RACHEL SUMNER & TRAVELING LIGHT
“Bookish bite. Sharp harmonies. Songs about saints, scientists, and stubborn women.”
Saturday, September 26 | 7:30pm | ACT II
ACT II Sharon Heflin Performing Arts Education Center
315 N Main St Suite A, North Little Rock, AR 72114
TICKETS: $30
Get ready for tight harmonies, virtuosic musicianship and fearless storytelling! This acoustic folk trio has won the Kerrville New Folk Competition and garnered the 2025 Telluride Bluegrass Band Contest among its many accolades. Tune into the America Folklife Center where their Library of Congress performance is preserved, or better yet, hear them intimately at ACT II in the Argenta Arts District as we bid a fond farewell to the 11th ACANSA Arts Festival of the South.
As for Traveling Light, Rachel told Americana Highways, “It seemed like the right fit for us — a little bit of a dad-joke, but mostly a reference to the stars. I wanted the band name to reflect the feeling that it could evolve and change over time if it needed to — whether that be stylistically, instrumentally or lineup-wise — and light shifts constantly!”
Mike Siegel, upright bass, vocals
Kat Wallace, fiddle, vocals
Rachel Sumner, guitar, vocals
“A bullish band packed with skills…”
Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light is an acoustic folk trio bringing Sumner’s original songs to life. Blending bluegrass, folk, and close three-part harmony, the trio pairs virtuosic musicianship with fearless storytelling, creating concerts that are as entertaining as they are thought-provoking.
Sumner writes because she’s working something out—or because she’s found a story she can’t stop thinking about. Her songs wander through labor history, folklore, the American West, and the lives of women history has too often overlooked. Again and again, they hold the past up like a mirror, asking what it still has to teach us today. She believes curiosity leads to empathy, and that stories remain one of our oldest ways of changing how we see one another. Her songs are written to meet listeners where they are: some simply enjoy a great tune; others leave eager to crack open an encyclopedia. Both feel like success.
Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light won the 2025 Telluride Bluegrass Band Contest, and Sumner is also a winner of the Kerrville New Folk Competition. She has performed at the Library of Congress, where five of her original songs are preserved in the American Folklife Center archives, and her songwriting has been recognized by the John Lennon Songwriting Contest.
Her song “Radium Girls (Curie Eleison)” has been streamed hundreds of thousands of times, tattooed on arms, sung in audition rooms, taught in classrooms, and quietly passed from one curious listener to another. Like much of Sumner’s work, it doesn’t simply tell a forgotten story—it asks why we forgot it in the first place, and who benefits from that forgetting.
Touring nationally, Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light has appeared everywhere from Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, and Earl Scruggs Music Festival to beloved listening rooms like Caffè Lena, Club Passim, and Sweetwater Music Hall. Whether on a festival stage or in a backyard house concert, the trio brings the same joyful musicianship, effortless chemistry, and spirit of discovery to every room. Audiences leave laughing, singing, and carrying the stories with them long after the drive home.