Ben Folds

He grew up here. That's the whole anchor. Born in Greensboro, raised in Winston-Salem, through its public schools and into whatever comes after — Ben Folds carries the city in his work the way most people carry an accent: you don't notice it until someone points it out, and then you can't stop hearing it.

At R.J. Reynolds High School he played in bands, working piano, bass, drums — already restless, already reaching past any single instrument. He left North Carolina for university, lost his scholarship, came back, landed eventually in Chapel Hill, and there formed Ben Folds Five, the alternative rock trio that made him nationally known from 1993 to 2000. The music was piano-forward and melodically generous in a decade that rewarded neither. It found an audience anyway — in the UK, in Australia, and eventually everywhere.

The career that followed keeps expanding. Solo records. Collaborations with musicians, authors, actors. From 2017 until his resignation in February 2025, he served as the first Artistic Advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., a role that put his instinct for connecting classical structure with popular music in front of the largest institutional platform American orchestral life can offer. He has performed with the Winston-Salem Symphony — a homecoming that means something specific when the city in question is the one where the piano first made sense.

He was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2011. Winston-Salem gave him the beginning. What he built from it belongs to the record.