Doors at 8pm, music at 9pm
$10, all ages
Hailing from Waterloo, Iowa, Katie and the Honky Tonks are a four-piece original honky tonk band owing its sound to 1960s Nashville. Their songs lean heavy on real stories, catchy hooks, and rhythms built for crowded dance floors. Fronted by Katie Sires on vocals and rhythm guitar, with Jesse Cotton on lead guitar, Johnny Love on bass, and Luke Sires on drums, they were named 2025 Iowa Music Awards Country Artist of the Year, and were considered for a Grammy after releasing their debut album, Ain’t No Shame. Proof that honky tonk is still here and very much alive.
Their debut album, Ain’t No Shame, OUT NOW builds on the success of their 2024 EP, Two-Steppin’ in the Shower, which solidified their place in the Midwest country music scene. The EP earned widespread recognition, with Iowa Public Radio saying, “The EP sounds more like Nashville 1964, not Nashville 2024.” Lonesome Highway, in a review of "Ain't No Shame' says, "Katie and the Honky Tonks join the ever-growing canon of women like Summer Dean, Emily Nenni, Sarah Gayle Meech and Kimmi Bitter, to name but a few, that are representing genuine honky tonk music."
https://www.katieandthehonkytonks.net/
Big Begonias took root in 2020, creating transcendental folk and honky tonk music, featuring original songs by Gabrielle Kouri. Gabrielle (Awful Purdies) plays guitar, banjo, and sings. George Spielbauer (Cedar County Cobras) plays various guitars. Bass guitarist Dave “Chief” Lumberg (Shoe Money, Mayflies) and drummer Daniel Miller (Lake of Wire, Kleenexgirlwonder) hold down the groove.
https://bigbegonias.bandcamp.com/
Alex Dupree is a songwriter based in Austin, TX. He released his first album in 2005, a piece of shambolic bedroom folk made with a group of friends called the Trapdoor Band. NPR called it “both poetic and political.” Over the course of three LPs with this group, and one under the pseudonym Idyl, Alex would root himself firmly but idiosyncratically in the traditions of American songwriting. “Sounds continue to unfold in ways that are timeless,” one reviewer wrote for Yahoo! Music’s Top 100 Albums of 2007, “Dupree just needed to discover them and dust them off.” During this time, he was also recording and touring extensively with Zookeeper, the folk-rock zag of emo pioneer Chris Simpson (Mineral).
In 2013, Alex moved to Los Angeles to study poetry, but songs were never far from his mind. He still wrote and performed with cosmic country bands Mister Paradise and Dawn & Dupree, leaning into a Willie Nelson-tinged croon for the bar crowd. He returned, more or less, to his own voice for 2017’s You Winsome, You Lonesome, put out on cassette by Keeled Scales. A full release with the label never materialized, and after some time floating between odd writing gigs, he returned to Austin.
Along the way he met Phoenix-based producer Michael Krassner (Boxhead Ensemble, Simon Joyner, Califone). Their collaboration resulted in the 2022 album Thieves. If You Winsome, You Lonesome is a suite of country storytelling (seen through the hazy marine layer of indie rock), then Thieves has narrative folk ballads at its heart. In the words of a UK reviewer, Alex is “a magician pulling the strings, sometimes a director setting the scenes” for these campfire stories of “caves and gangsters, bodies and bad guys, untrustworthy divas and the search for true love.”
You Winsome, You Lonesome got a belated vinyl pressing in 2024, commemorated by a 22-date tour of Texas. Alex’s second album with Michael Krassner, Talking to the Dog, is scheduled for release in 2026.