Lyric full house includes two Americana duos for Woodsongs
Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams/Ron Ickes and Trey Hensley
6:45 p.m. Oct. 28 at the Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center, 300 E. Third for the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. $10. 859-280-2218. lexingtonlyric.tix.com.
A full house awaits you at the Lyric Theatre for Monday’s taping of the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour – and we don’t exclusively mean the audience.
The Monday bill sports two industrious Americana duo acts.
First, we have Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams, the husband-and-wife team that spent seven years in the band service of Americana music titan Levon Helm. But that prestigious alliance is just one of many star credits within their resumes. As a solo artist, multi-instrumentalist Campbell has collaborated, recorded or toured with the likes of Paul Simon, Rosanne Cash and k.d.lang. Most prominently, he served for many years as lead guitarist for Bob Dylan.
Campbell’s work with wife Williams, which most recently gave us the fine 2017 album “Contraband Love,” now includes touring duties with two bands celebrating their 50th anniversaries this year – Little Feat and Hot Tuna.
The Feat connection, however, has required something extra of the duo. With Feat guitarist and primary vocalist Paul Barrere sidelined this fall due to ongoing treatment for liver disease, Campbell and Williams have been recruited as temporary Feat members on the dates the two groups share. That included an Oct. 11 show at the Louisville Palace.
In between those dates, the couple found time to return to the Woodstock, N.Y. recording studio founded by Helm in late September to cut a concert album.
Campbell and Williams will make up only half of Monday’s hearty WoodSongs bill, however. The rest goes to the team of Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley. If it seems like the two were just here, well… they were. They played the Kentucky Castle as recently as September. But since then the duo has released its third album, “World Full of Blues.”
Ickes is well known to local bluegrass enthusiasts as the former dobro player for Blue Highway. But recording projects outside of the band that took him to areas of jazz, blues, and country helped make Ickes perhaps today’s most recognized dobro stylist behind Jerry Douglas. Then again, his 15 wins as Dobro Player of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association didn’t hurt.
For their multi-genre turns on “World Full of Blues (which features vocal cameos by Vince Gill and Taj Mahal), Ickes and guitarist/vocalist Hensley teamed with Brent Maher, the veteran country producer who oversaw every studio recording made by another acclaimed duo - the Kentucky-rooted mother/daughter troupe The Judds.
This story was originally published October 23, 2019 at 2:37 PM.