Carrboro
Robin & Linda Williams
The ArtsCenterRobin and Linda Williams are excellent candidates to serve as the poster couple for The ArtsCenter’s American Roots Series, which kicked off its seventh campaign last night with Big Mama E & The Cool and the Will McFarlane Band featuring Armand Lenchek. The Williamses have reconfigured bluegrass, folk and old-time music in their image for close to 40 years (according to Garrison Keillor, “in duet they can do all-purpose welding”), and the pair’s résumé highlights read like the correct answers to the Great Roots Music test: appearances on Mountain Stage, A Prairie Home Companion, Austin City Limits and the Grand Ole Opry, and songs recorded by Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kathy Mattea, Tom T. Hall and Emmylou Harris. To top it off, their home base is Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where country music plays in every breeze. Tickets are $18, and the music starts at 7 p.m. Visit www.artscenterlive.org for the complete Roots Series schedule, with John Mayall, Dave Alvin and Karla Bonoff among the other can’t-miss concerts. Rick Cornell
Raleigh
Zelig
Rialto TheaterNonprofit film society The Cinema Inc. continues its 44th season of classics at the Rialto with Woody Allen’s Zelig. Pioneering a narrative style that would become Christopher Guest’s trademark in the following decade, Allen’s 1983 black-and-white film marks an early collaboration with longtime partner Mia Farrow. Allen plays the title character, who just wants to fit in during the Roaring Twenties. He does so by taking on physical guises and speech patterns and meeting assorted luminaries of the day. Allen combined old period footage with new technology to great effect. See how it holds up tonight at 7. Visit www.cinema-inc.org. Sarah Ewald
Raleigh
Keowee Chamber Music
Temple Beth OrThe many-member classical-and-folk collective Keowee Chamber Music sports an Asheville address, but it’s more telling that the ensemble shares its name with a manmade lake 80 miles southwest, just across the South Carolina border. The word once named a major Cherokee settlement near the Great Smoky Mountains, and that’s the region KCM serves with dozens of acoustic concerts, a festival in its 10th year, an outreach program for children and, most recently, a series of Holocaust remembrance events. This is a rare east-of-the-Piedmont engagement, then, featuring works by Mozart, Debussy, Rossini and Hungarian Erno Dohnányi performed by a string trio and flautist. Tickets for the 3 p.m. show cost $10. See www.rcmg.org. Grayson Currin
