SERFA 2025 SCHEDULE AT A GLANCE

Southeast Regional of Folk Alliance (SERFA) Announces Its Keynote Speaker Acclaimed Singer/Songwriter

Rees Shad

At The Bluegrass Hall of Fame & Museum – Woodward Theatre

Owensboro, KY – May 17, 2025

“Choosing Rees Shad was an easy decision as he stands for what Folk music is all about, expressing, demanding, and questioning all the facets of the human spirit” – Jill Kettles, 2025 SERFA President

It’s one thing to be prolific, but quite another to make music that’s consistently imaginative, exploratory, and intended to stand the test of time. Rees Shad has managed to do both. Constantly embracing a ready muse, he never hesitates to explore different sounds and pursuits, never abandoning his mission to shake things up.  

“My politics are pretty clear in my work, but I feel very strongly that we need to overcome the bifurcation of our political atmosphere and society.  An extreme othering has taken over and gotten out of hand, often coming down to rudeness and insulting one another. That is never going to help us come together and overcome the challenges with which we are currently (and increasingly) faced.” – Rees Shad 

SERFA, the Southeastern regional chapter of Folk Alliance International, is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization. The goal of SERFA goal is to provide opportunities for their members to network locally and advance the overall mission of Folk Alliance International. SERFA fosters and promotes member initiatives in its member states.:  Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. 

The annual SERFA conference is being held in Owensboro, Kentucky from May 15 – 18, 2025. Activities, including workshops, song circles, and artist showcases take place at the Owensboro Convention Center, Bluegrass Hall of Fame & Museum. Lodging is provided by the Hampton Inn & Suites Owensboro Downtown/Riverside. For more information and to register for the conference, visit SERFA.org. 

Born and raised in New York City, Rees has been recording music since he swiped his father’s reel-to-reel DictaphoneTM at four years old to record a song he had composed on the family piano. As a teenager, he began playing Greenwich Village clubs and hanging around recording studios as a sideman on sessions with Brill Building songwriters. While still in college, he renovated an early 19th-century barn into the first iteration of Sweetfish Recording Studios—a residential full-production studio in Upstate New York. Over the next fourteen years, Sweetfish would host scores of independent and major label acts from around the world and contribute to hundreds of releases. In 2000, Rees closed his musical shop and enrolled in graduate school, earning two Masters degrees, which led to a 20-year career in higher education.  

To date, Rees holds about 400 copyrights and has released 17 international solo albums and 13 additional albums (including March 2025’s Porcelain Angel) involving collaborations and side projects—all of which have garnered a combined 5.5M streams. His songs are rich in narrative and hybridize numerous genres in what Seth Rogovoy called Rees’s “relentless quest to push the boundaries of musical storytelling."

American Songwriter magazine described his work as “sometimes terse, always tender, the songs resonate with emphatic emotions convincingly conveyed in every verse and chorus.”  

Shad has never believed that such attempts are essential axioms when it comes to reaping artistic rewards. “I’m a singer/songwriter and I make music that some people can listen to and enjoy,” he insists. “It is my music, created to communicate ideas through stories, melody, rhythm, and performance. It blends styles and approaches, and it warrants your attention. I hope you enjoy it. That’s really the whole point.” 

“I distanced myself from the music industry and performance for close to two decades and only came back to it because I felt it was a point of commonality-perhaps one of the only points of commonality-through which such coming together can happen.” – Rees Shad 

SERFA 2025 Keynote will be delivered on May 17, 2025, at 11 AM in Woodward Theater, located inside the Bluegrass Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, KY. This not open to the public.

 For more information about Rees: www.reeshad.music.com

For more information about SERFA: www.serfa.org

Photo credit: Tim Gaudreau