Tickets: $20

ABOUT Gaines & Wagoner

Based in Madison, WI, the award-winning husband and wife duo of Mary Gaines (cello, guitar, bass, vocals) and Chris Wagoner (violin, mandolins, lapsteel, ukulele, guitar, accordion, vocals) play an eclectic mix of Americana-original and classic tunes ranging from folk to jazz, bluegrass to blues, honky-tonk and a little singer-songwriter on the side.

Let's just say you happen to walk into a music venue and see a duo playing cello and violin.

You'd most likely expect to hear either classical or folk music of some kind, right? But just as you spy the lineup of crazy acoustic and electric stringed instruments of all varieties the duo tears into a tune that combines funky electric fuzz-wah fiddle with thumping pizzicato cello and your assumptions start to crumble. The next tune features old-time duo vocals over the jangle of an acoustic mandolin and guitar followed by a righteous gospel-fired slide-guitar-driven blues and then right into a crooning, heart-stopping jazz ballad. The space in-between the tunes is alternately punctuated by folk-style storytelling and light-hearted riffing with the audience. This is not "one-size-fits-all" music. This is Gaines and Wagoner.

ABOUT Jenny and Robin Bienemann

Robin and Jenny Bienemann - By turns hilarious and heartfelt, this cutting-edge acoustic duo melds original and traditional music with an elegant hint of jazz. Robin's wild guitar stylings harken back to the earliest forms of jazz, blues and country guitar. Jenny's voice and guitar playing evokes comparisons to Joni Mitchell and Ricki Lee Jones. Both write songs that are celebrations of modern life in all of its wonderful, strange and hilarious beauty, garnering airplay on National Public Radio, Dr. Demento, and The Midnight Special.

Tickets: $20

SONS OF THE NEVER WRONG is a turbo-charged Altfolk trio from Chicago that delivers witty, whimsical songs with their signature soaring vocal harmonies and gorgeous arrangements. In case you're wondering, they're 2 gals and a fella: Bruce Roper, Sue Demel, and Deborah Lader. Their odd ball humor and spontaneous stories ignite their live shows and have earned them a cult-like international following for over 30 years. Combining influences of folk, jazz, pop and rock, their sound is wildly original, their energy is contagious and their banter is hilarious. However, no bio can outdo what OTHERS have to say about the Sons:

SUE DEMEL

"Sue Demel has one of the most unique voices in folk music today." -Sing Out Magazine
Whether it is scatting, chanting, weaving or arranging, she explodes the preconceived notions of harmony singing. Schooled in jazz and a respected songwriting coach, Sue is a seasoned back-up vocalist whose body of work achieves a rare peace between the boundaries of love and redemption.

BRUCE ROPER

"Bruce Roper has written the near-perfect song." -A.P. Newswire
Bruce is both a luthier and a well-seasoned carpenter of timeless songs. His reputation as a brilliant, prolific writer is well known in folk circles worldwide. His songs feel like they were written by a wise old poet, yet sung with a child's innocence. His gift for conjuring melancholy and heartbreak with a wink and a nod gives the listener a fresh take on life's experience, as he makes things that are hard to say easy to hear.

DEBORAH LADER

"Deborah has a folk sensibility that hits me where I live." -Art Thieme
Deborah's diverse influences converge and are expressed through her unique and multi-faceted music. An internationally recognized visual artist, Deb is also a multi-instrumentalist, (guitar, mandolin, mandocello, banjo, piano) with a special gift for songwriting, and a sought-after affinity for vocal harmony.

ABOUT C. Daniel Boling

C. Daniel Boling, Winner of the Grassy Hill Kerrville New Folk songwriter contest, the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, and others, Daniel shares experiences from a life well-lived in three countries and seven States. This balladeer/songwriter with the friendly tenor brings his well-crafted story songs to happy audiences throughout the U.S. and in Europe in over one hundred shows a year, from House Concerts and listening rooms to major festivals-Kerrville, Winfield, Woody Guthrie, and others. Daniel is also a member of the iconic 1960s folk trio The Limeliters.

Born into a traveling Air Force family, he later worked as a National Park Ranger (yes, the gun-toting kind) and as a Criminal Investigator for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. He started touring full-time at 50, when most guys are planning their retirement.

Daniel's 11th solo album-IT MATTERS featuring Tom Paxton-was released April 18, 2025 on Berkalin Records and features 16 of the songs Daniel and Tom have co-written since their previous collaboration album in 2023 ... cherry-picked from three times that many. It is enjoying excellent reviews and radio play across North America, Europe, U.K., Australia, and beyond.

