Ragtime rhythms, finger picking guitar style, and understated vocals are the hallmarks of the folk music style found in the Piedmont region, the area between the Atlantic Coastal Plain and the Appalachian Mountains from central Georgia to central Virginia. Jazz pianist-composer-bandleader Gerald Clayton has captured the essence of this celebrated land, home to a unique culture and rapidly vanishing folkloric history, and preserved it in a multimedia project. Piedmont Blues features a nine-piece band led by Clayton that includes vocalist Rene Marie and tap dancer Maurice Chestnut, and it combines music with projected film and new and archival photography to create an epic cultural event.