Abigail Washburn never set out to be a songwriter or a recording artist. Five years ago when she found herself on stage in a smoke-filled Beijing club playing her banjo and singing old-time Appalachian mountain music in Chinese to a packed house, she was as surprised as anyone. “A daring, definite talent, whose feel for the folk idiom results in moving material. Soulful is the word,” hailed the Wall Street Journal in 2005, during that same tour of China. “On stage, her voice resonated with the power of a seasoned performer and her poetic hill tunes sounded all the more evocative in Chinese.

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