Love, Dan - Daniel's 10th solo album since 1999 - was released on Berkalin Records in November, 2024 and appeared on "Top 10 Albums of 2024" lists from folk DJs in England, The Netherlands and the U.S.A.

Daniel's 9th solo album, NEW OLD FRIENDS in 2023 was entirely co-written by Daniel and legendary folk songwriter Tom Paxton. It reached #4 on folk charts in North America, #5 in Europe, and won "Album of the Year" in the New Mexico Music Awards. Noel Paul Stookey (of Peter, Paul & Mary) is also a co-writer on one song with Daniel and Tom.

Daniel's 2016 album, THESE HOUSES, was considered for GRAMMY Nomination as "Best Folk Album" and was chosen among Top 10 Albums of the year by Folk Radio DJs across the U.S., as was his 2014 album SLEEPING DOGS that year.

Daniel's songs tell interesting stories about a variety of characters, including himself. He plays guitar and banjo with a deft fingerpicking style that always enhances the stories, and a bit of harmonica into the bargain. His clear tenor draws positive comparisons to John Denver and Pete Seeger, and like Pete, Daniel is happiest when his audience sings too!

There's a lot of Steve Goodman in Daniel's delivery and storytelling, and you can also hear the influence of other classic folk singers and songs from the great American folk tradition. It's no surprise that iconic Appalachian folk singer Jean Ritchie is his second cousin. He's won numerous songwriting awards including Kerrville New Folk, Walnut Valley Festival, Santa Fe Bluegrass and Old Time Festival, Albuquerque Folk Festival, and Woody Guthrie Folk Festival.

Daniel also performs for senior living communities playing a show he calls "Songs My Daddy Loved." Remember when family and friends still got together on the porch in the evening and made their own music? Songs carried the news and kept traditions alive. These are songs from back then and from the early radio days: Folk; Gospel; Country; & Pop from the 30s, 40s and 50s and Daniel's own songs that still carry on the tradition. You'll recognize songs from Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Carter Family and lots of others you love. And Daniel's lovely wife Ellen will join in for some duets!

ABOUT Ben Bedford

Ben Bedford is a singer-songwriter, composer, and visual artist.
In the past fifteen years since the release of his first album, Bedford has played his music for audiences all over the United States hitting notable venues such as The Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, Folkstage in Chicago, and Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He's also played festivals like The Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, The Fox Valley Folk Festival in Illinois, and the Fayetteville Roots Festival in Arkansas. His music has received extensive airplay on folk and roots radio in the U.S., as well as in Europe, taking him overseas on several occasions for concert dates on the continent and in the United Kingdom. Notable dates there include Izzy Young's famed Folklore Centrum in Stockholm, Sweden, Toogenblik in Brussels, Belgium, and The Green Note in London, England.

He's also played in Canada doing a Home Routes tour in Alberta and British Columbia. Bedford's albums have charted highly on the Euro Americana charts and the Folk-DJ charts and his music has been played on National Public Radio's Car Talk and featured in The Sounding Board, the official newsletter of the renowned C.F. Martin Guitar Company. In addition to independent terrestrial stations, Bedford's music has received extensive airplay from syndicated programs such as "River City Folk" (syndicated by WFMT), "The Midnight Special" (syndicated by WFMT), BBC-Scotland, and the SIRIUS XM station "The Village", all helping to gain Bedford a wider geographical audience.

In July of 2010, Bedford was named one of the "50 most significant Folk singer-songwriters of the past 50 years" by Rich Warren of WFMT-Chicago. The list also included Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Anais Mitchell, Joni Mitchell, and Danny Schmidt.

In May of 2018, Bedford was named one of the six Grassy Hill Kerrville New Folk winners at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas--Bedford has recorded six studio albums: Lincoln's Man (2007), Land of the Shadows (2009), What We Lost (2012), The Pilot and the Flying Machine (2016), and The Hermit's Spyglass (2018). His sixth studio album, Valley of Stars, was released in January of 2023. With his visual art, Ben works in pen and ink and watercolor. Bedford is a member of Perspectives Art Gallery in Petersburg, Illinois. He'll spend 2025 touring with his partner Vanessa Lively, working on pen and ink drawings, as well as writing and illustrating his first book which will be a companion to Valley of Stars.

