AIɫɫ

On any given day, she leans into a network of relationships. She draws from a well of memory informed by a past carried down through songs heard and stories told, a life crisscrossed by roads and trails and neural connections that mirror the filament of the cosmos.

Dierauf hurtles toward college graduation with much to celebrate — a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, a full calendar of engagements for her band The Wilder Flower. These things create tension, but maybe it’s tension she’ll reckon with in a hit song. Who knows? That’s what her professors say, but not with a shrug. They say it with warmth, with confident expectation. Because the world is wide and the road is open and the sky’s the limit, and we have planes, trains and automobiles, and our own imaginations.

Her feet beat time on the wooded trails behind AIɫɫ, where the trees feel a little closer to home, and she works out the rhythm of her days — how much reading does she have to do before she heads to Boone for the gig with her band? Will she have to Zoom with her professor from the car again? Does she have time to eat more than a gas station protein bar?

Hectic, but the doing is what she loves.

Roots in Red Clay

Nashville might be the epicenter of country and birthplace of bluegrass, but musician and songwriter Jon Weisberger says Western North Carolina has its own genesis story. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains a short drive south from Asheville, the small North Carolina town of Brevard boasts an impressive roster of resident artists — Travis Book, Sarah Siskind, several members of the Steep Canyon Rangers, and Weisberger himself.

“Bluegrass is one of those rare musical forms where a large number of fans have also played music,” Weisberger says, “so rather than have a hard division between entertainers and fans, you have a unique community built around this set of songs that enable people who don’t know each other, maybe even can’t speak the same language, to sit around and make music together for hours.”

Dierauf lived her early years against a backdrop of hazy mountains, thick pine forests, waterfalls and tunes from another time, in a place where nationally touring musicians get together and jam with the locals. A “free-range child,” she roamed the woods around the family’s mountain home for hours, fertile ground for imagination.

Her father Roland, a DJ at WNCW 88.7 public radio, spins everything from Doc Watson to Ella Fitzgerald for his “Music Mix” radio show. He recalls his daughter as a toddler, lying awake in bed, tapping her feet to the rhythms coming from elsewhere in their home. She requested “the boograss”— a bluegrass compilation CD that lulled her to sleep night after night — and spent days at festivals and outdoor concerts swinging in hammocks and running around with the other kids as the music played.

After sitting out a third-grade school talent show, Dierauf declared she needed a talent, Roland says. She insisted on the fiddle, so her father bought a half-sized, cheap plastic model and found a teacher. She covered three weeks of material in the first lesson.

When the Transylvania County talent show rolled around the next year, Dierauf was ready. On a stage that looked like it might swallow her, she tore through “Orange Blossom Special,” a rollicking, classic fiddle tune played at breakneck speed to mimic the sound of a train. The audience took notice, Roland says, and so did a Nashville talent scout.

Dierauf honed her craft, attending the Mountain School of Strings and playing bluegrass, Appalachian folk, Irish and old-time string music every chance she could. She spent hours with craftsman Lyle Reedy, the Brevard-based luthier who custom-made one of her instruments, talking in his workshop. By high school, she had twice won the South Carolina State Fiddling Championship.

The fiddle part flowed, but the performing part didn’t come easy.

“The hardest thing for her when she was little was to play with people looking at her and listening to her,” Roland says.

She conquered stage fright after years of repetition and the opportunity to play on some big stages — at 17, she performed with the Steep Canyon Rangers in front of 80,000 concert goers at Merlefest, the annual “traditional plus” music festival held in honor of Doc Watson’s son, Eddie Merle Watson. That ability to perform under pressure would serve her well.

Happy Trails

The COVID pandemic shuttered schools and upended life the year Dierauf would have started college. Instead, she opted for a gap year. After working for the local Board of Elections during the 2020 presidential election cycle, she shouldered a 20-pound pack for a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail (AT).

The non-partisan Board of Elections job provided more than funds for Dierauf’s adventure; it granted perspective to a teen with flagging belief in American democracy.

“We chatted while assembling ballots and waited for a Baptist coworker to pray before meals,” Dierauf wrote in her Rhodes essay, “and appreciating each other’s cultural traditions allowed us to connect across age, class and belief.”

Dierauf left that experience with a renewed sense of hope and an orientation toward the world that would be reinforced during the long hike.

“American politics are really important,” she says. “But at the same time, I believe there is something bigger than that in communities that is more important.”

