Join us on Friday for an amazing duo all the way from Baton Rouge LA. Hear their sound here.
$8 advance / $10 day-off and at the door
The Louisiana-based duo of Clay Parker and Jodi James plucked the name of their first full-length album—The Lonesomest Sound That Can Sound—from a line in a semi-obscure Woody Guthrie tune called “When the Curfew Blows”: “Was the lonesomest sound, boys/ that ever heard sound, boys/ like the midnight wind, boys/ when the curfew blows.” Musically, their record doesn’t overtly owe that much to Guthrie—though its roots are clearly in rural American folk, country, and blues—but they certainly do understand what that lonesomest sound is all about.
This haunting and darkly beautiful album seems to have drifted in from another, much simpler time, yet its lyric concerns are at once timeless and universal. The graceful intertwining of Parker’s and James’ crystalline guitars and the beautifully mournful blend of their harmonies might bring to mind Gillian Welch and David Rawlings or Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris (the latter not a comparison I make lightly), but the duo unquestionably have a distinctive sound of their own that comes through clearly in every song—all of them co-written by the pair, who met in 2009 and have been playing together since 2014.