Cindy Harris

Cindy Harris has been making music with piano, fiddle, autoharp, bass, concertina and voice since she was knee high to a grasshopper. She took up autoharp at age 40, and 20 years later became the 2017 International Autoharp Champion. She went on to claim the Mountain Laurel Championship in 2019, and reclaimed the International Championship in 2023. Well known as a teacher and workshop leader, she is also a long-time contradancer, a skilled caller of contras and squares, an explorer of the Anglo concertina, and a West Virginia old time fiddler. She performs regularly with her contradance band GrayScale ContraBand and relishes occasional collaborations with Strange Times (with Jody Kruskal and David Johnson) and Bad Rooster (with David Johnson and Bill Bilassi) as well as other musical friends.

Cindy is particularly interested in traditional music of many varieties, and her repertoire includes everything from Irish tunes and Israeli dance music to dark Appalachian fiddle tunes from the mountains of West Virginia. But her playful side can’t resist amusing modern songs about real life, which somehow co-exist with folk songs from long ago. A concert set from Cindy is always a collection of eclectic surprises bound together by a common theme that suits the occasion.

Cindy has two recordings of her own, “You Can’t Get There From Here” (2006) with her daughter Rebecca Heath, and “Potluck!” (2018), a collection of autoharp duets with fifteen other fabulous autoharp friends. She was also included in the 2003 “Autoharp Legacy” project and appears on autoharp or fiddle on a number of other recordings. She has produced and also appears on three autoharp-related recording projects with members of the Cyberpluckers autoharp discussion group: a 1999 recording of the music of Stephen Foster, and two volumes of “Strike The ‘Harp” featuring a wide variety of holiday-related music (2009 and 2013).

Married for 44 years to college sweetheart Rick Heath, Cindy lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has two lovely daughters, bass player and singing partner Rebecca, and occasional singer and fiddler Sharon.