Joe Newberry brought April Verch to Fountain, confident she’d enjoy dancing on our 100-year old pine floor. A full house subsequently had another of those “you-shoulda-been-there” kinds of nights.
Verch is a native of Rankin, Ontario, and what fun it must have been in that little burg–today, like Fountain’s population, about 550–to watch a child prodigy in both stepdance and fiddle grow up there.
“I was fortunate that my parents loved the traditional music scene that existed in the Ottawa Valley and that’s what I grew up around,” she told Michael Lohr for Bluegrass Unlimited. “You went to the local dance hall every Saturday night for entertainment and everyone had a fiddler or dancer in the family and kitchen parties abounded.”
Her dad, Ralph Verch, “had a country music band before I came along,” she said. “He’s a great singer and guitar player.” She guested on his first CD, released in 2009.
Source
Lohr, Michael. “April Verch, Queen of the Fiery Fiddlestick.” Bluegrass Unlimited, June 2009: 50-53. Buy it.
