Photo courtesy Boy Named Banjo
It wasn’t long ago that a couple Tennessee high school students decided to sit together and start playing bluegrass. As life moved on, most would have expected that hobby to come to an end. But it’s 2017, and the group, which has come to be known as Boy Named Banjo, is still going strong.
“We had a class together sophomore year of high school, and we became friends because we had a shared passion for bluegrass music,” Barton Davies, one of the group’s many vocalists and instrumentalists, said. “We would get together and just jam. We put out a record before graduating from high school … After college ended, we kind of decided just to go for it instead of just putting the band on a back burner.”
As the band members progressed throughout their high school and college years, they picked up a few additional members to join them on the journey, eventually forming the five-piece band that will be rocking Oxford this Thursday.
Although bluegrass has been going through somewhat of a renaissance period in the last decade, Boy Named Banjo hasn’t fully participated in this movement, often adhering to the straightforward, old school style that bluegrass and folk music came from.
This sort of attitude toward its work is also reflected in the group’s live show. No bells and whistles, just full on energy and musicianship.
“I feel like it is no gimmicks or frills,” Willard Logan, the group’s mandolinist, said. “We just get up there and play our songs. Nothing else. And I think it is really working.”
The band’s latest project, “Lost on Main EP,” was its most ambitious attempt toward applying modern techniques to the more traditional genre, but given the recent success of its live shows, Boy Named Banjo fully anticipates to return a more live-esque style in its upcoming recordings.
“‘Lost on Main’ is kind of a more produced EP than what we kind of play or sound like live,” Logan said. “It was kind of experimental in the sense that we tried a lot of effects … We just kind of did that to see what it would be like. We like our live sound, so I guess the direction of your music is very much so headed towards blending more of our live sound like the first two records. We like to be able to recreate what people hear on the record when they come to the show.”
Boy Named Banjo will be playing at Proud Larry’s tonight. The show starts at 9 p.m., and tickets start at $5.
