We are excited to welcome back the Kell(e)ys!

Saturday, November 8th • 7pm

Doors: 6:30pm

Tickets: $15/$20

Meet Kelly Hunt:

The daughter of an opera singer and a saxophonist, Hunt was raised in Memphis, TN amidst a motley mélange of musical influences ranging from Rachmaninov to Joni Mitchell to Mississippi John Hurt. She grew up singing in choirs, poring over poetry books, and writing her own music as a matter of course, first on piano then 5-string banjo. After being introduced to the banjo in college while studying French and visual arts, Hunt began to develop her own improvised style of playing, combining old-time picking styles with the percussive origins of the instrument. After college, Hunt embarked on a rambling path through career pursuits in farming, French breadmaking, and visual arts, ultimately landing in Kansas City, where she would go on to write and record her debut album, Even the Sparrow.

While reminiscent of modern traditionalists such as Gillian Welch, Even The Sparrow reveals an ineffable quality that hovers beyond the constraints of genre, à la Anais Mitchell and Patty Griffin. Over the span of a dozen songs, Hunt’s penchant for storytelling and intriguing arrangement cast a spell which No Depression describes as “the musical equivalent of a book you can’t put down, one you’ll want to revisit again and again to catch every nuance and turn of phrase.”

In “Men of Blue & Grey,” what begins as a Reconstruction-era ballad about the repurposing of Civil War glass plate negatives in a greenhouse roof soon becomes a meditation on the hope that growth and life may one day be able to emerge from the ruins of suffering and haunting of violence. “Across The Great Divide” turns an otherwise traditional accounting of spurned love into a philosophical epic of the ethics of forgiveness and freedom, evoking the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard and Walt Whitman.

As for the original owner of Kelly Hunt’s mysterious tenor banjo, not much is known. “I’ve never been able to find anything about Ira Tamm,” she says, “I think he just had a humble little traveling show.” What’s clear is that the itinerant performer laid down his banjo at the height of the Great Depression, almost eighty years before it would be picked up by Hunt. “That banjo has stories. I wish I knew them all,” says Hunt, though the banjo’s most intriguing story may just be beginning with Even The Sparrow. “The marks of Ira’s hands are still in the calfskin head, so I can see where he played and left his mark,” she says. “Now my own marks are there too, in different places, like a kind of portrait.”

Kelly’s sophomore album “Ozark Symphony,” (produced by Dirk Powell at his Cypress House studio in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana), was released on Compass Records in October, 2023.

Meet Kelley Smith:

Folksinger/songwriter Kelley Smith is a hopeless romantic who fancies old poetry and grandpa sweaters. All at once whimsical and haunting, Smith delivers deeply affecting lyrics with wry charm and a time traveler’s voice. Prone to melancholy and daydreaming, Kelley spent her childhood roaming the woods of Minnesota and singing to forest animals. To this day, her longing for that landscape runs deep and seems to find its way into her songs in one way or another.

Raised by musicians, Smith always had music in her bones, but it wasn’t until she was 40 and a mother of four that her first record, Moon Child (2022), came to be. As an insomniac, she wrote this first batch of songs by moonlight. They evoke a sense of belonging, juxtaposed with escapism, as she croons about long-term love, grief, and her draw to the night sky.

Since 2022, Kelley has had the honor of sharing stages with folks such as Charlie Parr, Kelly Hunt, Wild Horses, Dave Simonett, Alan Sparhawk, Stephen Wilson Jr., and many others. Most often performing solo or as a duo, Smith interprets old folk songs on guitar and banjo, in addition to her original music.