Sheila Kay Adams is a seventh-generation ballad singer, banjo player, and storyteller. Her family’s long line of musical and storytelling traditions reaches back two centuries to the original English and Scots-Irish settlers of Sodom Laurel, North Carolina. The community of Sodom Laurel, though small, is well known for its strong and unbroken ballad singing tradition. Many notable ballad singers have come from this region, such as Sheila Kay and her great-aunt and mentor, Dellie Chandler Norton, who taught Sheila Kay balladry in the traditional unaccompanied style. 

In addition to ballad singing, Sheila Kay is an accomplished clawhammer-banjo player and storyteller. She began performing publicly as a teenager and has since been invited to perform at various venues across the country and in the UK. She has published two books – Come Go Home With Me and My Old True Love. She also lent her musical expertise to the productions of the films Last of the Mohicans and Songcatcher. 

Over the course of her career she has won numerous awards including; the North Carolina Society of Historians’ Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award, the North Carolina Folklore Society’s Brown-Hudson Award, the North Carolina Heritage Award, and the National Heritage Fellowship, cementing own legacy as one of the most influential Western North Carolina ballad singers today.