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August 24, 2026
Lake George Arts Project at Shepard Park
“I’ve never gone into the studio with a road map,” says Sara, a seasoned side musician to such artists as Richard Shindell, Pete Seeger, Eliza Gilkyson, and Jim Gaudet and the Railroad Boys, and a featured player in the recent smash Broadway musical Come From Away. “Making an album has always been more like a circuitous voyage.”
Sara’s own voyage starts in the bucolic agrarian area of northeast upstate New York — the name of the song that gives Northeast its title is no accident — where she was raised on her family’s working farm and exposed to earthy music at a young age via her parents’ record collection and her grandparents’ efforts in organizing local bluegrass concerts. Having started on violin at age four, by age nine she was already leading her own band and enjoying a rising regional reputation as a top-flight fiddler. “It was a very welcoming scene,” says Sara, who released a live cassette when she was 12. “If you could play, you were accepted. I learned a lot, playing standards like ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and ‘Faded Love’ at grange halls and dances. I loved how those songs could tell stories and make people dance.”
At 16, Sara dropped out of school and joined legendary upstate Celtic bluegrass outfit the McKrells, recording two albums with the group and touring the U.S. and Ireland. “It was the best road education I could’ve asked for,” she recalls about her McKrells tenure. “They’re all world-class pickers, they have well-crafted songs, and they really know how to hold a room. They taught me a lot.” Between accompanying other mentors — including Seeger, on his Grammy-winning 2008 album At 89 — she made her solo debut with 2009’s Daisycutter, a disc whose moniker eventually became that of her band. After an eye-opening 2011 tour with the U.S. State Department-/Jazz at Lincoln Center-sponsored “Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad” revue that took her to Kosovo, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Turkey, she and Daisycutter recorded 2015’s Waiting for the Stars. The acclaimed disc earned her enthusiastic reviews and comparisons to paragons like Shawn Colvin and Sheryl Crow.