About this Event

Currently touring nationwide, actress Barbara Bates Smith and musician Jeff Sebens will present “Go, Granny D!” on Thursday, August 16th, 7:30 pm at The Colonial Theater in Canton. The performance will be dedicated to the memory of the late C. Russell Smith, Barbara’s husband, a committed campaigner for the party.

Touting “You’re never too old to raise a little hell,” the 90-year-old Doris “Granny D” Haddock in 2000 blazed a 3200-mile trail across America for campaign finance reform, precipitating the passage of the McCain-Feingold Act. She continued her bipartisan reform efforts in countrywide voter registration drives, issuing her final challenge in 2010 at age 100: “Democracy is a running game. You huddle and you go back in. You keep going.”

Barbara Bates Smith, noted for her Off-Broadway adaptation and performance of “Ivy Rowe” from Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies, has toured for twenty-nine years with the works of Lee Smith. She has been active in the NAACP’s Moral Monday reform movement in North Carolina, even as an arrestee, in the spirit of Granny D’s efforts to reclaim our democracy. For fifteen years, Jeff Sebens has accompanied her shows with a variety of hammered dulcimer, lap dulcimer, guitar, and banjo music.

Tickets are $15 in advance and are available at the Haywood Democrats headquarters (Tue, Wed, Thu 10am-2pm) or online.