Donna Ray Norton, a 2026 South Arts Emerging Artist, is an eighth-generation Appalachian ballad singer, storyteller, and culture bearer from the Sodom Laurel (Revere) community of Madison County, North Carolina, where ballad singing has lived in her family for nine generations. She learned these songs the traditional way, by ear and knee to knee, through her mother, Lena Jean Ray; her cousin, Sheila Kay Adams; and generations of Ray, Wallin, Shelton and Norton kin, carrying forward one of the oldest surviving oral traditions in the United States. She did not inherit land or wealth. She inherited songs, stories held in memory and passed through bloodlines, where music is not separate from life but woven into it.

As the next in line behind Adams, Donna Ray carries the responsibility of keeping the torch lit and ensuring the songs that shaped her family continue to burn brightly for those who come after her. She has shared stages with artists including Ketch Secor, Warren Haynes, Grahame Lesh, Tim O’Brien, and Sierra Ferrell, bringing traditional unaccompanied ballads into contemporary performance spaces. Her work and advocacy for Appalachian culture have been featured in Oxford American, Rolling Stone, and Garden & Gun. As founder and leader of The Nest of Singing Birds and host of the monthly Old Marshall Jail Ballad Swap, she remains committed to ensuring these songs are not museum pieces but living, evolving traditions rooted in the mountains and resonant far beyond them.

Like her forbearers, Donna Ray grew up hearing her family's music and stories in her home; but it did not always appeal to her. "It was just one of those things that you grew accustomed to, and you learned from hearing them." Read more

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When Donna Ray was seventeen, however, a senior project in high school "was what really got me interested in my heritage." Researching the tradition of ballads led to learning them—from her mother, from Adams, Marilyn McMinn McCredie, and Mary Eagle—and then to performing.  

Norton is now a highly regarded member of the younger generation of Madison County ballad singers and storytellers. She was featured in the documentary Madison County Project, which won the 2005 Audience Choice Award at the Asheville Film Festival. She has performed at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Festival, Mars Hill University Heritage Day, and at many other venues in western North Carolina every year since she began her musical journey.

In 2005, she was honored with the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Youth Award for Balladry. In 2006, Donna Ray performed with the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra in their "Blue Skies/Red Earth" concert series in Raleigh. She also toured western North Carolina with the Symphony concert at the end of May 2007 and received The Key to the City of Hickory for her contributions in musical heritage. Donna Ray has performed at the Berkeley Old Time Music Festival in Berkeley California twice now. She has been performing across North Carolina at several different venues, including a series and festival at the NC Museum of History. She performed at the 50th annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C. in July of 2017 with her cousins, Sheila Kay Adams and Melanie Rice. She and Melanie performed in Washington at the Folklore Society of Greater Washington's Getaway in October of 2018.

She has been a part of many different performances celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Cecil Sharp traveling through the Appalachian Mountains and collecting the old ballads from people in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. These shows were in Blowing Rock and Mars Hill, NC and at The Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol, Virginia. Donna Ray is a featured artist in an exhibit at The Birthplace of Country Music Museum titled “I’ve Endured: Women in Old Time Music,” which debuted in March 2023. She was featured in a radio showcase in Australia for the “Country Wagon Show.”

Norton added MerleFest and the Earl Scruggs Music Festival to the list of places she has performed, as well as performing with the Blue Ridge Opry in November of 2023. In 2026, she played the Cabin Stage at MerleFest as a special guest of Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor and performed on the first Grand Ole Opry staged hosted at MerleFest.

Most recently Donna Ray has added hosting events to her long list of accomplishments. She, alongside her cousin Sheila Kay Adams, hosts a monthly Ballad Swap at the historic Old Marshall Jail Hotel and Zadie’s Restaurant. Ballad Night at the Old Marshall Jail just celebrated its two-year anniversary! It is the only recurring Ballad Swap that happens anywhere in Western North Carolina. This led to an article being published in the Winter Ballads Issue of the Oxford American Magazine, titled “Orphan Girl”, it features Donna Ray and the swap at the Old Marshall Jail Hotel.

She and Sheila Kay attended and performed at the Folk Alliance International Conference in Canada, where her efforts earned them an article in Rolling Stone Magazine. Shortly after, they opened the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, performed at Capricorn Studios in Macon Georgia, Grocery on Home in Atlanta, Raleigh Wide Open, opened for Sierra Ferrell at the Orange Peel in Asheville, and opened for Ketch Secor at Grey Eagle in Asheville. Donna Ray also opened the Warren Haynes Christmas Jam in Asheville, NC and was accompanied by Warren himself, as well as Grahame Lesh. 

She has three albums available. Her newest album was produced by Grammy nominated and highly accomplished old-time, bluegrass, and swing musician, Josh Goforth. Josh also provides the musical accompaniment for Donna Ray’s first ever bluegrass song, featured on this album. A special treat for any listener, for sure! One of her songs was used by Sarah Council, an independent choreographer, in a piece that she created telling the story of her southern roots and personal history in New York City. She was featured on an album called “Big Bend Killing, The Appalachian Ballad Tradition”, with artists such as Sheila Kay, Bobby McMillon, Alice Gerrard, Amythyst Kiah, Roy Andrade, David Holt and Roseanne Cash. This album was released in the fall of 2017 and nominated for a Grammy in 2018. In 2023 she was featured on an album released by the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area.

Donna Ray’s work with Fine Tuned producer Josh Goforth on her album Forevermore I’ll Sing was the prototype for the Fine Tuned project, inspiring the mentorship and innovative collaboration of the other Fine Tuned groupings. 

She has also worked with Tyler Ramsey, performing with him at Rare Bird Farm, and the two have a collaborative project in the works.