Tickets: $22

Ellis Paul has been traversing lands and discovering their riches since 1965. Born in the potato farming country of upstate Maine, he struck out for Boston after excelling as a middle and long-distance runner in high school on the strength of results good enough to earn an athletics scholarship to Boston College. It was there that he turned to guitar and songwriting after fate intervened to sideline his athletics career in the form of a knee injury.

Open mic stages and New England coffee houses were the incubator that set him on the fast track to honing his craft as a singer-songwriter-guitarist in the early 1990s. Before long he had emerged as one of the brightest lights in the galaxy of prodigiously talented stars working the Boston-area folk scene at the time, a cohort that included Patty Griffin, Patty Larkin, Vance Gilbert, Dar Williams, and Martin Sexton, among others. Paul's distinguished discography, released on the Rounder, Black Wolf, and his own Rosella labels, was also launching at around this time. Stories (1994) and A Carnival of Voices (1995) stand out as particularly impressive examples of his precocious command of folk song forms and growing confidence as a lyricist. The 1990s and early 2000s saw him accumulate a cabinet full of music awards, maintain heavy annual touring schedules, and steadily build a nation-wide audience of loyal fans, an audience that continues to grow with the release of each new album.

Several critics have noted that Ellis Paul embodies a distinctively Boston school of songwriting, characterized by observational economy, vividly drawn characters and a "show-don't-tell" philosophy of lyric writing. And indeed, he does exemplify all of these traits in his extensive catalogue, brilliantly and abundantly. But to focus on him as a master of songwriting alone is to miss the bigger picture, for he is and does so much more. An original American renaissance man, he is also an illustrator, poet, children's book author, producer, music tour leader, collaborator, innovator, educator, commencement speaker, honorary doctorate recipient, respected spokesperson among his peer group of leading folk artists, and esteemed mentor to newer songwriters such as Rebecca Loebe, Antje Duvekot, and Seth Glier. Then there are his forays into other media, such as song placements in successful movies, covers by Grammy nominated artists, his Parent's Choice Foundation award for two children's albums, and his headlining roles as a performer at Woody Guthrie festivals and tribute concerts. The achievements and accolades go on and on.

More recently, his 22nd and latest album, 55 (2023), culminates a string of outstanding recent releases stretching back at least as far as Chasing Beauty (2014) and The Storyteller's Suitcase (2019), each of which has continued to set the bar ever higher on his oeuvre. From the emotionally charged, sophisticated Americana of "Plastic Soldiers" and "Kick Out the Lights (Johnny Cash)" from Chasing Beauty, to the abject pathos of "I Ain't No Jesus," the metaphysical heartbreak of "The Innocence and the Afterlife" and the hilariously unreliable narration of "4th of July," all from The Storyteller's Suitcase, Paul turns his attention to midlife reflections on 55.

In this latest suite of songs he examines who and where he is, checking the pulse of an exhausted, post-COVID nation in the process, and further refines his storytelling craft. A case in point is "Holy," a devastating masterpiece that discloses only just enough for us to paint our own picture of the tragedy of the doomed dreams of a young Irishman. Allowing space for his listeners to add their own individual and shared layers of meaning is something Ellis Paul creates with consummate ease. That's why legions of fans each have their own favorite Ellis Paul stories, encounters, shows, and, of course, songs. Like all great artists, he is able to communicate with us all, but in languages that are unique to each of us.

But while he may seem to have made all this sound easy, it wasn't. The making of 55 coincided not only with the COVID years, but also with his ongoing struggles to manage Dupuytren's contracture, a debilitating condition that afflicted both of his hands with potentially career- ending consequences for playing guitar and piano. Fortunately, potato farming and distance running teach endurance and resilience!

The storyteller closes his suitcase, but the worlds within it keep changing, the traveler keeps moving on, and brand new vistas keep opening up with each twist and turn in the road. From Maine to Big Sur, Okemah to Homer, Alaska, from hardscrabble rustbelt towns to peachy Georgia, from the plains of Texas to the snows of Alberta, these lands are our lands. This land is his land.

"Born in Okemah shoes, with the Dust Bowl blues, a friend of the working man," was how Willis Alan Ramsey described Woody Guthrie, a description that doubles to perfectly situate Ellis Paul's exploration of the fractured, kaleidoscopic landscape of America's soul. Ellis Paul shares his land with us. And in sharing it with us, the truth he reveals is that it is also ours.