"Hogslop is the real deal groovilicious honkin old-time string band. Guaranteed old-time awesomeness with these fellas around!" - Abigail Washburn (Banjo Extraordinaire)
The Hogslop String Band is a Nashville based old time string band comprised of five energetic young musicians hailing from Georgia, Tennessee, California and North Carolina. Featuring Casy Meikle and Kevin Martin on fiddles, Graham Sherrill on banjo, Gabriel Kelley on guitar and Casey "Pickle" McBride on the washtub bass, these boys surely raise a ruckus.
"Hogslop is the real deal groovilicious honkin old-time string band. Guaranteed old-time awesomeness with these fellas around!" - Abigail Washburn (Banjo Extraordinaire)
The Hogslop String Band is a Nashville based old time string band comprised of five energetic young musicians hailing from Georgia, Tennessee, California and North Carolina. Featuring Casy Meikle and Kevin Martin on fiddles, Graham Sherrill on banjo, Gabriel Kelley on guitar and Casey "Pickle" McBride on the washtub bass, these boys surely raise a ruckus.
“The country blues is a gift of 20th century American music, and it’s awesome to see a band tap into its legacy with so much gusto and original vision.” – Music City Roots
Marley's Ghost is nothing less than a national treasure, the capable inheritors of the archetypal Americana blueprint drawn up by The Band. As the L.A. Weekly aptly put it, "This West Coast [group] deftly, and frequently daffily, dashes across decades of American music to create a sound that's steeped in tradition but never bogged down by traditionalism." These guys can sing and play anything with spot-on feel, from reggae (hence the double-entendre moniker) to blues to stone country, which is what they've been doing - to the ongoing delight of a fervent cult that includes many of their fellow musicians - throughout their first quarter century as a working unit.
"The band has always been eclectic, and that's one of the reasons we've stayed together for this long," Wheetman explains. "I've said this before, but instead of having to be in a Delta blues band, an a cappella singing group, a country band, a reggae band, and being a singer/songwriter, I'm in one band and we just do all that. It's very convenient."
Dan Wheetman (vocals, bass, rhythm guitar, fiddle, harmonica, banjo, Dobro, lap steel) came to the group after a long career during which he played in the '60s Simi Valley, Calif., teen rock group the Humane Society, Fresh Air (with Don Heffington), the Honky Tonk Swamis and '70s country-rockers Liberty, who spent years on the road with John Denver and Steve Martin. Danny's showmanship and unique sense of humor, combined with an uncommonly powerful and resonant baritone, provide the focal point for the group's upbeat performances.
Mike Phelan (vocals, lead guitars, fiddle, Dobro, bass, lap steel), who's been performing as a singer/player since he was knee high to a grasshopper, has lived all over the U.S., playing, recording and performing in many styles, including bluegrass, rock, folk and blues in countless bands. Phelan cites guitarists Steve Cropper, Eldon Shamblin, Doc Watson, Jimi Hendrix and B. B. King, and vocalists Tommy Duncan, Ralph Stanley and William Bell as major influences. Like Wheetman and Wilcox, he's also a deft and prolific songwriter.
Jon Wilcox (vocals, mandolin, rhythm guitar, guitar, bouzouki) has solo recordings on the Folk-Legacy, Sierra-Briar and Sage Arts labels and has toured internationally as a singer/songwriter and interpreter of traditional American and British Isles music. He's also intimately familiar with the groves of academe, having graduated from Stanford Law School and later teaching high school history.
Ed Littlefield Jr. (vocals, pedal steel guitar, Highland bagpipes, keyboards, mandolin, Dobro, lead guitar), a product of the Northern California folk scene, relocated to Washington State in the early 1970s. He toured extensively with the well-known Seattle Western swing band Lance Romance before founding Sage Arts, one of the Northwest's premier recording studios, where he functions as a producer and engineer. Littlefield is one of the most innovative of the new breed of pedal steel guitarists; among his influences, he counts Ian & Sylvia, Bob Dylan, Flatt & Scruggs, Hank Williams, Doc Watson, Ernest Tubb, the Grateful Dead, The Band and the Rolling Stones.
Jerry Fletcher (keys, accordion, vocal arranging), who's long the band's secret weapon and unofficial fifth Ghost, appearing on albums and gigs from the outset, became a fulltime member in 2006. A teen rock rival of Wheetman's and later his cohort in Liberty, Fletcher lays down a thoughtful groove that grounds the band and completes the musical puzzle.
Lash LaRue is a Park City band that infuses a wonderful mixture of driving original tunes with old country blues, rock n’ roll and good o’l Americana. Coming together in 2009 the group combines a mixture of Park City favorites including Cole Hobbs on lead guitar, vocals and harmonica, Karri Dell Hays on fiddle, vocals and clawhammer banjo, Elaine Minahan on lead vocals and washboard, Jack Walzer on guitar and vocals and Mark Viar on the dog house bass.
Existing in the tension between tradition and frontier, Telluride Bluegrass Festival Band Contest winner and Prairie Home Companion guest, Run Boy Run, truly exceeds the sum of its parts as touches of classical, jazz, and folk express themselves through the old-time core of the band’s unique sound.
Drawing on an eclectic mix of folk, Celtic, and whatever else they feel like, they are currently performing in local venues. Wayward Molly recently had their "coming out" concert in March 2012 to a packed house and two standing ovations while raising funds for the American Cancer Society.