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.
Last weekend, 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, located in the rural Pennsylvania community of McCoysville.
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 warm-up for shows they’re playing together in the coming months at much larger theaters in Pennsylvania and Indiana.
“Ragamuffin Hall,” 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.’
Fisher’s parents were both raised in Amish families, but his father joined a Mennonite congregation as a young adult. Among the Mennonite churches 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 Fisher’s MP3 player. When 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?” 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.”
Recording in a converted church became a unique experience for Fisher. He moved to Tennessee as a young adult and for three years immersed himself in the songwriting industry — the Oak Ridge Boys even recorded one of his tunes. But the road life didn’t suit him — particularly bar gigs.
“There’s drinking and carrying on,” Fisher said. “It’s just not me. I’m not a prude, but I just don’t enjoy that scene.”
Fisher considers his wife and three children his main priority, and he remains a faithful Mennonite — his pastor once asked him why he didn’t just start a cabinetry business and launch a prison ministry. Yet his music production work eventually grew to the point three years ago that he could stop working as a carpenter.
In 2022, 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. The acts he’s recorded include an Amish man who played steel guitar with his son’s band, a musician who drove for hours from Missouri, and an Amish band from Ohio.
Last Saturday, he sprinkled his own songs between tunes made popular by Waylon Jennings, Alison Krauss, and Don Williams. After a short set by Fisher’s five-piece band, they stayed on stage to back up Ben and Rose. Fisher used an electric guitar fashioned from a beam recovered during his renovations of a church stairwell.
The overwhelmingly white matinee crowd consisted mostly of older people and included several of the musicians’ family members. Downstairs, Ragamuffin Hall T-shirts were for sale alongside $3 homemade whoopie pies, a regionally ubiquitous Pennsylvania Dutch dessert.
The insular culture and unadorned lives of conservative Anabaptist people aren’t often associated with music, but Amish sacred music dates back half a millennium. Their 900-page hymnal — the “Ausbund” — was composed in part by Anabaptist prisoners in 16th century Germany and is still used today.
Fisher’s Amish roots and ability to speak Pennsylvania Dutch, the Old Order Amish dialect, have helped build rapport with likeminded musicians.
However, Amish church music is almost always group singing only, without instruments or soloists. The community generally discourages public performances and other “acts of pride.”
“There’s a lot of great talent in that community that goes undeveloped because,” Fisher said — using a Pennsylvania German phrase — “that’s just, ‘we don’t do that,’ you know.”
That’s the sort of pushback he received in February after uploading a rollicking, live version of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to YouTube. Fisher felt compelled to respond.
“I’m a believer, I’m a man of faith, and I’m not ashamed of that,” he replied in a video message. “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.”
Elam Stoltzfus, director of the Nicholas Stoltzfus Homestead in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, said it was “one of the shocks of my life” to attend a charity fundraiser last year at a farm where Ben and Rose performed. (Stoltzfus is a common name among the Amish.) There were bright lights, a video screen, barbecued chicken, and
