SUMMER CONCERT SERIES 2024
At The Bloomery, we love listening to great music as much as we love growing flowers. Both bring beauty and hope into our lives, and it brings us great joy to share talented musicians with the Casper community. Add locally prepared cuisine, beer, and the sites and sounds of nature to a summer evening and the night is just about as perfect as it can be.
Come experience outdoor music, Wyoming style.
Mark Oblinger
The Bloomery is celebrating it's third season of "Summer Concerts on the Farm" in 2024, and we are so excited to open with Mark Oblinger! Mark is a Colorado-based Grammy nominated, Emmy Award winning singer-songwriter, composer and producer who brings his soulful, eclectic blend of folk/pop to the stage featuring powerful, vocal forward arrangements from his breakout release, “High Water Line” - PLUS new songs from his latest EP, The River , released on January 5th.
”High Water Line” garnered a host of national reviews, press and radio airplay on both commercial and noncommercial Americana and AAA formats and tour dates including the iconic Café Bohemia, the Rockwood Music Hall, and The Bitter End in New York City. This past April, Mark released the first single from The River - his very alternative take on the Pure Prairie League classic, “Amie.”
The second single, “Lead the Way (Bessie’s Eyes),” was released on September 22, and both have already received airplay on KRFC and the Colorado Playlist. Mark’s national performing roots include stints with chart topping country rock stalwarts Pure Prairie League (“Aimee”) and Firefall (“Cinderella”, “You Are The Woman”). From there, Mark has had the good fortune to work with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Richie Furay (Buffalo Springfield, Poco) Garth Brooks, Amy Grant, John Oates, Jeff Hanna (Dirt Band) and more.
With works featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Mark was a 2012 Grammy nominee for his Children’s Jazz Symphony - “JumpinJazz Kids - A Swinging Jungle Tale,” featuring the great Al Jarreau. Mark also won 5 Emmys for his work on the PBS show, “The Big Green Rabbit.”
Mark will be joined on stage by an all-star line up including singer/keyboardist and co-writer Linda Lawson and multi-instrumentalist Eric Moon on lap steel, keys, accordion and vocals.
Tophouse + Taylor Ashton
Tophouse is a Montana-raised Americana/Folk band made up of Jesse Davis, Joe Larson, Will Cook, and Andy LaFave.
Created in 2015, the band began as a duo when two Music Composition majors at the University of Montana, guitarist/songwriter Jesse Davis and violinist William Cook, realized they loved playing music together and wanted to start - immediately. Lacking both a drummer and a singer, the first iteration of Tophouse was a virtuosity 'Celtic folk' instrumental duo with next-to-no connections. For about a year Tophouse performed in the bottom of parking garages in the cold Missoula air because "the reverb was cool." William and Jesse eventually snuck their way into a local farmer's market, and then moved onto the illustrious stardom of coffee shops, breweries, and weddings.
Joseph Larson, a singer, songwriter, and guitar/banjo player, joined the band in 2016. Joe wrote and performed songs, while Jesse's songs like “Where Are You” and “Summer Never Leaves” - which, up to this point, had simply been instrumental violin pieces - finally came into their fullness. Joseph's addition vaulted Tophouse to local fame, with the Missoulian naming Tophouse one of the top 5 best new bands. Between 2017-2019 they released their self-produced EP Middle of Somewhere and their album Hopes & Fears while performing in festivals like the Bitterroot Celtic Festival, Avery Fest, and the Flathead Celtic Festival.
Tophouse moved to Nashville TN in October of 2019. They, like many musicians, were stranded at their shared home for most of 2020. During this year Tophouse wrote, recorded, and released their second album, Snapshot. When music city opened back up in 2021 Tophouse was invited to be the house band for Tennessee Brew Works and began performing in and around Nashville. After a difficult year of waiting and hoping, Tophouse prevailed, performing in events like the Local Show and going on their first official tours to Montana, Texas, and California.
In 2022 Andy LaFave the pianist joined Tophouse. Andy - an incredible songwriter and musician that regularly releases his own music under his solo project Don't Dance - has performed with William and Joseph since childhood. With Andy's help, Tophouse is working on their newest music release and will be ready to inspire the populace.
Wyoming Singer-Songwriter Aaron Davis
“Aaron Davis is an essential force in the Americana roots music scene in Wyoming” (KHOL 89.1FM)
Kentucky native Aaron Davis stages his songs with poetic amplitude and a deep well of old-time and modern sonic textures - voice, acoustic & resonator & lap steel guitars, open back banjo, harmonica, cigar box percussion, and tailor-made phrase sampling and analog simulations. Aaron is chiefly known as co-founder of national touring act Screen Door Porch, as engineer-producer-session player at his Three Hearted Recording Studio in Hoback, Wyoming, and for the eclectic quartet Aaron Davis & The Mystery Machine. Aaron’s solo shows are well versed in both off-the-cuff and intricate arrangements, working the lesser-worn corners of the American musical fabric through an unconventional lens. The downhome fusion of roots-inspired Americana bridges alt-country, mid-century slide blues, story folk, gypsy grass, Western swing, and groovy roots rock - often bridged with stories of unsung characters.
Nearly two decades of touring the country and staying true to the write-and-record troubadour sensibility has led the press to describe Aaron as “a combination that goes down like top-shelf bourbon” (Austin Chronicle) with “a searing slide guitar” (Country Weekly), and “a particularly standout approach that mixes poetry, groove and roughness” (Lonestar Time).
