The Gig Cartel - Gig guide: Hayseed Dixie, Holmfirth

Hayseed Dixie, Holmfirth

(featuring Hayseed Dixie)

Venue: Holmfirth Picturedrome

Hayseed Dixie began in the summer of 2000 in the fertile valley of Deer Lick Holler, deep in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee USA. In this area which was completely isolated from outside cultural and musical influence, the boys grew up playing the traditional music of their forefathers on banjo, fiddle, mandolin, acoustic guitar and acoustic bass. All of this changed abruptly one afternoon when a stranger crashed his car into a stately old oak tree on a particularly dangerous curve, which the locals refer to as the “Devil’s Elbow.” Sadly, the stranger expired, but his legacy lives on! As the boys searched through the wreckage looking for identification, they discovered several vinyl AC/DC albums. After playing these back on an old Edison 78rpm Victrola, everyone agreed that the songs were right fine country music . . . and that the Lost Highway of Brother Hank Williams and this Highway To Hell of AC/DC were indeed the exact same damn road! And the rest is now enshrined in musical history.

Hayseed Dixie began one innocent Summer day in 2000 when John Wheeler and Mike Daly drank roughly enough whiskey to float a battleship from the Florida Coast over to Portugal and back and decided to play around in John’s studio. Having spent the previous few years touring around with assorted country hat-acts, John had assembled a proper pile of recording equipment. Thus when he and Mike discovered in their drunken epiphany that the Lost Highway of Reverend Hank Williams and the Highway to Hell of Bishop Bon Scott were indeed the same identical stretch of tarmac, they were well and truly prepared to document this revelation in situ.

East Nashville, Tennessee in the Summer of 2000 was a proper Bohemian party place, and a few friends stopped by, drank some of John’s whiskey, and played and sang on this recording here and there, as was the custom of the times. And ten AC/DC songs were suddenly reimagined and recorded forever anew, entirely reinvented as Appalachian Mountain hillbilly rave-ups. Everyone danced (oh how they danced!) around the studio room and out onto the porch and drank more whiskey. (You should have been there. Really. You should have.)

Now, functioning well as “Exhibit A” in the demonstration of how one’s beginnings rarely know one’s ends, Hayseed Dixie have evolved into a proper force, one that most people either love, hate, or have never heard of. There isn’t really any middle ground, nor should there be. But fourteen albums - consisting of both original material and reinterpretations of previously rendered songs - and global physical *sales in excess of half a million copies, with over 1,200 live shows in 31 different countries testify: Hayseed Dixie are the undisputed creators of the musical genre, Rockgrass. There are many copycats, converts, and disciples out there. Accept no imitations.