For two decades, the Henhouse Prowlers have toured their bluegrass act around the U.S. and the world.
The quartet has played in 25 countries and were even named cultural ambassadors by the U.S. Department of State in 2013. Now the Chicago group is bringing their sound – which incorporates elements from African and Asian folk music with traditional bluegrass stylings – to western Kentucky.
The Henhouse Prowlers will play Paducah Beer Werks at 9 p.m. on Friday. Three of the band’s members spoke with WKMS ahead of the tour stop.
While the band has had many personnel changes, the Henhouse Prowlers are bassist Jon Goldfine, guitarist Chris Dollar, Jake Howard on mandolin and Ben Wright on banjo.
The band's formation and early years
Wright and Howard said that they all played in various bands in Chicago and the Henhouse Prowlers was originally a side project in the city’s burgeoning music scene.
“Chicago has the Old Town School of folk music, so there is a bluegrass scene here. It wasn't massively robust when we started playing, but it was popular enough to build an audience and encourage us to keep playing,” said Wright. “There is a pretty big folk music history to here, and a lot of people don't know this, but like some of the most famous early bluegrass recordings were recorded right here in downtown Chicago. Flatt and Scruggs came up here. Bill Monroe got his break at the Chicago Barn Dance, which was a radio show broadcast out of here that eventually essentially turned into the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.”
Henhouse Prowlers and the World
The band’s global experiences have pushed them in new musical directions, but they have also moved the group to start an educational outreach program for both school children and festival-goers alike.
“So we all have this strong love for traditional bluegrass, and if you come to our shows, you'll see that we do like to play that kind of music. But we've also found, throughout the years, this band has had various members who love to songwrite and who come from really different backgrounds,” Howard said. “I think through all of that, we find this common love of bluegrass, but we really try to stretch it as much as we can without being without the Bluegrass police calling us out.”
The Henhouse Prowlers have played all over the world, from the Middle East to Siberia. Howard said it has become a huge part of who they are as a band and that it was almost accidental that they got into international music and travel. He said they were sent to West Africa through the State Department for cultural diplomacy.
“It was so much fun, [and] so fascinating culturally, to exchange music with people from all over the world,” Howard said. “It really became something we decided we wanted to focus on … all of that kind of evolved into us starting a nonprofit called Bluegrass Ambassadors so that we can work with the State Department, but also build programming on our own. We sing in about a dozen different languages and do workshops.”
The band is traveling to the Czech Republic this fall as part of their own cultural diplomacy program. Ben Wright says that the Czech people are familiar with Bluegrass because of an unlikely source: armed forces radio from the post-war era.
“[It] started at the end of World War II. We threw up radio towers and started broadcasting Armed Forces Radio,” said Howard. “Through that, they found this really deep love with bluegrass music. They were under this regime that was pretty restrictive on what they could listen to, and music was definitely something that was this connective force to the outside world.”
Paducah Stop
The band is in the process of preparing an upcoming album to coincide with the trip to Europe. Wright said that people in Paducah can expect to hear songs off the unreleased record, as well as a Czech translation of a Johnny Cash tune.
The Henhouse Prowlers’ music can be found on the band’s website.
Ticket information for Friday’s concert at Paducah Beer Werks can be found on the venue’s social media channels or on Eventbrite.
