“A lot of great male voices have come from North Carolina including Eric Church, James Taylor, Randy Travis and Don Williams...Aaron Burdett has proven this his name needs to added to that list.” –Rick Amburgey, No Depression
“The more I listen, the more I like this music.” –Larry Stephens, The Lonesome Road Review
“Well-crafted original songwriting… a bit acoustic, a bit electric, and a bit early New Grass Revival.”–Casey Driessen (Béla Fleck, Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott, Steve Earle)
“One of our favorite regional singer-songwriters.” —Martin Anderson, Program Director, WNCW, Spindale, NC
“His sense of melody and depth of lyrics is the perfect combination. His trajectory will be comparable to Ray LaMontagne and Amos Lee when people start to take notice. It will be exciting to watch.” — Brian Swenk (Big Daddy Love), The Mountain Times
Short bio:
Aaron Burdett is an acclaimed Americana/folk singer-songwriter and performer from Western North Carolina, and is listed as one of the most important western NC musicians by WNC Magazine. He's won top awards in multiple songwriting competitions hosted by the likes of Merlefest, The USA Songwriting Competition, Mountain Stage, the NC Songwriter’s Co-op, and Our State Magazine. His last four albums have been voted top 20 Albums of the Year by WNCW radio listeners. www.AaronBurdett.com
In 2022 joined the Grammy winning band Steep Canyon Rangers, and he’s now on tour with them full time.
Longer Bio:
Aaron Burdett’s lyrics are soul-touching, intelligent, witty, and poetic all at once, while his music style is a seamless blend of Americana, country, blues, bluegrass, and folk.
Aaron is listed as one of the Top 10 most important musicians of western North Carolina by WNC Magazine, alongside such greats as Doc Watson, Steep Canyon Rangers, and The Avett Brothers. He has also received critical acclaim as a songwriter, most recently winning the Chris Austin Songwriting contest at MerleFest for the bluegrass category for his song Rockefeller. His latest album “Dream Rich, Dirt Poor” (2021) debuted at #8 on the Billboard bluegrass charts and has had 4 top 10 radio songs to date.
Burdett took home the grand prize in the folk category of the USA Songwriting Contest with “A Couple Broken Windows” in 2018 and was also the winner of Our State Magazine’s Carolina Songs Competition in 2012 with “Going Home to Carolina.” Aaron’s song “Magpie” won third place bluegrass song in Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at Merlefest in 2013. Over the years Aaron has been a finalist in numerous other songwriting competitions, including The Mountain Stage Songwriting Contest, The NC Songwriter’s Cooperative Songwriting Contest, and the Hank Williams Songwriting Contest.
As a child, Aaron discovered John Hiatt, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, The Beatles, The Band, and Rickie Lee Jones on vinyl records in his parents' living room in the mountains of North Carolina. As a budding guitarist and songwriter, he was drawn to powerful communicators of the time like David Wilcox and Tracy Chapman and John Gorka. In his late teens, he discovered John Prine on a cassette tape dug out of a workshop drawer filled with rusty sixteen penny nails on a Wyoming ranch. He re-discovered the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on that same trip in a second-hand store in Riverton, Wyoming.
In his 20s he was introduced to Doc Watson when he heard him play in the living room of an old farmhouse near Boone, North Carolina. That experience led him to Norman Blake, Tony Rice, David Grier, Tim O'Brien, Darrell Scott, and Gillian Welch.
Mix all those influences up, add time and pressure, seven full-album releases, thousands of live performances, and you get Aaron Burdett the songwriter and artist you hear today.
Drawing heavily on both the traditions of Appalachian folk music as well as nationally known songwriters, Aaron’s music gives voice to the small rural areas of the Blue Ridge Mountains while also speaking to the working men and women throughout the country.
