Hot Box Chelmsford, 8 Oct 2025
The creators of Rockgrass
Hayseed Dixie began one innocent Summer day in 2000 when John Wheeler and Mike Daly drank roughly enough whiskey to float a battleship from the Florida Coast over to Portugal and back and decided to play around in John’s studio. Having spent the previous few years touring around with assorted country hat-acts, John had assembled a proper pile of recording equipment. Thus when he and Mike discovered in their drunken epiphany that the Lost Highway of Reverend Hank Williams and the Highway to Hell of Bishop Bon Scott were indeed the same identical stretch of tarmac, they were well and truly prepared to document this revelation in situ.
Holding up their own idiosyncratic mirror to an unsettled and unsettling 2017, Hayseed Dixie offer up their 15th studio album, a collection of both original songs and reinterpretations of R&B and Soul classics. Dance with them as they probe the queries: “Why do we still believe there is such a thing as ‘race’?” “Are concepts like ‘nations’ and ‘nationality’ really useful to people who lay bricks or perform kidney stone surgeries?” and “Why does every song always sound better with a banjo in the mix?” The boys are seeking after the root core categorical commonality that runs like an eternal golden braid throughout all of humanity. Then they will buy it a drink!
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28 Viaduct Road, Chelmsford, CM1 1TS
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