Keith & Joan Pitzer -West Virginia Singer/Songwriters
Phone: 304-288-7024
URL: www.fallingmountain.com/pitzers.html
email: laurelmountainmusic@yahoo.com

Keith & Joan Pitzer embody the experience of Appalachian life set in modern surroundings. Their music is a blend of old and new, where traditional and contemporary styles meet with honest down-to-earth lyrics. It is this combination, the tasty mix of original with traditional Appalachian and Celtic, that captures the heart and soul of their music. A poet as much as a lyricist, Keith’s lyrics convey both the irony and introspective nature of his worldview while Joan’s harmonies and counter intuitive bass parts fill out their unique view of their Appalachian home.

Listening to a live performance, their musicianship and rich vocal harmonies may well evoke a 1960’s coffeehouse performance of Ian & Sylvia, a 70’s performance of Gordon Lightfoot, or perhaps another place and time entirely. With their tight well-blended harmonies, Keith’s unique guitar style, harmonica and occasional mandolin and Joan’s solid foundation on bass and occasional penny whistle, their music takes you on a spellbinding journey through an emotional landscape celebrating a deep connection with nature and the places, people and times they have known.

Sharing music and marriage for over thirty years, they have performed at numerous fairs and festivals, coffeehouses and listening rooms across the mid-Atlantic states. They have opened for such notables as Tony Rice, Norman and Nancy Blake, Garnet Rogers, Tom Paxton, Robin and Linda Williams, and Chris Hillman, and shared stages with contemporaries like Eliza Gilkyson, johnsmith, Pierce Pettis and Jack Williams. Their resume includes performances at the John F. Kennedy Center, Mountain Stage NewSong Festival, the Westmoreland Arts & Heritage Festival (PA), the Fiddle & Bow Society (NC), and West Virginia’s Tamarack Center.

In addition to their duo tour schedule and recordings, they were part of the tour group Voices of West Virginia with respected Mountain State songwriters John Lilly, Kate Long and Todd Burge. Their music can be heard on the video, “A Vision for a Wild Mon,” produced by the West Virginia Wilderness Coalition and narrated by Larry Groce, Artistic Director and host of the nationally syndicated radio show Mountain Stage. Their song “Underneath a Blackened Moon” is included in the audio drama, “When Miners March,” written about the definitive history of the coal miners of West Virginia in the early 1950’s by William Blizzard and produced by Ross Ballard II.

In addition to writing and singing about the beauty of West Virginia’s mountains and rivers, Keith is the Executive Director of Friends of the Cheat, an environmental advocacy organization working to stop acid mine drainage into the wild and scenic Cheat River.