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Duke Arts Presents

William Tyler
Corduroy Roads

Thursday, November 20, 2014 | 8:00 pm

Friday, November 21, 2014 | 8:00 pm

Saturday, November 22, 2014 | 8:00 pm

Sunday, November 23, 2014 | 7:00 pm


**Tickets for ALL performances of William Tyler’s Corduroy Roads are sold out. There will be a waiting list available at the door an hour prior to the start of each performance.**

Duke Performances has commissioned the exceptional solo guitarist William Tyler – who occupies the musical intersection of John Fahey and Bill Frisell – to make a new performance that reflects on the lingering legacy of the Civil War. Corduroy Roads, created by Tyler with his collaborators filmmaker Steve Milligan and theater director Akiva Fox, is a new music/film project. The piece creates a narrative frame for extraordinary photographs of the Civil War taken by George Barnard and Alexander Gardner, 150-year-old artifacts recently acquired by Duke University Libraries. Taking these fragile and beautiful images as his inspiration, Tyler, a Southerner from Tennessee and Mississippi who grew up fascinated by the Civil War, examines questions of history, memory, and the ways in which the war haunts the South to this day.

Corduroy Roads will be performed for an intimate audience at 305 South Dillard, a reclaimed performance space in downtown Durham. Join us for the world premiere of this important new project by Tyler, whose debut solo release Behold the Spirit was lauded by Pitchfork as “the most vital, energized album by an American solo guitarist in a decade or more.”

Made possible, in part, with support from the Archive of Documentary Arts at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University.