In his first appearance at the Athenaeum Center, North Carolina’s Colin Cutler will be performing Tarwater, an album of songs based on Flannery O’Connor’s short story characters that charted in both folk and alt country radio. The evening will also include a presentation on the project and O’Connor’s theology of art, in conversation with O’Connor scholar Amy Alznauer.

Raised Pentecostal in a military family with North Carolina and Pennsylvania Catholic roots, an Army veteran who traded in his rifle for a banjo and guitar and a wandering troubadour’s period thumbing rides around Europe, a community college teacher who has taught with the Fulbright program and studied with the National Endowment of the Humanities, an award-winning folk musician and songwriter, Colin Cutler’s life has drawn from many threads. On Tarwater, his fourth studio album, he wove them together into what No Depression described as “one magnificent tapestry of roots music.”

Lyrically, Tarwater was inspired by the earthy characters of Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor and where they’d crossed paths with Cutler’s own life, as well as the searing vision of God and humanity that O’Connor articulated in her essays–the effect is both “wickedly funny” (Susquehanna Folk Music Society) and “devastating” (Americana Highways). With music pulling from blues, Appalachian oldtime, gospel, Sacred Steel, traditional country, and early rock’n’roll, Paste described Tarwater as having”…a juke joint energy coursing through it and a humidity that seems to sweat out the sins and the booze that these characters are often soaked in.”