Recognizing Aaron’s twelve-album discography, the “truly phenomenal songwriter” (Americana UK) with “lyrical prowess” (JH Buckrail) was one of two composers in Wyoming to be awarded a Performing Arts Music Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts - “a merit-based honor for an artist’s work in their field.” He has been fortunate to share bills with many of his heroes including Wilco, Willie Nelson, Jason Isbell, Buddy Guy, Sam Bush, Brian Wilson, Steve Earle, Grace Potter, Sarah Jarosz, Justin Townes Earle, and James McMurtry. Most recently, Aaron embarked on a once-in-a-lifetime endeavor — The WyoFolk Project — in which he produced-recorded-mixed a compilation album featuring fourteen of Wyoming’s celebrated songwriters performing new works at his studio.
His new EP, Medicine, features four original songs bound by medicinal themes, recorded in Austin with longtime collaborators.
Aaron will be joined at The Bloomery by longtime collaborator David Bundy (fretless/fretted bass, vocal harmony), who is also a member of Aaron Davis & the Mystery Machine and Screen Door Porch. David is an in-demand sideman, music teacher, and is the primary songwriter-vocalist for rock band Ticket to Space.
Liver Down The River
From the high mountain river-valley of Durango, Colorado comes a five piece band of musicians called Liver Down The River. The group has their roots in countless river floats, campfires, late night picking, and Colorado living. Since LDTR's creation in 2012, their unique sound and high energy performances have lead them to share the stage with the likes of The Infamous Stringdusters, Railroad Earth, Lil' Smokies, The New Mastersounds, John Stickley Trio, Kyle Hollingsworth Band, and Poor Man’s Whiskey.
The band got their start in 2012 when Patrick Storen and Emily Winter met and started playing music together. A few common fiddle tunes and Grateful Dead numbers later, the two were ready to perform. With the addition of Jake Hasluck on bass, Dominic Fante on drums and Tom Buswell on guitar, the music comes to life.
The music is a blend of original and improvisational compositions that take the listener on a journey to the high peaks of bluegrass, down to the deepest pockets of the funk, and through to the outer reaches of space. Inspiration comes from the band’s collective adventures, love of nature, the following of the soul, and the drive to keep on moving on.
Kelly Hunt
On the walls of any local used music shop there hangs a gallery of mysteries. Picked up and handed down across the decades, each instrument contains the imprints and stories of those who have played it before, most of which remain untold. For Kansas City-based songwriter Kelly Hunt, the most intriguing of these stories is the origin of her anonymous calfskin tenor banjo. “I really wasn’t looking for it,” she says, “but I opened up the case and found a note saying, ‘This banjo was played by a man named Ira Tamm in his dog and pony show from 1920 to 1935.’ It was unlike any banjo I’d ever heard…so warm and mellow, with an almost harp-like quality to it, very soulful”—apt words for the Memphis native’s debut album, Even The Sparrow, which was released in May 2019 and nominated for the International Folk Music Awards “2019 Album of the Year.”
The daughter of an opera singer and a saxophonist, Hunt was raised in Memphis, TN amidst a motley mélange of musical influences ranging from Rachmaninov to Joni Mitchell to Mississippi John Hurt. She grew up singing in choirs, poring over poetry books, and writing her own music as a matter of course, first on piano then 5-string banjo. After being introduced to the banjo in college while studying French and visual arts, Hunt began to develop her own improvised style of playing, combining old-time picking styles with the percussive origins of the instrument. After college, Hunt embarked on a rambling path through career pursuits in farming, French breadmaking, and visual arts, ultimately landing in Kansas City, where she would go on to write and record her debut album, Even the Sparrow.
While reminiscent of modern traditionalists such as Gillian Welch, Even The Sparrow reveals an ineffable quality that hovers beyond the constraints of genre, à la Anais Mitchell and Patty Griffin. Over the span of a dozen songs, Hunt’s penchant for storytelling and intriguing arrangement cast a spell which No Depression describes as “the musical equivalent of a book you can’t put down, one you’ll want to revisit again and again to catch every nuance and turn of phrase.”
In “Men of Blue & Grey,” what begins as a Reconstruction-era ballad about the repurposing of Civil War glass plate negatives in a greenhouse roof soon becomes a meditation on the hope that growth and life may one day be able to emerge from the ruins of suffering and haunting of violence. “Across The Great Divide” turns an otherwise traditional accounting of spurned love into a philosophical epic of the ethics of forgiveness and freedom, evoking the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard and Walt Whitman.
As for the original owner of Kelly Hunt’s mysterious tenor banjo, not much is known. “I’ve never been able to find anything about Ira Tamm,” she says, “I think he just had a humble little traveling show.” What’s clear is that the itinerant performer laid down his banjo at the height of the Great Depression, almost eighty years before it would be picked up by Hunt. “That banjo has stories. I wish I knew them all,” says Hunt, though the banjo’s most intriguing story may just be beginning with Even The Sparrow. “The marks of Ira’s hands are still in the calfskin head, so I can see where he played and left his mark,” she says. “Now my own marks are there too, in different places, like a kind of portrait.”
Kelly’s sophomore album Ozark Symphony, (produced by Dirk Powell at his Cypress House studio in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana), was released on Compass Records in October, 2023.
