The Chatham Arts Council is investing in artists through our Meet This Artist series, introducing you to 12 Chatham County artists each year in a big way.
The fine folks at Hobbs Architects in downtown Pittsboro are powering our Meet This Artist series this year. Architecture is art, and the Hobbs crew values art in our community.
Take a look. Meet your very inspiring neighbors. Meet This Artist.
Alice Zincone is a creative woman of many and varied talents. One of her passions is Bluegrass music, which she grew up listening to in Greenville, North Carolina as her parents played and sang in their house (and regularly on a friend’s porch) for years. She never took a single singing, guitar, or bass lesson, but rather learned through watching, playing, and singing alongside her parents and many of the Bluegrass masters in the area, including her dear friend and bandmate, Tommy Edwards. Read on to learn more about this unique artist of many talents!
Tell me about yourself.
I grew up in a musical family. I can’t remember a time when music wasn’t playing in the house. My mother learned to play piano through lessons and taught herself how to play guitar. My father taught himself how to play the banjo after grad school. By the time I was a toddler, my family was hosting jams with the local bluegrass musicians in Greenville at East Carolina University (ECU), including Tommy Edwards of Chatham County fame. In fact, Tommy sold my dad his first really nice banjo and my mom her first really nice guitar, which are both still in the family. I just don’t think I could help but grow up singing. I didn’t really play an instrument until after college. I had a mandolin, and I could play a few chords, but I didn’t really take to it.
I went to ECU and majored in art and metal design. I worked for about seven years as a jewelry designer and repair person at a local jewelry store in Greenville. When I decided I needed a change, I felt like a good shift would be into art education. After I got my second bachelor’s degree, this time in art education, I moved out of Greenville and into this area and started playing music with Tommy as a fill-in with The Bluegrass Experience. When people couldn’t hire the full band, he would put together a trio, a quartet, or sometimes even a duo. The duo’s gigs morphed into Carolina Lightnin’, which is the band that my partner Rick and I were in with Tommy until the time of his passing. We have continued on with Carolina Lightnin’, but we just couldn’t decide on one person to replace Tommy so we renamed the band Carolina Lightnin’ and its Cast of Characters, and we usually add two musicians. I’m still playing semi-professionally, and I continue to make visual art.
I also love nature and animals. I’m fostering two cats right now for a family who moved to New Zealand for two years. I’m an avid Bluebirder as well, although here at my house it’s too wooded. I do have one nest right now but sometimes I don’t get any Bluebirds. I’m establishing a Bluebird trail at McDougle Elementary School where I teach elementary art.
How did you learn how to play and sing?
I’ve learned from other musicians and through experience. Some folks call that learning authentically. My mother sang beautifully. I started singing with her at a young age. My dad said that when I was around ten years old, I started matching pitch. In short order, I started learning harmony lines. Even if my mother changed the key to the song, I could easily find the harmony line. It was mostly my mother singing the lead line; I would sing the next highest harmony and my sister would sing the next highest harmony above that. A lot of times I’ll sing a song, and someone will say, “I don’t think that’s the way that goes.” I’m like, “Well, that’s the version I learned from so-and-so.”
I’ve never had a bass or guitar lesson in my life. I would sneak and play guitar a little bit when my sister and parents weren’t around. I knew how to make the chords just by watching my sister and my mother play. I did take eight years of piano lessons, but I do not read music. I mean, I can sit down and know the notes in the notation, but I really can’t sit down at the piano and play the tune as it is written. I never could get to that point.
Does your family still play?
My sister will still play on occasion. My mom passed away in 2010. My dad has always had a band, The Tar River Boys, and then the Greenville Grass as well. The Tar River Boys band was born out of a porch pickin’ session every Wednesday night on a front porch at Dr. Temple’s house in Tarboro. Numerous articles have been written about that pickin’ session, including a feature in Our State magazine in 2011. My dad played banjo with those two bands until very recently when COVID shut things down and he started having some health issues. He’s mainly retired now.
Can you talk a little bit more about the genesis of Carolina Lightnin’ and how you got started playing with Tommy?