The 2,190-mile-long AT cuts through fields and farmland from Georgia to Maine, rough mountain terrain and tiny towns. One in four people who attempt the thru hike each year actually completes it.

At mile 100, Dierauf abandoned her intention to hike solo when she met the first member of what would become her trail family, or “tramily.”

“At first, we really kept tabs on her. And then she got in with her tramily and my wife went and met them and really liked them,” Roland says. “She was like, ‘This is a good group and she’s got people now.’”

The tramily ranged in age from 18 to late 50s and included a couple of military veterans, a medical student and a philosophy student.

“On the trail, there are no boundaries. You’re sleeping right next to each other, you’re eating together,” Dierauf says. “You’re all day every day, everything.”

From that intimacy, trail names are born — Dierauf was christened “Pigpen” after walking into a shelter with dirt all over her face. The name stuck, owing to some of her morning and evening routines, which were less than hygienic (she declined to elaborate).

The tramily’s bond transcended political, social and demographic boundaries.

“Some were hiking at the end of their careers,” she says. “They were politically very different from where I was at 18, and it was just really cool to talk with people with different life experiences and outlooks. One of my tramily members reflected on raising his daughters, and that was just so interesting to hear.”

Four and a half months later, or 131 days and four pairs of Hoka Speed Goat trail runners later, she triumphantly crested Maine’s Mt. Katahdin, the northernmost point of the trail. Ready to see her family and fiddle again, she headed home to prepare for the start of her freshman year at the University of Virginia; but in between the coming home and leaving, a new opportunity emerged.

In Bloom

At 22, Dierauf’s demeanor belies her age. Tall and long-limbed, dressed in thrift-store chic (for the sake of sustainability), and known to cut her own now-shoulder-length hair, Dierauf’s smile conveys ease and offers it to whoever is on the receiving end. She’s a little bit surprised and a lot grateful for the attention the Rhodes Scholarship has brought her way, and to her band, The Wilder Flower.

The trio formed in 2021, when Dierauf met bandmates guitarist Danielle Yother and banjoist Molly Johnson at the South Carolina Fiddling Competition.

The partnership evolved organically, Dierauf says, and the group released its first album in 2023.

“The two of them are just awesome visionaries for the band, especially Danielle. She’s really a dreamer, so she’s often the one reaching for the moment,” Dierauf says. “I think I’m a planner and a plotter, so I’m thinking about all these schemes of how things could go and all the contingencies. And Molly is very measured and earnest, and you can hear her sincerity in her songs. She’s doing our taxes right now, I’m thinking about the timeline of our next three albums, and Danielle is cold-calling venues in Oregon.”

In rare free moments before or after shows, they slip away to the nearest antique mall where Dierauf combs the copious treasures for petite pottery dishes and tiny gold and silver trays. During performances, the three women draw listeners into their world through stories, improvised banter, and original musical arrangements that defy genre.

The band played twice on Davidson’s campus during the spring semester — the first time at Summit Coffee on Main St., the second as part of the Traditional Music Series in the Duke Family Performance Hall.

On a chilly February night, a steady stream of professors, college staff and students made their way up Summit’s narrow staircase to the second floor, where row after row of mismatched chairs filled the space in front of a tiny stage and retro-looking, slightly wobbly microphone.

The trio paused between songs as Johnson changed keys on the banjo — an instrument notorious for quickly slipping out of pitch. Dierauf quipped, “Anyone know any banjo jokes?” As Johnson strummed and plucked, Yother chimed in, “How long does it really take to tune a banjo? Nobody knows — it’s never been done.”

Dierauf’s friends and classmates occupied the front row, some crowding together cross-legged on the floor. When the band launched into a raucous fiddle tune, the barriers between performers and audience disintegrated.

The students answered Yother’s invitation to dance, leaving self-consciousness behind and bouncing happily around the musicians until the end of the set.

School Days

Roland Dierauf attempts to think about his daughter’s intellect without parental bias. It’s hard. From an early age, Madeline devoured books. She enrolled in calculus classes at Brevard College and grew to love imaging 4-D shapes.

As a freshman at UVA, she showed her dad the first essay she wrote for a senior-level English class.

“I didn’t do work of that quality when I was in grad school,” he says. “She wants to be sure she does things perfectly, but she likes to learn, likes ideas. It’s just always been deep in her.”

