McCOYSVILLE, Pa. | Conrad Fisher’s musical journey has taken him from an Amish country upbringing in Pennsylvania to Nashville and back.
These days the singer-songwriter has been making videos and recordings of musicians with Amish and Mennonite roots — building audiences well beyond the conservative religious communities.
On a recent weekend, Mr. Fisher took the stage in a former Presbyterian church that he bought for a song and converted into a performance space and recording studio he calls Ragamuffin Hall, in the rural Pennsylvania community of McCoysville.
Mr. Fisher performed two sold-out concerts with Ben and Rose Stoltzfus, a married couple whose Amish background and church choir harmonies have drawn millions of YouTube clicks. It was a sort of warmup for shows they’re playing together in the coming months at much larger theaters in Pennsylvania and Indiana.
“Ragamuffin Hall,” Mr. Fisher said, “is supposed to be a place where those weird things that’ll get you ostracized everywhere else, we’re like, ’Oh, no, that’s a gift. And here’s how you use it.’”
Mr. Fisher’s parents were both raised in Amish families but his father joined a Mennonite congregation as a young adult. Among the Mennonite churches Mr. Fisher attended as a boy, musical instruments were rarely used.
Nonetheless, his father was a fan of Johnny Cash and didn’t look too closely at what was on Mr. Fisher’s MP3 player. When Mr. Fisher’s brother came home from a camping trip with a mix CD featuring Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers and the Beach Boys, it changed his life.
“It blew my mind, right?” Mr. Fisher, now 31, recalled. He started learning keyboards and then guitar, bass and drums before adding music production — “mostly because I was dead set on making a living with music.”
“My buddies would be like, ‘Hey, I wrote a song for my girlfriend. Can you do a track?’ And I’m like, sure.”
In 2022, Mr. Fisher learned an old brick church several miles from his home was up for sale. After he laid out his vision for making it into a music incubator, they sold it to him below market value.
Musicians now regularly find their way to Ragamuffin Hall, mostly to record “clean country music” and rootsy bluegrass with a heavy dose of gospel.
Mr. Fisher’s Amish roots and ability to speak Pennsylvania Dutch, the Old Order Amish dialect, has helped build rapport with likeminded musicians.
“There’s a lot of great talent in that community that goes undeveloped because,” Mr. Fisher said. “But I do play a lot of different kinds of music, just like, you know, if you’re a shed builder you build sheds for all kinds of people, not just churches and schools.”
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