I moved to the area in 1998 with the sole purpose of playing with people who I’d met at bluegrass festivals. I was also looking to Tommy for some leadership in the bluegrass scene and such. Before I even moved up here, Tommy got the guys together for The Bluegrass Experience. We had a pickin’ session at his old store, which was fun. The first gig I did with Tommy was on the BB&T Plaza. It was just a duet, with him playing guitar and me playing bass. By this time, I had started dating Rick, my current partner. I remember saying to Tommy, “If you ever wanna add a banjo, I know a great banjo player.” A year or so later, Tommy needed a trio, and we invited Rick in. It was special. I’ve never heard anyone play guitar like Tommy Edwards. He had a very distinct style. He could mimic the banjo licks on the guitar, and he could fill spaces in ways I’ve never heard anyone else do. His song writing was prolific and darn good.
Who inspires you?
Well, Tommy was a big influence and inspiration—there was nobody who liked to play more than him, and no one more gracious about letting people up on stage, even though it sometimes drove us bananas! Every once in a while, he’d invite someone that was a real train wreck up on stage, but Tommy just was so generous with his time and his talent, so we’d smile right through it. He still inspires me to be open and accepting of other musicians. I’ve known Tommy literally all of my life. He came over to my house when I was 10 days old. As I mentioned before, he was at ECU when my dad started teaching there. He found out about my dad needing a banjo, so he popped into my dad‘s office with the RB 250 that we still have. Soon after that, I was born, and he came over to the house. That’s pretty significant.
As far as other influences go, the bluegrass musician Rhonda Vincent is a huge force to be reckoned with. I feel that the music industry is very male-dominated, and she has certainly fought up through the patriarchy. She’s made her own way for a long time. She used to do all the business for the band until she started to get the respect she deserves. I’m also inspired by Emily Frantz and Andrew Marlin from Watchhouse and the way they have made their music career work with their life. I’m always inspired by my partner, Rick Lafleur. Next to Tommy, he is one of the most dedicated musicians I know. He plays his banjo several times a day. He’s very disciplined, and I’m always inspired to play a few songs when I hear him playing on the other end of the house.
How did COVID affect the different things that you were doing?
We didn’t do any playing in person for a long time. I’m an outgoing person, so for me, the quarantine took a lot of getting used to. Rick’s an introvert, so it was easier for him. I’m more comfortable with myself now having spent so much time alone. It did make us step back and re-examine what our musical future would be like. We did a concert with Bynum Front Porch that was livestreamed, and we did a little concert from The Parlour at Manns Chapel.
It was a bleak time for everyone, but especially because Tommy got sick during COVID. We also lost another bluegrass musician and supporter, Tyson Laney, very close on the heels of Tommy’s passing. When Tommy got sick, Rick and I just didn’t feel like putting any kind of music out there. It was a shock to a lot of people when Tommy passed as he went down fast. He died one day after the anniversary of my mom’s death. Tommy and my mother had a very close relationship. They didn’t see each other often, but we always thought the world of the Edwardses.
Tommy was an educator, too, like you are. Tell me about your own journey with visual arts education.
I love designing jewelry, but I couldn’t get paid for the designing part. People will pay you to repair jewelry all day long, but that gets a little boring. I tried making my own designs on the side, hoping that the store I worked with would carry those designs, but I couldn’t talk them into giving me a commission for the design work. So I moved on, tried a couple of other jeweler-type positions, but it was the same, and never a very creative thing. At that point I decided I needed to shift, and I thought that staying in arts would be in my wheelhouse, so I went back to ECU, got my degree in education, and went to work in elementary schools in Johnston County and Wake County. I then saw an opportunity on the state personnel website at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind, teaching art.
I love challenges, and I’ve always had a soft spot for kids with disabilities. My mother was a physical therapist, so I’ve been around people with physical and mental disabilities all my life. I knew that getting used to that world would not be an issue. I spent a glorious ten years at that school. It’s a really small residential school, and it felt very family-like with the children. At a certain point, they started asking me to do more and more things with the special education part of the school, with which I just wasn’t comfortable. Plus it was a long drive to and from school, so I decided to make yet another shift, and got a job teaching art in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School District at McDougle Elementary School.
