Friends gather for a concert at Russell’ s Roost. photo by Marc Skirvin
Brown County House Concerts
~ by Jeff Tryon
A
flurry of house concert events last year have whetted appetites and energized local music lovers to create a series of live music events offering original music. Hondo Thompson is a volunteer DJ for the WFHB community radio station in Bloomington who frequents the music scene. After moving to the western edge of Brown County last summer, he plunged into the house concert idea.
“ I built a deck on the back of my house, and what drove me was the closing of Muddy Boots and the Pine Room,” he said.“ It was a place that had music seven days a week. It might be open mic, most of the time it was local bands, and every now and then they’ d get some band from out of town. A lot of really cool things were happening.”
He said the Pine Room music scene and the local house concert movement both have roots in an earlier, similar situation— Otis Todd’ s garage jam, a weekly picker-fest where old time accomplished players and young up-andcomers met to swap tunes, share licks, and learn their craft.“ You’ d get some of the pickers like Barry Elkins and people who had been around Uncle Otis getting together with some of the young guys,” Thompson said.“ That’ s where the Indiana Boys came from; Richard Gist, Kenan Rainwater, and Joe Bolinger played there. You had guys from the White Lightning Boys playing old bluegrass.”
A house concert is a musical performance presented in someone’ s home or yard, barn or rec room. Typically, there is a suggested donation or sometimes a set admission fee. The money usually goes to the performers or some predesignated cause. Refreshments are usually pitch-in or provided by the host.
The idea has been growing nationwide as a way of bringing regional and national acts to less visited places and helping them to bridge gaps in their travelling schedule, according to local singer-songwriter Jason Blankenship.
“ If you’ re playing a weekend in Detroit, and the next weekend in Chicago, it helps if you can fill in with a couple of house concerts during the week,” he said.“ There are house concert associations that you can join online. If you want to host concerts, they hook you up with artists that are coming through the area.”
34 Our Brown County • Jan./ Feb. 2019