Dierauf transferred to Davidson as a sophomore from the University of Virginia, motivated by the need to be closer to her bandmates and by Davidson’s academic environment. Professor Maria Fackler still recalls the sophomore who dissected J. G. Ballard’s Crash with sentences sharp enough to leave marks. For her honors thesis, she returned to Ballard’s novel and tackled Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, tracing “the mechanics of unease” with the same precision she applies to bowing patterns.

“She’s incredibly intellectually curious and can hold disparate ideas in productive tension in her head quite easily,” Fackler says. “Madeline doesn’t just absorb information; she questions, interrogates and challenges it. Her richly syncretic mind works in wonderful ellipses and loops and swirls. She takes the unanticipated route with staggeringly impressive results.”

That blurring of boundaries allows coursework to bleed into the creative work of songwriting. Dierauf’s song “Janie,” inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, emerged from an independent study with Professor Anne Wills on transcendence in American literature.

Sung from the perspective of Hurston’s protagonist, “Janie” is a meditation on nature, revelation and the search for meaning.

“Madeline asked, ‘How does Janie relate to God, to creation, to nature, to the world?’” Wills says. “I love that this song is one of the unexpected fruits of the semester.”

Dierauf will make her way to the University of Oxford in the fall to complete two master’s programs — one in American Studies and the other in Philosophical Theology. It will be her first time in Oxford, but not her first time exploring the holdings of the university’s storied Bodleian Library.

Davidson Professor Hudson Vincent hired Dierauf to comb through the library’s digitized archives of early modern ballads for a study of early American prison literature. Reading deeply, Dierauf discovered several songs that have yet to be studied by scholars.

“She not only found new primary source materials,” he says, “but also helped me to consider the importance of folk ballads to the history of transatlantic prison literature.”

The literature chronicles the journeys of English citizens who were convicted of crimes, shipped to America and sold to colonists as indentured servants, typically for seven to 14 years.

“There are these heartbreaking ballads about people who committed vagrancy,” Dierauf says. “There’s one where a baby is ripped from its father’s breast — just awful. But that is where the American ballad tradition comes from.”

Reimagining Tradition

If Dierauf’s academic life is a testament to intellectual rigor and curiosity, her musical career is a masterclass in cultural preservation and innovation. Along with The Wilder Flower, she performs with four other bands, tours the United States, releases recordings and teaches workshops in bluegrass and Irish ornamentation from South Carolina to Colorado.

Weisberger, the veteran bluegrass musician and producer who has worked with The Wilder Flower on recent recording sessions, describes Dierauf as a talented performer who understands tradition but isn’t afraid to push boundaries.

“The point is not to preserve this music in a museum,” he says. “It’s preserved through performance and through cooperation. There’s an emphasis on new songs, but there’s also a powerful desire to hang on to the songs that have stood the test of time. You have to reference the past and recognize the past in order to move forward.”

Dierauf’s ability to exist fully in different spheres — academia and traditional music, elite education and rural culture — earned her a Rhodes Scholarship, making her one of only 32 Americans selected for the honor in 2024, and the 24th Davidson student to earn the distinction. But more remarkable than the achievement itself is how she weaves these threads of her life into something uniquely powerful: a bridge between worlds that seem increasingly disconnected in American culture.

Rural landscapes border I-26 as you travel to Brevard by way of Asheville, the mountain city hub for the arts that’s also an international tourist hot spot.

“I’ve never had the luxury of believing that people who think differently from me are bad people,” Dierauf says, as she reflects on growing up in a red county where diverse political viewpoints coexist within a shared heritage. “Living in Western North Carolina has made that impossible.”

In an era marked by deep political and cultural divisions, music can transcend boundaries. Bluegrass and folk, genres often associated with conservative or rural America, speak to listeners of all persuasions through common themes: love, loss, hardship, sorrow.

“Creating music in a way that’s welcoming and inclusive of everyone feels really important to me,” Dierauf says. “At Wilder Flower shows, there’s enough of everyone in us that all sorts of people are coming out.”

This ethos is reflected in her teaching. Dierauf leads workshops for students of all ages and backgrounds, often in places where the legacy of folk music is intertwined with histories of struggle and resilience.

“She’s a promising teacher and spokesperson for American and British folk music,” Professor Vincent says. “As a Rhodes Scholar, she has a unique opportunity to become one of the most important voices reviving and promoting British-American folk music on a global stage.”

