Welcome To Travianna

At Travianna Records we believe that music needs no boundaries. We believe music is meant to be experienced, to be participatory—we believe that it’s able to stretch its roots deep into your heart and plant a seed that carries the essence of all that came before and all that is yet to come.
This label is born from love. Love of music, love of community and friendship. It was born from the life and death of a man who exemplified all that Americana music can encompass and who pursued creative potential by allowing it to guide him through his life. Samuel A’Court Ashe Bason (better known as A’Court) crossed over in August of 2013. A’Court’s life as a musician and artist demonstrated a remarkable and unusual sense of free expression and collaboration. His life also revolved around the communal farm of Travianna, in Floyd County VA, which his family and friends founded in 1971.  It came to be that the farm took on “a life and personality of its own serving as a magnet for musical talent from all over the world.  Innumerable people, both famous and infamous made the pilgrimage to Travianna in order to share and experience music in a different light.”
Mark Hodges and A’Court met each other in high school and quickly bonded through their mutual love of music, remaining friends for the rest of their lives.  A’Court had an uncanny ability to bring together diverse groups of musicians and to loosen up and have fun with traditional forms of music, allowing for experimentation and evolution. Mark’s vision is to honor A’Court’s life and contributions to the world of music by sustaining that spirit within this label in a way that truly reflects how nearly every kind of music comes together to create the genre of Americana.
That’s what Travianna records is all about. The music plays and sings for itself. It speaks the most vividly to the ways that it surfaces from all of the places it’s planted and all of the ways that it grows. From blues to ballads, from roots to reggae, from tradition through its transformation, this label fuses your favorite music together without privileging one kind over another. It simply lets them blur and blend and allowing the best of the evolution to shine through.
One frequent visitor referred to Travianna as a “huge musical cornucopia. There was a dawg/bluegrass improv in A’Court’s woodworking shop, an Irish seisún[1] in the next room, an east-meets-west sitar thing going on in the great room and outside around a huge bonfire was this raging old time jam. All going at once – it was surreal.”
Travianna Records seeks to be a melting pot for many kinds of music to mix and merge, creating an experience that encompasses all the best that music has to offer. We want to represent real music, music that was born of many places and with limitless influences. Music……. no boundaries.