Rising Folk Song and Percussive Dance Star Sophie Wellington Releases Enchanting New Album Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still

“Sophie Wellington’s dancing reveals a deep knowledge and love of Appalachian music and spot on rhythmic sensibilities, enhanced by a jazz education. Her singular approach to percussive dance opens new possibilities where we thought there were none left!” –Nic Gareiss

"Sophie Wellington moves the needle to 10 out of 10 with her fresh interpretations of old time music on fiddle, guitar, vocal, and dance." –Cathy Fink

Adhyâropa Records is thrilled to announce Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still (ÂR00184), the new album by Sophie Wellington. Riding the crest of a generation of musicians focused on blending genres to create something new, unique, and personal, Wellington brings a jazz-informed sensibility to folk song performance and pairs it with their stunning virtuosity as a percussive dancer to create a one-person band in a category all to themselves. 

Growing up in Staunton, VA, Wellington was raised in a musical community via contra and square dances, choirs, music festivals and camps; their approach to both music and dance has always been of a piece with one another, two squares on a single quilt. Since studying with Bruce Molsky, Darol Anger, Paul Rishell, and Annie Raines at Berklee, Wellington has pursued a similarly quilted approach to their creative work.

“This album is the culmination of developing old time and ballad music for guitar and for a different harmonic space,” Wellington says. “I grew up around old time fiddle and guitar music but I’ve always been passionate about jazz as well, and as I’m getting older those streams have started to cross a bit. Guitar offers so much in terms of harmonic and rhythmic structure when accompanying a melody, which is also at the heart of fiddle playing as it differs from classical violin playing. I’ve been exploring a lot of alternate tunings, and trying to apply that melodic approach to the old time music that’s been in my blood my whole life.”

‘Scolding Wife,’ the opening track and the album’s first single, offers a clear example of Wellington’s approach. A Marion Reece fiddle tune dating back to the early 20th century and traditionally done in AEAC# tuning (also known as Black Mountain Rag, Calico, Open A, or Drunken Hiccups tuning), here is played on solo flatpick guitar, with its famous left-hand pizz triad transposed to 12th-fret harmonics, accompanied by an overdub of percussive dance. Wellington’s tapping, scuffing, and sliding perfectly frames the song, and seemingly places its soundworld squarely in Appalachia. Yet, complexities and modernizations lurk just below the surface. The melody is oftentimes approached obliquely, displaced like a round for one player; space is left with intention and not a measure goes by without a wry and playful musical metacommentary on the tune itself and its relevance to modern praxis. 

This approach leads directly to the track that follows, Pete Sutherland’s ‘Shacks and Chalets.’ A legend among the Vermont folk music community, Sutherland’s ballad is a poetic commentary on American income disparity very much in the tradition of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger which has found an echo in the music of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg, films like Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, and the political movement led by Vermont’s own Bernie Sanders: “When it’s springtime in the mountains, there’s a stirring in the soul / But it also brings the floods that’s caused by stripping off the coal / And the shacks along the river must obey the water’s will / And you can watch ‘em floating down the stream from the chalets on the hill.” Wellington sets the text to a river of James Taylor-esque add4 chords, and delivers her vocal performance with a crisp diction and intonation closer to Becca Stevens or Cécile McLorin Salvant than the original. 

“Through different paths in my life I’ve developed a kid of harmonic intuition that’s always been behind these ballads, and there are a number of ballads on this album that I’ve harmonized – or reharmonized,” Wellington says. “Sometimes I’ll employ open or drone strings to simulate the legato of a bowed instrument and to open up new harmonic possibilities, especially in alternate tunings. Playing this tune in DADGAD allows the lower strings to ring through even while the harmony changes, and the dissonances are really interesting. It’s reminiscent of something one of my biggest influences Jake Xerxes Fussell does with pedal effects, to create a vibey, sustained wash of sound. It’s something folk musicians have been doing for years with drone strings but he draws the connection to a more contemporary sound.” 

Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still follows a pattern of ballads and songs interspersed with instrumentals through to the end, the instrumentals showcasing Wellington’s acumen at angular displacement of familiar old time tunes accompanied by dance while the ballads feature their crystal-clear soprano and talent for reharmonization. “Dance is essential to everything I do, including in my instrumental performance,” Wellington says. “As Nic Gareiss says, if you’re making music, you’re dancing, because you can’t do it without a body; atoms moving, making ripples, making the people around you hear it and feel it. It doesn’t just enhance the music I’m making, it enhances everyone else’s experience of being inside the music I’m making. And I feel privileged to have grown up in a community where music and dance were so closely intertwined.”

This is felt acutely on ballads like ‘In Seaport Town,’ ‘Shirt of Lace,’ and ‘Autumn to May,’ even in languorous tempos. Wellington has a true talent for stripping adornment from a lyric, the better to allow subtext or darker tones to become apparent. When they sing “So early early the next morning / A hunting a hunting they did go / And little did he think of a bloody murder / And a’hunting he agreed to go / He ne’er came back ‘til so late in the evening / She inquired of her servant boy / Oh, he got lost in the wild woods a hunting / And his fair face, you’ll see no more,” they don’t couch their delivery. The pain in the lyric becomes visceral, feels physical; the undulating guitar no mere accompanist but a partner in a tragic pas de deux.

Among the instrumentals, the mid-album idyll ‘Jack of Diamonds’ is a highlight. An unhurried take on a classic traditional (sometimes known as ‘Drunkard’s Hiccups’ due to its hiccuping pizzicato interjection, here again transposed to 12th fret harmonics) covered throughout the years by artists from the Byrds to Mile Twelve. Wellington implies a tipsy, cockeyed gait with slides and string bends while losing none of their physicality or wry harmonic playfulness; if a listener finds themselves involuntarily compelled to waltz to this track, they wouldn’t be the first. 

But no discussion of this album would be complete without a visit with the title track, another plaintive ballad by W. T. Wrighton and J. E. Carpenter. The least rhythmically tethered of the songs, Wellington here allows her voice, recorded with aching intimacy by multiple Grammy winner and co-producer Cathy Fink, to swell to full prominence, their delivery recalling balladeers like The Dubliners’ Luke Kelly, the clarity of their intervallic leaps conjuring an Appalachian Sarah Vaughan. Understanding the power of their unadorned voice, Wellington begins the final verse a cappella: “At the first sweet dawn of light / When I gaze upon the deep / Her form still greets my side / While the stars, their vigil keep / When I close my aching eyes / Sweet dreams my memory fill / And from sleep, when I arise, Her bright smile haunts me still.” The return of the guitar, sidestepping the original’s triadic harmony for mournful minor 7ths and 9ths, transforms the song from a simple lament to a profound, melancholic lullaby. 

Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still is an album of great variety, but its beating heart is Wellington’s connection to dance, physicality, and connection. “I think that in general there’s a lack of gathering and moving together,” Wellington says. “The internet gives people a sense that they’re quelling their loneliness in a room by themselves, and that’s a really dangerous thing. An A.I. partner whose task is to concur with everything you say until you become dependent on that affirmation is dangerous, as much for communities as individuals, because friction is something we’ve evolved to crave and need.”

“Dance, to me, is a place where people are allowed to make mistakes. If you don’t try and fail, trying feels very scary. Not trying is not the same as not failing, all it does is reinforce that failure is something unrecoverable! This is always at the back of my head as someone who’s taking traditional music and trying to do new things with it.” Wellington’s newest album Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still, in all its intimacy and idiosyncrasies, is an attempt to bridge this gap between us, to create community, to create connection; for this alone, it is not only a success but a triumph.

Artist: Sophie Wellington

Album Title: Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still

Label: Adhyâropa Records

Release Date: June 8, 2026 (single: ‘Scolding Wife’); June 23, 2026 (single: ‘In Seaport Town’); July 10, 2026 (album: Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still)

Purchase: https://sophiewellington.bandcamp.com/album/her-bright-smile-haunts-me-still

Performers: Sophie Wellington (guitar, fiddle, vocals, percussive dance)