At the heart of Dierauf’s work is a commitment to preserving the cultural heritage of Appalachia and American folk music not as an old-time curiosity, but as a living, breathing tradition.

“Folk music is always evolving,” she says. “Every time someone picks up a fiddle or sings an old song, they’re adding something new. These songs belong to everyone.”

Balancing Act

Dierauf’s life seems impossibly full: seminars, rehearsals, gigs all over the country, and now, preparations for the summer and Oxford.

“What makes her so sweet, generous and singular is that she’s touring with the band and then she’s reading this very difficult theory, and then she’s working at the Davidson Farm, or she’s doing all of these different things at once,” Fackler says. “Last week, she Zoomed into our tutorial from her car on the way to Asheville. Another time, she called in from a hotel room at Dollywood. She’s always on the move, but she never lets anything slip. She makes it look easy, and none of it is.”

Dierauf is candid about the challenges.

“There are things I have to say no to sometimes,” she says. “You can’t do everything, and you have to be honest about your limits.”

Dierauf tries to draw those lines, though not always with success she admits, to allow for something even more important: connection with people.

She credits her mother, Beth, for that invaluable lesson — give of your time generously, and try to be present, always. Wherever the family went, they joked they’d have to drag Beth away by both hands to get her to leave a conversation.

“At least in the lore of what Appalachia is, that’s pretty prominent, just sitting on the porch and having time, being with people, passing the hours,” she says. “I don’t think we realize how much we’re missing when we don’t make time for people.”

Beth, a beloved assistant district attorney known for her compassion and integrity, died of cancer in November 2023. Dierauf finds guidance in her mother’s legacy of devotion to public service and community.

“Frequently, people she prosecuted later asked for help improving their futures. Relationships of that nature are unlikely, but she was kind, honest, respectful, and always believed that lives could change,” Dierauf wrote in her Rhodes essay. “She was exceptional, and when she passed away last fall, I could suddenly see her, and all of those qualities, more fully than before.”

Roland Dierauf sees those same qualities in his daughter.

“Madeline is really kind and she’s able to see the good in everyone, which is totally like her mom,” he says. “Her mother could talk to anyone and they’d feel like they’ve connected with her, even at the grocery store checkout line — Madeline’s just as good at that.”

Dierauf returned to Davidson that November to complete final exams.

“I don’t hold Madeline up in any heroic or sentimental way,” Professor Wills says, “but she is a powerful example to me about acceptance and humanity in the face of a terrible loss. There is a lot of wisdom in this person.”

The interview for the Rhodes Scholarship took place nearly a year to the day her mother passed away.

Coda

Dierauf graduated from Davidson May 18 under a cerulean sky. The Wilder Flower has gigs lined up through the summer, and Oxford looms large. The nerves haven’t set in yet, but she has some questions: will she unearth some cool clothes in the charity shops, will the English weather affect her mood, will she find people to make music with right away? She wonders, will the mystique of Oxford conjure that feeling she had as a college freshman — that everything is big and important and exciting? She hopes so.    

Time changes things, and The Wilder Flower will evolve while Dierauf is away. More recording, more attention to their social media, songwriting — these things are possible through technology. But sometimes Dierauf wants nothing more than to stay still.

“If I could isolate and change one element of the modern world,” she says, “I wish there wasn’t the expectation and possibility of doing all of these things and being eight places at once and being half committed to all of them.”

The interstates we drive that cut through the landscape and bypass small towns, the airplanes that slice open the sky, leaving trails that look like lonely tree roots — we travel so far, so fast, but Dierauf wonders, at what cost?

“I know I’m going to be flying back for gigs because I can,” she says, “but I also think it might be better if I didn’t do that; if I spent my summer there, just being immersed.”

She will have some decisions to make, but no matter how she does it, the plan is to continue making music. And whether or not the connections are mediated by technology, she’ll connect with people past and present — as an academic, musician or something else entirely.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she wins a Grammy one day,” Professor Fackler says. “But I also wouldn’t be surprised if she becomes a public intellectual, or a teacher, or an advocate for the arts. She’s going to be fine either way.”

Back in Brevard, Dierauf stands on her back porch surveying the remnants of an ancient mountain range that was created by a collision of continents 340 million years ago and later slowly ripped apart by tectonic forces. Soon she will travel across the ocean that now divides those continents carrying with her timeless things — music, literature, a sense of belonging.

“I don’t know exactly what comes next,” she says. “But I know I want to keep building bridges.”