Donna Ray Norton 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.

Donna Ray has been recognized as a 2026 South Arts Emerging Artist.