Aaron Ratcliffe

Aaron Ratcliffe wears a yellow star "JOY" button pinned to his black suspenders as a reminder of the freedom dancing can bring. He dances full of life because his life has been filled with dance. He grew up in a small cove in Haywood County, NC where his family has lived for over 160 years. He first learned to dance from his family and at the street dances, folk festivals, Stomping Grounds, and Shindigs on the Green. He joined Cane Creek as a freshman at UNC in 2003. Now, as a graduate student, he still loves to work out his studies with a good dance. He danced down the aisle with his bride, Megan, and heÕll be dancing the day the next little Ratcliffe comes along.

Aaron also has a passion for teaching and sharing clogging. He enjoys contributing to lessons and workshops led by the team. He teaches clogging classes at Ninth Street Dance in Durham, NC and is working to become a better southern Appalachian dance caller. Aaron celebrates the community of friendship found in the Cane Creek Cloggers and is honored to put his feet to good use with such a swell bunch of folks.

Bill Barnett

Bill Barnett is a relatively new member of the Cane Creek Cloggers, having joined in January, 2006. He has thoroughly enjoyed dancing with and learning from the more experienced team members. He first learned to clog in the early '80s at the Station in Carrboro where Tuesday night was clogging and square dance night, and where he met his wife Paige. When he is not clogging, Bill keeps busy as a father of four and as a software engineer.

Cheri Junk

Cheri Junk escaped the long winters of Illinois in 1969 when she and her husband Daryl came as newly-weds to this beautiful state in 1969. She has always loved to sing and dance. When she was very young her family would ask her to stand up on a footstool in the living room after Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners to perform for them. No chance of being shy in that family! She went on to sing in church choirs and community choruses, be a cheerleader in junior high, and take part in lots of different kinds of dance form. In North Carolina, she watched cloggers at festivals and became enchanted by southern folk culture, including dance. She also loves the outdoors and walking in the woods, and for the past six years has been privileged to work with undergraduate students at UNC-Chapel Hill as a full-time academic advisor in the Fine Arts & Humanities. Since 2005, when Daryl was invited to join the group, she has attended every Cane Creek Cloggers' performance as unofficial groupie. She is delighted and very grateful to be a new member of the Cane Creek Cloggers and was thrilled to dance in her first gig at Shakori Hills in April 2008. She looks forward to many more years of dancing with all of these wonderful folks.

Daryl Junk

Daryl has the distinction of being the oldest member on the team. He is also the one with the least experience clogging, having never clogged before September 2005, when he saw the Cane Creek Cloggers perform at Meadowmont. It looked like so much fun that he joined in the start of 2006. There were no cloggers in the cornfields around the town in Illinois where he grew up, and he was much too shy to even think of dancing in public. He always had an interest in music and eventually dabbled in Scottish folk dancing and contra dancing a few years before getting turned on to clogging. A former cartoonist for his college newspaper, he leads a quiet life disguised as a computer programmer, but enjoys lettering wedding certificates and doing other calligraphy projects when he can. His previous claim to fame consists of having traveled around Europe for a month giving concerts with the School Band of America the summer he graduated from high school.

Dane Summers

An on again off again member of Cane Creek since 2003, Dane is quite taken with dance steps of all kinds. He can thank the Old Farmer's Ball at Warren Wilson College for breaking his early shy fear of dance back in 1995. He aspires to continue to dance, to learn to play music as long as he has limbs to do so.

Diana Montgomery

Diana Montgomery has been dancing with the Cane Creek Cloggers since 1980 when the team first began. Her love for traditional dance grew after joining a community square dancing group in high school. Diana’s introduction to clogging came later via her sister, Linda (a former Cane Creek Clogger) who taught Diana "the basic" on top of a picnic table in an Eastern NC campground. Diana lives, loves and laughs with her husband (and favorite fiddler) Rob on the banks of the Eno River. Favorite hobbies are biking (especially with her son, Nick), kayaking, and gardening. Diana’s profession is in the field of education. Formerly a high school biology teacher, Diana now works with a national, non-profit center focused on teacher leadership, research and policy.

