Boston-based string band Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light took home the top prize at the 2025 Telluride Bluegrass Band Contest. The trio, made up of Club Passim staff members including School of Music Manager Rachel Sumner on vocals and Performance Manager Kat Wallace on fiddle, craft music that blends folk tradition with feminist storytelling, poetic lyricism, and a touch of grit.

Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light are packing up their instruments and setting off on a run of spring and summer performances, highlighted by first-time headlining dates at iconic venues and a highly anticipated appearance on the main stage of the Kerrville Folk Festival.

In case it's a lesson you're not familiar with, the Radium Girls of the 1920s changed history: after radium dial companies knowingly exposed the young factory workers to radium poisoning, the women's cases led to landmark labor laws and standards, and can even be said to have led to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Featured this week in a Library of Congress exhibit focusing on Labor Day and released today, Rachel Sumner's “Radium Girls (Curie Eleison)" tells the story of these brave women, often absent from most history books.

Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light make music steeped in tradition, with modern, lyric-forward songs and snaking chord progressions; their version of Joanna Newsom’s “Colleen” is no exception. Noted for its commentary on identity and feminism, the mystical folk ballad has earned a fandom of its own, with examinations of its fascinating lyrics throughout the far corners of the internet.