Michael Johnathon

His next book WoodSongs 4 was released June 2019, dedicated to Pete and Toshi Seeger and includes the Dazed & Confuzed album. In 2020 he released LEGACY, a full length studio album. The title cit is a 9-minute epic that goes from Pete Seeger to Dylan to the collapse of the record industry as we know it. The album also includes two Dylan covers including a total rebuild of Rolling Stone.

His CD release of SongFarmer was the first national album to be entirely recorded on an iPhone and received the Roots Album of the Year Award by the National Traditional Music Association in 2018.

Johnathon produces the all-volunteer, community-run Troubadour Concert Series at the Lexington Opera House, Kentucky Castle, Lyric Theatre, Kentucky Theater in Lexington, and the Paramount Arts Center in Ashland, Kentucky. By 2018, the volunteer organization produced over 400 concert events with artists including BB King, Steve Martin, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Lindsay Buckingham, Keb Mo, Taj Mahal, Brian Wilson, and Gregg Allman.

In October 2018 Johnathon toured with a musical concept called Songs of Rural America. Fully orchestrated, the 17-song concert celebrates rural communities, merging the roots audience with the classical world. The orchestration was written by Michael Johnathon and Joshua Carter. The concert with The Ohio Valley Symphony Orchestra in Gallipolis OH was filmed as a public television special for broadcast in 2019.

To commemorate Earth Day, Johnathon wrote the script for the play Walden: The Ballad of Thoreau, performed in over 8,900 colleges, community theatres, high schools and home schools in nine countries. The play is set during the final two days Henry David Thoreau spent at his cabin on Walden Pond and explores the contemporary processes in the protection of the earth and home communities. A film of the play aired nationwide on PBS stations and was awarded a 2009 John Muir Award for Feature Film.