Join us at the Floyd Country Store on Saturday, September 30, 2023 at 7:00 pm for a live concert with Viv & Riley with Dori Freeman Live. Tickets are $20 general admission, $25 reserved seating, available for sale online and in the store.

About Viv & Riley

Vivian Leva’s voice is the sound of living tradition. Raised by parents who absorbed ancient tunes and ballads during visits to legendary old-time musicians, Leva grew up steeped in the Appalachian and country music of her Lexington, VA home. On 2018’s Time Is Everything, her label debut on Free Dirt Records, Leva earns a spot in the lineage of great neo-traditional songwriters like Gillian Welch and Sarah Jarosz. And much like these singers, Leva finds inspiration in the past without being stifled by it.

It is unsurprising that she found an instant musical connection upon meeting Riley Calcagno at a fiddle festival in Washington state. Calcagno, who also spent his formative years immersed in traditional music through his playing with the widely recognized band The Onlies, appears throughout Leva’s debut album, acting as co-producer and adding banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin and harmonies. Whether on recording or in concert, Leva and Calcagno’s vibrant and magnetic harmonies shift effortlessly between archaic ballads, classic country and honky tonk, and the best of contemporary Americana, imbuing each story of love, passing time, and heartbreak with a hearty emotional punch.

It’s rare to find such mature and confident voices in such young artists—whose music springs so organically from a grassroots connection to the traditional music community in which they were raised. Since the record’s release Leva and Calcagno have toured as a duo across Canada, the US, and the UK, and received wide critical praise. Rolling Stone Country wrote that Time is Everything “shines a light on the past without giving up its place in the present” and Wide Open Country called the record “a triumph of lyricism and musicianship.” As individuals, they have performed with Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens, Donna the Buffalo, and Bruce Molsky to name just a few. To this collaboration they bring both the steady hands of experience and a refined taste for American music, yet still a youthful abandon that can’t be forced.

About Dori Freeman

Dori Freeman’s inimitable signature sound is in peak form on her fourth studio album, Ten Thousand Roses. Raised among a family of musicians in the Blue Ridge Mountains and hailed by Rolling Stone as “one of the most authentic vocalists to emerge from the hills of southwestern Virginia in recent years,” she’s a bonafide Appalachian artist, while simultaneously shattering the archetype by empowering the characters in her songs with personal strength and homegrown wisdom. Through this process, she both defies and expands notions of what it means to be from the region.

Dori Freeman has always been an artist who’s had an eclectic range of influences and the ability to deliver deeply moving vocals in a variety of styles that comprise the Americana genre. True to form, her soaring alto delivery is on display throughout this collection of nine originals and one cover. Freeman wrote the songs on Ten Thousand Roses during the pandemic, when, like millions of others, she was stuck at home. She made a point, however, to spend as much time outdoors as possible. “I really observed and appreciated nature during that time,” she says. Natural elements such as storm-clouds, wildflowers, and spiders show up as motifs throughout the record, which examines everything from being deeply in love with someone to realizing that you don’t need another person to complete you.