BloominGrass feat. Sam Bush Band, Alice Randall, Leyla McCalla, John Prine Tribute feat. Jason Wilber and Dave Jacques of John Prine Band with Emily Scott Robinson, and Sunny War
$10 discount and free hardback book: Alice Randall’s My Black Country with purchase of both nights for a limited time!
There is only one consensus pick of peers and predecessors, of the traditionalists, the rebels, and the next gen devotees. Music’s ultimate inside outsider. Or is it outside insider? There is only one Sam Bush.
Guitarist Jason Wilber and bassist Dave Jacques (both members of the John Prine Band) will lead the John Prine Tribute along with Emily Scott Robinson, Oh Boy Records recording artist, and other featured vocalists to highlight the legacy of the legendary folk artist in his birthday month.
Alice Randall is a New York Times bestselling novelist, award-winning songwriter, and educator. She is widely recognized as one of the most significant voices in modern Black fiction and has emerged as an innovative food activist committed to reforms that support healthy bodies and healthy communities. Her latest book, My Black Country, is “a delightful, inspirational story of persistence, resistance, and sheer love” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) of this most American of music genres and the radical joy in realizing the power of Black influence on American culture.
Leyla McCalla joins BloominGrass this year with her full band. She finds inspiration from her past and present, whether it is her Haitian heritage or her adopted home of New Orleans, she — a bilingual multi-instrumentalist, and alumna of Grammy award-winning African-American string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops — has risen to produce a distinctive sound that reflects the union of her roots and experience. McCalla’s widely-acclaimed collaborative project, Songs of Our Native Daughters (Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell), released via Smithsonian Folkways in 2019. The album pulled influence from past sources to create a reinvented slave narrative, confronting sanitized views about America’s history of slavery, racism, and misogyny from a powerful, modern Black female perspective.
Los Angeles-based street singer, guitarist, and roots music revolutionary Sunny War has always been an outsider, always felt the drive to define her place in the world through music and songwriting. Her restless spirit, a byproduct of growing up semi-nomadic with a single mother, led her to Venice Beach, California, where she’s been grinding the pavement for some years now, making a name for her prodigious guitar work and incisive songwriting, which touches on everything from police violence to alcoholism to love found and lost.
Colorado songwriter Emily Scott Robinson beckons to those who are lost, lonely, or learning the hard way with American Siren, her first album for Oh Boy Records. With hints of bluegrass, country, and folk, the eloquent collection shares her gift for storytelling through her pristine soprano and the perspective of her unconventional path into music.