The Critton Hollow
String Band

Since 1975, the Critton Hollow String Band has brought traditional American music to audiences throughout the United States, Canada, Japan, Ireland, and Scotland. With fiddle, hammer dulcimer, banjo, and guitar, the band tends a stable of songs from the first settlements of Appalachia to the best of contemporary American folk music. Songs that express a range of experience that can make you laugh or make you cry and occasionally do both at the same time, ballads that tell stories of bad men and disappointed lovers. Instrumentals that will make you want to get up anddance or sit back and listen. The three members of the band - Joe Herrmann, Sam Herrmann, and Joe Fallon - combine precise instrumentation, melodic interplay, and three part harmony to create a warm and engaging sound. As Mitch Podolak, the artistic director of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, commented, they have a "unique ability to make their audience feel a part of their performance." The Critton Hollow String Band has played at numerous folk music venues, festivals, and concerts including the Birchmere Music Club, the Kennedy Center, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Carter Family Fold, the Vancouver Folk Festival, Clearwater's Hudson River Revival, and the Upper Potomac Dulcimer Festival. They have appeared on radio shows such as Mountain Stage, Voices from the Mountains, and Live at the Birchmere, and on television shows such as Live at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Music from Home, and the Today Show. The band has seven CDs: Gather 'round (2009), The Dulcimer Collection (2000), Cowboys and Indians (1995), Great Dreams (1988), By and By (1985), Sweet Home (1983), and Poor Boy (1979).