Dave Ruch, a full-time musician, researcher, performer and public scholar for the New York Council for the Humanities will perform a program titled “Dead Roots: the folk, blues, Appalachian and jug band roots of the Grateful Dead” a 3 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 19 in the First Presbyterian Church of Ironton.

Admission is $15. Tickets are available at the performance and the concert is free for students. The church is handicap accessible with a lift chair to the sanctuary available through the basement entrance and a ramp leading to the sanctuary in the back of the church.

Ruch’s work has been featured on American Public Media, in Emmy Award-winning documentaries and on stages across North America and the U.K. He delights adult audiences with authentic songs and stories from the people who built and settled our communities – farmers, domestics, lumbermen, fiddlers, women, soldiers, children, immigrants, sailors, Native Americans, canallers, and more. Dave finds his song material in dusty archives, obscure songbooks, diaries, old field recordings, scholarly journals and sometimes from his own children, and brings these gems to life with great skill on banjo, guitar, mandolin, octave mandolin, bones, spoons, washboard and jaw harp.

Ruch graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology and Business. His discomfort in the corporate world led to his fledgling beginnings as a full-time musician in 1992, and a devastating case of tendinitis in 1994 took him out of the world of four-hour-long performances in clubs and into the world of educational entertainment. He now performs for and works with groups of adults, kids, school students and others, connecting history and culture with music while having as much fun as possible.

Ruch works in schools, does educational concerts for adults, researches “heritage” music and regional culture, records, plays electric guitar in a band or two including an original “jam band”, runs a whole series of distance learning programs, coaches other artists, teaches people to play the spoons.

Some of Ruch’s projects include an Emmy-winning PBS documentary called “Songs to Keep,” an award-winning website called “W is for the Woods,” a ten-year run as a “Speaker in the Humanities” for the New York Council for the Humanities, a new appointment as a Public Scholar for NYCH, a concert tour in the U.K., articles for The Huffington Post, a slate of well over 2,000 school performances, a network TV appearance, a global online singalong for 27,000 students.

The Ironton Council for the Arts would like to thank the Ohio Arts Council for awarding the council their first-ever Art Start grant will be used to help defray the cost of performance fees and operating expenses for the 2022-23 concert season.