Jordan Smart + Willy Tea Taylor w/ Jodi Jones

Jordan Smart is a folk singer based in Latonia, KY. Covering a broad range of subjects — from parental epiphanies and questionable lavatory visits, scathing political commentary and hitchhiking cross country, satirical talking blues to love, loss, grief and even pickles —  Smart aims to have a song for every occasion. If he can’t make you laugh, cry, or at very least think, feel free to approach him for a refund.

There is no question that Willy Tea Taylor’s life as a singer/songwriter was predetermined – his role realized the moment he wrote his first song. His inspirations drawn from two separate wells; Living the life of a cattleman’s kid and experiencing true visionaries music like Greg Brown, John Hartford, and Guy Clark. The image of Guy Clark and friends sitting around the kitchen table loaded with ashtrays full of butts, half-smoked cigarettes, food, and booze on one Christmas Eve in 1975 burned into Taylor’s soul. Those guys, swapping songs without pretense, lit Willy Tea’s fire. And ever since, its led purpose with passion – finding a hang by curating relationships through musical friendships that get him closer to his own Clark style kitchen table.

From his early days co-fronting The Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit, to singing solo in countless cowboy bars, to pitching countless wiffle ball games, Willy Tea has never lost the vision. Now Willy Tea Taylor has taken his vision of the “hero hang” on the road. and his talented traveling band The Fellership is made up of his fantastically talented buds who play Willy’s songs with a brand of reckless abandon and utter humility that spits in the face of pretense. The way The Fellership plays Will’s songs is the way they demand to be played and, in their short time together, they have been awe-ing every audience lucky enough to see them.

Folksinger Jodi Jones is determined to boldly dream a better tomorrow in the wake of a broken and weary world. Deeply rooted in the musical traditions of her childhood home in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, her work is a poetic and unflinching account of the beauty and hardship of working class experience in America. With defiant wit and innate musicality, she beautifies the bitter truths of our modern age into song as an act of love and solidarity. Art may not save us from our problems, but Jones believes it is crucial to surviving them with our humanity intact.

To sing is to live, to live is to hope, and to hope is to find the strength to fight another day in these dark and uncertain times. With guitar, banjo, fiddle, and even dulcimer in hand, she seeks to alchemize pain into purpose and break old ground to plant new seeds of hope and change.