Tell me a little bit more about your work with the students at the Governor Morehead school and helping them learn art. What were some of the challenges or some of the unique things that you discovered working with that community?
Well, art is quite visual, but I learned very quickly that not every person who is blind is 100% blind. Some of the students had additional disabilities, but they were all hungry to learn. I knew my first challenge was just to get them engaged with the materials. I taught vocabulary and talked about famous artists. I catered every activity and every lesson for each individual student. If they had more usable vision, then they made something more figurative or more realistic. I just wanted them to create with their hands and use their visual cortex. There have been studies done with people who are completely blind that show when a visually impaired person begins to draw, their visual cortex still lights up. Your visual cortex helps with spatial awareness. Knowing the blueprint of your house takes spatial awareness, whether you can see it or not. We all know how to get around in the dark in our own house because we’ve learned that spatial awareness.
I also learned all of the specialized technology, such as tactile graphics (touchable pictures) and braille printers. Shape is taught with low tech things like Wikki Stix, which are pieces of yarn coated in wax. We talked a lot about two-dimensional shapes versus three-dimensional forms. One time I had a duck carver come in and do a lesson. He brought an unpainted decoy that he left with us so everyone could touch it. I asked the students, “What form does the head feel like? What form does the body feel like?” We also worked on “buddy shapes.” For example, a sphere’s buddy shape is a circle, so I asked the students to make a circle with their Wikki Stix. We also used thin metal on a rubber mat to draw on, and then flipped it over. This makes an instant raised line or shape.
We did sculpture and printmaking, and we had one girl particularly interested in painting. She had some usable vision, so I taught her how to create shapes with Wikki Stix and then paint inside of them. I also had full use of the maintenance department at Dorothea Dix Hospital, so I had them make a paint cup holder, on which I put braille labels for the colors.
How long did it take you to learn braille?
I took a semester-long course. I brought home a braille reader, which looks sort of like a typewriter, but it has less than ten keys and a carriage that goes back and forth. Now they make electric ones. For the ones I learned on, you had to really use your muscles to push the keys to emboss the braille dots.
Do you use any of the things that you’ve learned teaching visually impaired students with the students you’re teaching now?
Yes, absolutely — visual references, working with three-dimensional things, and making presentations high-contrast, for example. I also notice things differently after working at that school, such as contrast and font size. It bugs me when I see a website with a beige background and super thin font, making it super hard to read. Little things like that. I’m also able to recognize when students may need an eye exam or other intervention.
What do you see in the future, both with your art and your music?
I forgot to mention that I take equestrian riding lessons once a week right now, so I’m hoping for more time for that. I’ve always loved horses.
I’m really hoping to do more songwriting. In the early 2000s, Rick and I wrote a song that Rhonda Vincent recorded. Her version went to number seven on the bluegrass charts. If I ever go to a concert, I can text her and tell her I’ll be at the show, and she’ll put the song on the song list and give me a shout out.
I love to play music, but I’m not going to make a dedicated career out of it. It’s hard work to keep a band together, market the band, make videos, do recordings, and make an electronic press kit. Tommy did a lot of that. I’m less than five years from retiring from the state. I do look forward to being able to put more effort into marketing the band and digging up gigs, but we’ll be focusing on the house concert type of venue as opposed to the sports bars with people talking more than they’re listening. The Burrow that the Chatham Rabbits created on their property is a great listening space.
In retirement, I know I’ll be doing more creating, whether it’s in metal arts, or music, or both. I’ve also been talking with someone about working with her at her jewelry and art gallery when I retire. I really do like a variety of activities, as you can likely tell by now. I play and write music; I make art; I ride; I teach art; I garden; and I Bluebird. I’m always just getting into something new or different or coming back around to something.
We encourage you to come see Alice play live with Carolina Lightnin’ and its Cast of Characters at ClydeFEST this Saturday! Carolina Lightnin’ and its Cast of Characters is scheduled to play from 11-11:30am but we hope you’ll stay afterwards for all of the ClydeFEST fun! Click here for more information about the schedule of events for the day.
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