Two Way Street Coffee House is Chicagoland’s most beloved folk and acoustic music venue, presenting weekly concerts and community events for over 50 years! The show starts at 8pm (CDT) and the doors open at 7:30pm. (Suggested donation $10). We will also host this concert virtually. You may access the livestream on www.twowaystreet.org, on our Facebook page, or on our YouTube channel.
On Friday, May 12, 2023 Two Way Street Coffee House Friday Night Concert Series presents 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 Even the Sparrow.
If you can’t join us in person, you can still tune in virtually to catch the show! To make your donation to Kelly Hunt HERE or for more information visit www.twowaystreet.org.