Forrest Oliphant

Forrest is the most recent guy on the team, having joined the team in March of 2006. He has been contra dancing since before he was born, and grew up around oldtime music where his folks met at the Folk School in Brasstown, NC. He still contradances at least once a week, and has recently thrown himself into the local Argentine Tango and Swing scenes. He also clogged with the Apple Chill Cloggers in Italy in the summer of 2006.

Jean Healy

As one of the founding members of the Cane Creek Cloggers in 1980, Jean Healy has been involved in much of the choreography. She also met her husband when he joined the group later in 1980. He professes to be "unclogged" and is no longer a member of the team. Jean first saw clogging on a family vacation at Fontana Village when she was around 13 years old. She was a math teacher at Orange High School in Hillsborough, NC for 27.5 years and retired in January, 2008. She hopes that, in retirement, she will be able to spend more time with her 2 daughters and 3 granddaughters. Aside from her love of dancing and teaching, she has many other interests: camping, scuba diving, and traveling are just a few of them.

Jim Kirkpatrick

Jim has been a member of the cloggers for over 20 years. He started his adult dance career with English and Scottish dancing, then contra dancing and has dabbled in swing,tango, Ziedeco, and Cajun. He first learned to clog at the old train staition in Carrboro back in the early 1980’s. Several years later he decided to try out for the Cloggers and has been doing it ever since. He and his wife, Ruth, have 3 sons who all like to dance, especially percussive dance. The rest of the time he builds custom furniture and cabinets in his shop near Chapel Hill.

Katy Shoemaker

Katy has always enjoyed dancing and honed her skiils during the Saturday Night Fever Days! But she had never really danced 'til she discovered the mountain music around Appalachian State University! During those college days, she also spent time in the wild west town of Love Valley, NC, riding the mechanical bull and dancin' honky-tonk style at the Silver Spur Saloon. (This proved to be great preparation for her career as a Kindergarten teacher at Triangle Day School where she taught for 16 years.)Katy began to look outside of her passion for teaching for other ways to grow and learn when her son left for UNCCH and she joined the Cane Creek Cloggers in 2003. Four years later the son has graduated and Katy's retired from teaching, but she continues to dance! When not dancing, Katy, and the love-of-her-life, Charles, spend time trying to get their sailboat to go faster!!

Laurie Williamson

An enthusiastic Cane Creek Clogger of almost 4 years, Laurie is a native of Boone, NC where she grew up among traditional Appalachian mountain music and dance. Her true clogging roots, however, stemmed from extended family "hootenanny" gatherings of the Blackley/Kearney clans in the Franklin/Granville county areas of NC. When visiting her grandparents as a youth she would enjoy singing, clogging and square dancing to old time, bluegrass and country music tunes. Since childhood, she has explored various forms of dance from ballet, tap, jazz and modern to Salsa while traveling in Latin America. Most recently, she learned African dance for the Blue Grass Brown Earth production with Chuck Davis and the African American Dance Ensemble. When employed, Laurie is a Social Worker, but she is currently home preparing her 2 year old red headed son Jack to be a future CC Clogger. She also enjoys yoga, scuba diving, photography, travel, and cooking with her husband.

Megan Ratcliffe

A native of Covington, Georgia, Megan is the youngest member of the team. She began dancing at the age of 3 and soon joined the Dylong Express Cloggers in Covington. Later she gave up clogging to take many forms of music lessons and continued throughout her childhood. She moved to Chapel Hill in 2004 to attend UNC-CH and is currently in the School of Journalism. Megan joined the Cane Creek Cloggers in early 2006. Since then, she's enjoyed learning all the fun routines and even making up some steps of her own! Outside of clogging, Megan enjoys attending square dances around town and singing or playing along to old time and bluegrass music. She hopes to use her newly acquired knowledge of Southern Appalachian dancing and music to encourage and inspire other young people to get involved. Her favorite thing about the team is dancing with Aaron Ratcliffe--they are Cane Creek newlyweds!