March 10, 2019, at 7:30 pm.

Isis Music Hall 743 Haywood Road West Asheville 28806

Show-Only Tickets: http://isisasheville.com/event/leap-laugh-connie-regan-blake/

Dinner-and-Show Reservations by phone 828-575-2737

$15 in advance/$18 day of show

Connie Regan-Blake celebrates the release of her new storytelling CD “Leap and Laugh! Tales of Adventure” on March 10th, 7:30pm at Isis Music Hall on Haywood Road in West Asheville. Audiences will enjoy a laugh-out-loud and remarkable storytelling journey from a leap in New Zealand to “Dorky Spandex vs. Macho Leather” on the Blue Ridge Parkway to the sparkling “Well at the End of the World.”

One of America’s most celebrated storytellers, Connie Regan-Blake has performed her folktales and true-life stories for audiences in 47 states, 18 countries, and 6 continents so far! She has told at main stage concert halls, schools, festivals, libraries and at corporate conferences. Good Morning America credits her as “the mother of the American storytelling renaissance.” Her archive was recently adopted by the Library of Congress. Even with such accolades and world-wide fame, Regan-Blake still touches audiences with the authentic mountain charm she did when she first started her career in the 1970s, traveling America’s highways in a pick-up truck, stopping in towns to tell stories, quite some time before “storytelling” left the front porches of Appalachia.

Regan-Blake is the only performer invited onstage for every National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, since its conception in 1973 when featured a handful of tellers, a handful of audience, and a load of haybales to sit on. One of the tellers was Regan-Blake’s mentor, Ray Hicks, the only human ever featured on the cover of Smithsonian Magazine—which only ever has treasures on it. Hicks was a master of telling Jack Tales. When word of his talent reached across the nation, Johnny Carson sent a producer up to the Hicks home (they did not have a telephone) to arrange an appearance on The Tonight Show. Hicks replied, “You tell Johnny if he wants to hear a story, he can come up here and I’ll be happy to tell him one.” It has been Regan-Blake who has carried Hicks’ mastery into the world, stirring a whole series of generations to, in the words of Hicks himself, “Connie, tell on, tell on.”

Local poet and producer, Laura Hope-Gill, says of Regan-Blakes’ performances, “Hearing Connie tell reminds me to slow down and pay attention to life. There’s always story going on, and we can miss it.”

Throughout her career, Connie’s rare talent has transformed convention halls into wondrous landscapes and turned packed theaters into intimate circles of friends. She has performed at the nation’s top folk music and storytelling festivals, including the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C., the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival in Orem, Utah, and to Ugandan women building their lives through the paper-bead jewelry collective, Bead for Life, for which Regan-Blake is an ambassador.

Audiences can expect to laugh out loud as Regan-Blake describes her selection process of a hang-gliding guide in New Zealand and to hold their breath as her husband, Phil, takes on the Blue Ridge Parkway on bicycle, as well as to be enthralled by an old traditional story made new in Regan-Blake’s talent and skill in telling. This is a family friendly event.

Connie Regan-Blake, office: 828-258-1113 email: Connie@storywindow.com  

To learn more about Connie, visit www.storywindow.com.