Fiddle & Bow Brings Two Legends Together Aug. 15
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On Aug. 15, the Fiddle and Bow Music Hall in Honea Path will host a pairing that sounds less like a booking than a small act of cultural mischief. David Childers and Jason Ringenberg, two veteran Americana figures with enough mileage between them to make a genre feel like a family tree, will be backed by the Carolina Serpents, Childers’s band renamed for the occasion since Ringenberg will be taking the lead as well. The two are expected to trade songs with a certain amount of hard-earned authority.
Ringenberg’s résumé carries the pleasing stamp of old insurgency. He is the man often credited with inventing cowpunk, that rambunctious fusion of punk rock and country music, and as frontman for Jason and the Scorchers he helped kick down the doors of 1980s Americana before Americana had settled into a respectable noun. Childers, for his part, is a North Carolina Hall of Fame inductee, which seems about right for a musician whose work belongs to the weathered, durable side of the regional imagination.
The appeal of the show, according to Fiddle & Bow Owner Justin Atkin, lies partly in the novelty of seeing two such performers on the same stage and partly in the chemistry of musicians who have spent their careers learning how to make a room move. Both men are high-energy performers, and the evening promises the sort of loose, driven exchange that can make a concert feel less like a program than a conversation conducted in rhythm.
The venue itself is part of the point. The Fiddle and Bow, at 45 North Main Street in Honea Path, is intimate enough that the closest seats are only three feet from the stage and the farthest only 30 feet away. It books traditional country, bluegrass, Americana, blues, gospel, folk, singer-songwriters, and, as Atkin put it, “really good music,” a phrase with the appealing simplicity of an old-fashioned guarantee.
It also doubles as a folk-art gallery, which gives the place the feeling of a listening room that has wandered into a museum and decided to stay. The hall seats about a 100 and has hosted Grammy winners, number one songwriters, and other arrivals whose reputations precede them by a comfortable margin.
Tickets are available through the Fiddle and Bow’s website, social media pages, and Eventbrite, or by calling Atkin directly. But the larger invitation is simpler than all that: come next week to the room built for listening and watch two seasoned musicians turn familiarity into occasion.
