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. Their music takes shape on the fiddle, cello, and in their singing. Georgia’s training as a fiddler is in Norwegian traditional music.

Their first full-length album, Apprentice to Transformation, is a collection of original & traditional fiddle tunes devoted to the practice of witnessing Death not as the end, but as a moment in the act of transformation.

Georgia plays both Norwegian “flat fiddle” (regular fiddle) as well as the hardanger fiddle, a violin-like instrument with sympathetic strings. Georgia is currently a Folklife Apprentice with Loretta Kelley, studying hardingfele repertoire for dance (supported by the Maryland State Arts Council).

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:

Mostly I play fiddle 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. My flat fiddling focuses on tunes from Gubransdalen, and my hardingfele playing stays on tunes from Telemark, though Loretta Kelley is currently expanding my repertoire to include all other major hardingfele regions; Valdres, Vestaland, Hallingdal and Setesdal. I secretly plan to return to playing Telemark tunes exclusively after my apprenticeship has concluded, though some of the MAND dancers will be sad to hear this.