Mix of blues and rock make for lively Hayseed Dixie gig

The Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@gmail.com

Self-proclaimed inventors of ‘rockgrass’, Hayseed Dixie come to Róisín Dubh on Saturday, January 27. The quartet use banjo, mandolin, guitar and bass to re-interpret the songs of AC/DC and classic rock acts like Pink Floyd, as well as playing their own songs.

“If you turn up wanting to see a bunch of hillbillies play some classic rock tunes and some quirky originals, that’s going to happen,” says John Wheeler, lead singer with the band. “If you show up wanting to see some guys from East Tennessee who travel around the world a lot and make some wry political observations, you’ll get that.

“And if you want to come along and cross your arms and say ‘why in the hell did anybody show up to see this one-joke band?’, you’ll leave after three songs.  Those are all valid reactions!”

Originally hailing from East Tennessee, John is now based in England, in Cambridge.  His song When the World Gets Small was created in his newly adopted hometown.

“I actually started that the day after the Brexit vote,” he says. “I was walking down the street in Cambridge, and it looked the same as the night before. There were homeless people sitting on the street. A couple of weeks later I was in Venice Beach in California, which has the largest homeless population in the United States. The police run them off during the day, but they let them camp there at night. So, there’s a bit of a community, and I think no matter where you are on the social totem pole, everyone likes to be in some sort of community.

“Both the UK and the US like to fancy themselves as real proper first-world nations,” he adds. And they are – but there’s also this really dark underbelly of people who get forgotten. The similarity was striking to me.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.