Late one night at Merlfest 2006, after a few months of making music and dancing together, Julie and Jennie decided to form the Linefork Girls, a flatfooting and clogging ensemble with a shared love of old time traditional music and good moonshine.
The Linefork Girls throw down their dance boards and make music with their feet at festivals and fiddlers conventions all across the eastern US, especially in the mountains of Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina. The Girls can regularly be found dancing with bands like the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers, Clack Mountain String Band, and Matt Kinman and the Old Time Serenaders. In addition to freestyle dancing at festivals, the Linefork Girls give lecture-demonstrations on traditional Appalachian dance (flatfooting and clogging) and music (old time and mountain bluegrass), as well as dance workshops and called square dances. Both Linefork Girls also danced with Hell or Highwater (along with Carla Gover and Brett Ratliff), a clogging group (not white-shoe) that did percussive dance pieces along with more traditional mountain figures. Look for a resurrection of Hell or Highwater in the fall of 08.
Linefork is a small community in southeast Kentucky, just down the road from where Julie used to have a farm and in the mountains where Jennie spent most of her time. Both Linefork Girls have since moved--Jennie to Philadelphia to finish up her PhD and Julie to the Shenandoah Valley to work at a college. Julie will be headed back to Kentucky (Lexington) in the fall to begin a PhD program.
