Bland Simpson biography

COHORT BLAND SIMPSON

     Director of UNC Chapel Hill’s Creative Writing Program, Bland Simpson has worked in music and theater with Jim Wann and Don Dixon for over thirty years. The trio, with help from English professor and outdoorsman Jerry Leath Mills, premiered King Mackerel & The Blues Are Running: Songs & Stories of the Carolina Coast in Chapel Hill, NC, on December 8th, 1985, and the show has since then played all over North Carolina and Virginia, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, everywhere from the West Bank in New York City to the Tybee Island Light on the Georgia coast. As a follow-up, the Cohorts released Wild Ponies: More Songs from the Carolina Coast on CD in 2006.
     A member of the Tony Award-winning stringband The Red Clay Ramblers since 1986, Simpson has toured extensively in North America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and collaborated on the following musicals: Diamond Studs and Hot Grog (with Jim Wann); Life on the Mississippi (with Tommy Thompson); Cool Spring and Tar Heel Voices (with Jack Herrick); Kudzu, A Southern Musical (with Jack Herrick and Doug Marlette); and three-time Broadway hit Fool Moon (with The Red Clay Ramblers). He contributed to the scores of Lone Star Love, or The Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas (Jack Herrick, principal composer/lyricist) and Tony-nominee Pump Boys & Dinettes (Jim Wann, principal composer/lyricist. As a Rambler, Simpson also collaborated on the Atlanta Ballet’s Ramblin’ Suite (2002) and the Carolina Ballet’s 2005 Carolina Jamboree (scheduled for March 2008).
     Simpson is author of the books Heart of the Country; The Great Dismal; The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey; Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals; and two works featuring photography by his wife Ann Cary Simpson (a native of Sea Level in Down East Carteret County), Into the Sound Country and The Inner Islands. A former chair of the NC Writers Conference, he has received the Governor’s Award Conservation Communicator of the Year from the NC Wildlife Federation; the NC Folklore Society’s Brown-Hudson Award for writing and music concerning state and regional heritage; and, in 2005, the North Carolina Award in Fine Arts, the state’s highest civilian honor.

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