The Glorifying Vines Sisters are one of North Carolina’s longest-established quartet-style gospel groups, as well as one of its leading family music ministries. The Vines Sisters come from a large family and first sang with all of their siblings as the Heavenly Ten at the Union Grove Baptist Church near Farmville, North Carolina.

Alice Vines, Dorothy Vines Daniels, Audrey Vines, and Mattie Vines Harper, known collectively as The Glorifying Vines Sisters, are musical matriarchs of Eastern North Carolina. Since 1958, the group has been tearing up the road and tearing up every church they visit. But they don’t confine themselves to churches; they’re comfortable playing secular venues, too.

After more than sixty years as professional touring artists, and over a dozen records, the sisters still live by a belief learned from their mother: “If you listen to music in the right way, you always can get a blessing.”

Faith & Harmony is a family group—two sets of three sisters who are first cousins. They grew up singing together in Greenville, North Carolina. All six members are descendants of Dorothy Vines Daniels of the Glorifying Vines Sisters, a gospel group that for many years has been a Music Maker partner artist, and great nieces of sculptor/guitarmaker/author/musician Freeman Vines.

Faith & Harmony members are Kadesha Spaight, Renay Sugg, KeAmber Daniels, Andrea Edwards, Christy Moody, and Tinesha Weaver. “Music and family go hand in hand for us,” KeAmber said.

The two families have followed the Black gospel tradition—specifically, quartet gospel, which is also known as jubilee singing—from one generation to the next in an unbroken link for nearly 300 years. Jubilee singing employs syncopated rhythms, overlapping melodies, and extended vamps characterized by call-and-response singing with rhythmic short, repeated phrases sung behind a lead singer’s vocal improvisation and religious testimony. More than anything, the singular aim of the song delivery is to rouse the church attendees into an ecstatic and holy reverie.

ABOUT CARROLL V. DASHIELL, JR.

The North Carolina Arts Council, Pitt County Arts Council, and the Greenville-Pitt Convention & Visitors Bureau named Carroll V. Dashiell, Jr. Artistic Director of The African American Music Series in 2016. Carroll Dashiell is a native of Washington, DC. A graduate of Howard University, with citations in Who's Who in Music and Down Beat Magazine, Carroll has been recognized for excellence in the music industry as a bassist, musical director/conductor and also as a composer/arranger. Affectionately known as CVD, he has been involved in academia for more than three decades serving as professor of music at the Saint Mary's College of Maryland, University of the District of Columbia and East Carolina University in North Carolina. He is Professor Emeritus, East Carolina University School of Music and currently serves as Chairman, Department of Music Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts Howard University. CVD is the producer and writer of A Tribute to Motown Records, (a stage show and concert that celebrates some of the African-American's cultural contributions to the music industry, staged in the tradition of the famous touring Motown Review) that is selling out theaters and venues nation-wide. In addition to composing, writing and arranging, CVD is continuing his performance as jazz bassist and is very humbled to be the Founder and Director of the Dr. Billy Taylor Jazz Festival, named in honor of his mentor.