Cindy Harris has been making and teaching music with voice, autoharp, fiddle and a variety of other instruments for as long as she can remember. She is particularly interested in traditional music of many varieties, and her repertoire includes everything from Irish tunes and Israeli dance music to dark Appalachian fiddle tunes from the mountains of West Virginia. But her playful side can’t resist amusing modern songs about real life, which somehow co-exist with folk songs from long ago. A concert set from Cindy is always a collection of eclectic surprises bound together by a common theme that suits the occasion.

As a member of the Pittsburgh traditional music and dance community, Cindy formed the contradance band GrayScale in 2018. With a repertoire based on traditional fiddle tunes, GrayScale placed fourth in the 2018 Neo-traditional Band competition at the Appalachian String Band Festival in Clifftop, WV. GrayScale is a favorite contradance and square dance band in Western Pennsylvania, and performed at several festivals while touring Australia in 2020.

Cindy placed second in the International Autoharp Championship every year from 2013 through 2016 and won that contest in 2017.She played in the Mountain Laurel Autoharp Championship every year between 2008 and 2019, claiming the championship in 2019. In 2023, she won the International Autoharp Championship for a second time, and performed the following year with Bill Bilassi and fiddler David Johnson.

Cindy has two recordings of her own, “You Can’t Get There From Here” (2006) with her daughter, Rebecca Heath, and “Potluck!” (2018), a collection of autoharp duets with fifteen other fabulous autoharp friends. She has produced and also appears on three autoharp-related recording projects with members of the Cyberpluckers autoharp discussion group: a 1999 recording of the music of Stephen Foster, and two volumes of “Strike the ‘Harp” featuring a wide variety of holiday-related music (2009 and 2013). Cindy has been married for 45 years to college sweetheart Rick Heath and has two lovely daughters, bass player and MLAG contest name-card turner Rebecca, and occasional singer and fiddler Sharon. They all live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.