Richie Owens with Bob Ocker & Joe Sharp – Appalachia Ballads, Bloodlines, and the Long Journey Home, Celebrating the Dolly Parton and Owens Family Mountain Music Legacy | with our guest, Joey O & The Cloverleaves

Fifth-generation Appalachian musician, storyteller, filmmaker, producer, author, and Dolly Parton’s first cousin, family historian, and longtime occasional musical collaborator – Richie Owens brings his album, Appalachia – Ballads, Bloodlines, and the Long Journey Home to Godfrey's stage, offering a rare musical and personal connection to one of America’s most celebrated artists.

The son of Louis Owens, whose musical guidance helped shape Parton’s early career, Richie is the Owens family’s official archivist and historian. He also produced Parton’s Hungry Again (1998) and Precious Memories (1999), along with collaborative family music projects.

Appalachia – Ballads, Bloodlines, and the Long Journey Home, with Bob Ocker and Joe Sharp is rooted in East Tennessee, the Great Smoky Mountains, old gospel churches, front-porch picking, mountain ballads, bluegrass, country blues, and folk, the trio combines original songs, traditional music, family history, and spoken-word storytelling. With more than forty years of friendship between Richie, Bob, and Joe, the music carries the ease of musicians who know each other’s timing, voices, humor, and silence. In the intimate setting of a Live Music Listening Room, these Appalachian stories have room to unfold—sometimes funny, sometimes quiet, and always connected to the people and places behind the songs.

Richie Owens
with Bob Ocker & Joe Sharp
richieowens.com

Appalachia – Acoustic Trio

Ballads, Bloodlines, and the Long Journey Home

Richie Owens featuring Bob Ocker and Joe Sharp

Appalachia – Ballads, Bloodlines, and the Long Journey Home is an intimate acoustic journey through the songs, stories, humor, hardship, faith, and family lines of the Southern mountains.

Led by fifth-generation Appalachian musician, storyteller, filmmaker, producer, and author Richie Owens, the trio draws from East Tennessee and Great Smoky Mountain traditions—mountain ballads, gospel, bluegrass, folk, country blues, and original songs shaped by generations of family history.

Owens serves as the voice and storyteller, weaving music with spoken-word tales that can make a room laugh one moment and fall silent the next. This is not Appalachia polished for a postcard. It is the old road with the gravel still in it.

Joining Richie are longtime musical friends Bob Ocker on guitar, mandolin, and harmony vocals, and Joe Sharp on upright bass and harmony. Their musical paths and friendships have crossed for more than forty years, giving the trio a natural chemistry that cannot be manufactured or rehearsed.

Bob brings the texture and restraint of a lifetime immersed in American roots music, while Knoxville-born Joe provides the steady pulse and old-bluegrass authority underneath it all.

Together, Richie, Bob, and Joe create something that feels less like a staged concert and more like three old friends sitting down to share where they came from.

It is acoustic, funny, sometimes haunted, and deeply rooted in the belief that Appalachia was never simply a place on a map.

It was a sound, a prayer, a warning, and a family story still being told.

Joey O

Joey was “born in God’s waiting room,” in a middle-class neighborhood just outside Orlando, Florida. Playing in bands in bars and clubs from the age of 15, he moved to Nashville in 1998 and played in various acts—Bombshell Crush, The Everafters, Trinity James, and Jason Moore’s Lost Pages, to name a few. He released a solo album, No Breaks No Bleeding, shortly before relocating to the Lehigh Valley. No Breaks No Bleeding was described by local critics as “clearly spilling blood at the altar of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen,” which he took as a massive compliment.

His last project before the move, Joey O and the Last Call Communion, will be released later this year.

“Writing, recording, and releasing music—whether in a band, for another artist, or as solo material—is always satisfying, but playing live has always been the highlight of making music for me. Whether it’s 5, 500, or 5,000+, having a room full of people in the moment, having a blast, and getting lost in the songs is the best.

Give me your room, open the bar, I’ll put money in the till, and everyone will have a blast.”