival tents, behind barns and in beauty shops. And if you’re lucky—or maybe just still enough—you might catch it whispering to you through the pages.
Some of the names in here are famous. Most ain’t. But all of ‘em matter. Because they laid the stones we’re still walkin’ on today. This book honors that. It honors them.
So pull up a chair. Pour something warm or strong. And settle in.
We’re goin’ home.
—R.O. Locust Ridge, Tennessee
Appalachia-Acoustic Trio
Ballads, Bloodlines, and the Long Journey Home
Richie Owens featuring Bob Ocker and Joe Sharp
Some shows are built around songs.
Others are built around stories.
Appalachia – Ballads, Bloodlines, and the Long Journey Home is built around both.
Led by fifth-generation Appalachian musician, storyteller, filmmaker, producer, and author Richie Owens, this acoustic presentation carries the music, memory, humor, hardship, faith, family lines, and hard miles of the Southern mountains. Rooted in the same storytelling world as Smoky Mountain DNA, the show reaches into East Tennessee, the Great Smoky Mountains, Locust Ridge, old gospel churches, front-porch picking, mountain ballads, bluegrass, country blues, and the long road between leaving home and trying to get back to it.
This is not Appalachian music polished up for a postcard.
This is the old road with the gravel still in it.
Richie serves as the voice and guide of the evening, weaving together original songs, traditional music, family history, spoken-word storytelling, and the kind of truth that can make a room laugh one minute and go quiet the next. His stories carry dry humor, hard-earned honesty, mountain wit, and just enough darkness around the edges to remind you these songs came from real people, not museum glass.
Accompanying Richie are Bob Ocker and Joe Sharp, two seasoned musicians whose friendships, playing, and voices have been crossing paths for more than forty years. After that many years of knowing each other, singing together, playing together, and walking through the same mountain-rooted music, it does not come across like a band assembled for a show.
It comes across like family.
Because at this point, that is what they are.
That long friendship gives the trio its natural harmony blend — not just in the vocals, but in the way the instruments lean into each other. Nothing feels forced. Nothing feels borrowed. The music has the ease of men who know each other’s timing, humor, scars, and silence — the kind of trust that cannot be rehearsed into a room. It has to be lived.
Bob Ocker brings guitar, mandolin, harmony, and a lifelong feel for American roots music — folk, bluegrass, old-time, country blues, and the quiet spaces between them. His playing does not crowd the story. It walks beside it, answering Richie’s songs with taste, restraint, and the kind of trust that only comes from years of friendship and shared music.
Joe Sharp brings upright bass, harmony, and the deep pulse of a life spent inside East Tennessee music. Born in Knoxville and raised around family picking, Joe came up through bluegrass and mountain music, carrying the steady rhythm, quiet confidence, and deep-rooted feel that only comes from a lifetime around the music. His bass does not just fill out the sound — it holds the floor steady, giving the trio weight, warmth, timing, and old bluegrass authority.
Together, Richie, Bob, and Joe create an acoustic trio sound that is lean, honest, and rooted. Richie carries the songs and stories. Bob brings guitar, mandolin, harmony, and road-worn musical color. Joe brings upright bass, harmony, timing, and the floorboards underneath it all.
The result feels less like a staged concert and more like an evening with three musicians who know where the stories came from because they have lived close to them.
Appalachia – Ballads, Bloodlines, and the Long Journey Home moves through mountain ballads, gospel fire, bluegrass, folk, country blues, original songs, family stories, and the uneasy beauty of returning to the place that made you.
It is intimate.
It is acoustic.
It is funny when it ought to be.
It is haunted when it has to be.
And it is rooted in the truth that Appalachia was never just a place on a map.
It was a sound.
A warning.
A prayer.
A family story.
And sometimes, if the room is quiet enough, it still has something left to say.