Darlin' Corey Live!

Here's another vid from our March 20th performance at The Vanilla Bean Cafe.

Homegrown String Band Down at the Crossroads

We had a great time at a great venue this past Saturday night. The Vanilla Bean is a wonderful little restaurant/music venue located at a rural crossroads in northwestern Connecticut. Good food, good people, and good times. Thanks to Barry and Maria for having us back at The Bean, and Jen at Woolworks in Putnam, CT, and Alisa from Burgis Brook Alpacas in Canterbury, CT for helping to spread the word.

I recorded our second set with a little Flip video camera on the side of the stage. The recorder was behind the speakers and at a bit of an odd angle, but I'll post a few songs anyway. Here's the first:

Thanks to Everyone who came out to the Show 
The Homegrown String Band

HGSB Live at the Bean and the Rock

This weekend we will be doing two coffeehouse shows in New England. On Friday night March 19th we will be at The Dog Rock Coffeehouse in Walpole MA. This will be our first time performing at the Rock, it looks like a nice listening room venue and we are looking forward to the show and making some new friends. The music starts at 8 pm in Blackburn Hall located at 30 Stone Street.

On Saturday March 20th we will be returning for our second performance at The Vanilla Bean Cafe in Pomfret, CT. It has been a few years since we last played The Bean; as I recall it was a very nice restaurant with delicious and very reasonably priced food with a separate listening room for the music. Like The Homegrown String Band, The Vanilla Bean is a family business. The cafe opened in 1989 in a restored early 19th century barn and is owned and operated by the Jessurun Family—Barry, Brian, and Eileen. (Barry's wife is well known singer songwriter Maria Sangiolo.)

Knitting Circle

We had so much fun and got such a good response from the knitting circle we did at Cafe Lena in January that we decided to do it again at The Vanilla Bean. So come on down early, grab a bite to eat, and join the circle. The knitting, crocheting, and chatting starts at 7 pm, the music starts at 8:00. The Vanilla Bean is located at 450 Deerfield Rd (at the crossroads of Routes 44, 169, and 97) in Pomfret, CT.



The Dog Rock Coffeehouse                  
Blackburn Hall
30 Stone St
Walpole, MA


The Vanilla Bean Cafe
450 Deerfield Road
Pomfret, CT
860-928-1562

37 Hours on the Road

Maps, Shubb capos & Blue Chip guitar picks: "Tools of the Trade"

This weekend we made a quick trip to New Jersey and Maryland. We were only gone for 37 hrs, but we covered over 700 miles! Driving through a couple of disaster areas, over flooded waterways, through driving rain, power outages, and hurricane force winds. Here's how we spent our 37 hrs on the road. 14 hrs driving, 5 hrs setting up/breaking down, 8 hrs sleeping, 6 hrs visiting our friends Joe and Dottie in Bethlehem, PA, 1 hr lost to the spring ahead time change, and 3 hrs of playing music. All in all a pretty typical two days on the road. Those three hours of playing and our visit were great. Two good sized and attentive audiences, despite the nasty weather, in Chester, NJ, and Hagerstown, MD.

Next weekend it's another quick road trip. This time we will be heading north to Walpole, MA, and Pomfret, CT. Friday night we will be at The Dog Rock Coffeehouse in Walpole and Saturday night at The Vanilla Bean Cafe in Pomfret. Try and catch a show and say hey to the Travelin' Homies if you can. This weekend will close out a month that saw The Homegrown String Band visit 6 states: NY, NJ, CT, PA, MA, and MD.

Road tip of the day: Shubb Capos, Blue Chip Picks, and Rand McNally Atlas—don't leave home with out 'em!

Photo by Rick Jackofsky

Celebrate Your Unikewity

Unikewity is a word that originated in the mind of "The Amazing Annalee." It has come into such common use that it has become an accepted part of The Homegrown String Band lexicon.

Unikewity - (yoo nuh kyoo uh tee) n. [Annalee-ism.] The special quality that makes you, you, the part of you that is extraordinary, one of a kind, unique.

While our "unikew" sound can be attributed, in part, to our unique instrumentation and quirky personalities, it is also the result of the constant  balancing act necessary to keep varied audiences (and ourselves) interested and entertained. We try to keep our music fresh but still rooted in the sounds of traditional American roots music. Our influences include all the indigenous American musics (blues, jazz, bluegrass, rock n' roll) as well as the traditional folk musics of Europe and Africa that combined to give birth to American music. Sometimes our eclecticness (I think that's another new word) can surprise and confuse people (see my "Hard to Describe" blog), but it is really just a continuation of an American tradition; people from different backgrounds and cultures each adding something of their own to the melting pot of American culture.

Old, New, Borrowed, Unikew
The Homegrown String Band - Something Else!