Raleigh Wide Open Music Festival — Alice Gerrard Performance
Custom Made Woman
A Life in Traditional Music
by Alice Gerrard
184 pp., 102 halftones
ISBN 978-1-4696-9036-0 $30.00 cloth
Publication date: December 2, 2025
For more information: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469690360/custom-made-woman/
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The Raleigh Wide Open Music Festival, presented by PNC, returns on Oct. 1-3, 2026!
The fun starts on Thursday evening, Oct. 1, with a free Kickoff Celebration at The Corner on N.C. State’s Centennial Campus. Three festival bands will perform, and attendees can bring chairs and a picnic OR enjoy food and drink from trucks onsite. We’ll have festival merch (including our famous banjo-playing squirrel T-shirt!) available for purchase.
Then, on Friday, Oct. 2 and 3, the streets of downtown Raleigh come alive with multiple spaces for live music, a N.C. Family Fun Zone, food and drink vendors, arts and crafts makers, and more. It’s a cornerstone annual event that brings people together around bluegrass, Americana, folk, and other traditional music. And best of all, it’s free!
The festival is produced for the community by Raleigh-based nonprofit PineCone (the Piedmont Council of Traditional Music). The best way to stay up-to-date as the festival gets closer is to sign up to receive PineCone’s weekly email newsletter. You’ll get updates about changes, closer looks at festival artists, and announcements about all of PineCone’s programming and activities supporting roots music in the Triangle. You’ll also want to follow the festival on Facebook and Instagram at @raleighwideopen.
In a career spanning more than 50 years, Alice Gerrard has known, learned from, and performed with many of the old-time and bluegrass greats and has in turn earned worldwide respect for her own important contributions to the music. Her groundbreaking collaboration with Appalachian singer Hazel Dickens during the 1960s and ’70s, Hazel and Alice, produced four classic LPs and influenced scores of young women singers. The duo was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2017. Gerrard founded and edited the Old-Time Herald and is the subject of the documentary You Gave Me a Song.