In 2022, banjoist Allison de Groot (she/her) and percussive dancer (Nic Gareiss) released The Thrill, a visual album inspired by archival recordings of Appalachian singer, dancer, and musician Hobart Smith. Smith (1897-1965, Saltville, Virginia) once stated "music fills you with a thrill you just can't express..." The project is at times a tribute, at times a discussion, at others a queer lover's tiff with Hobart's sounds. In this public panel, de Groot and Gareiss will discuss the process of creating The Thrill, showing clips of the visual album, playing selections of Smith's recorded material, and answering questions around the process of both dialoguing and lovingly arguing with his sonic remains.

This event is presented by the Queer Souths Initiative, which seeks to bring queer artists and performers working in the South into conversation with scholars, staff, and students at the University of Virginia. The initiative seeks to celebrate aesthetic and critical practices that challenge normative structures, intimacies, and ways of knowing. Queer Souths explores this work across Appalachia, the Southern United States, and the multiple transgeographic and transglobal Souths, connecting diasporic and migrant networks from Virginia to Philadelphia to El Paso to Cape Town.