about | Georgia Beatty

Georgia Beatty is a musician and folk artist, focused on cycle, lineage and healing through cultural transmission. Their work has two taproots growing at equally feverish rates in the paradoxically woven worlds of songwriting and traditional music. They play fiddle, cello and sing. Georgia’s study as a fiddler is in Norwegian music.

Georgia lives & works in their hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.

More about my songs:

I know music is one of the many boats that helps us sail back to bodies that aren’t broken, to the knowledge that was meant to be passed on. I really care about what we have collectively forgotten and been forced to forget. There are all sorts of confusing ways we can build knots in our ancestry, and our hearts, in our ecosystems, etc. Songs reach above and through all that. You can really tell your great-great-great grandmother what she’s been waiting to hear, if you sing it right. You can really close an open wound and watch new plants grow if you choose the right rhythm. This is what I research when I make songs, and what I aim to share when I sing them to people.

More about fiddling:

The fiddle tunes I play are for dances. There's not much I can say that will do justice to these beautiful, magic tunes, you’ll just have to come to a dance and hear them for yourself. This tradition is ~400 years old. I was first introduced to Norwegian fiddling through the Mid-Atlantic Norwegian Dancers community and have had the utmost honour of learning from a number of Norwegian master fiddlers and dancers since. In my flat fiddling (regular fiddle), I focus on tunes from the region of Gubransdalen, and with the hardingfele I study tunes from the Telemark region. I am currently a MSAC Folklife Apprentice studying hardingfele with Loretta Kelley, and she is expanding my repertoire to include other major regions; Valdres, Vestaland, Hallingdal and Setesdal.