Bluegrass doesn’t get any better than Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands. She’s Berkeley’s own, she’s won the International Bluegrass Music Association award for Female Vocalist of the Year multiple times, not to mention a Grammy for her contribution to True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe, and her Right Hands are about as talented as a band has a right to be. Laurie sings and plays guitar and fiddle. The immensely talented Tatiana “Hoss” Hargreaves will be joining the band on fiddle. She can be heard fiddling up a storm on the band's latest CD. Tom Rozum sings, swaps jokes, and plays mandolin, mandola, and guitar, Patrick Sauber plays banjo, and Max Schwartz plays bass. If you’ve never heard them before, you need to hear them as soon as you can. And if you’ve already heard them, chances are you want to hear them again. Singout! calls Laurie “one of the leading lights of American acoustic music, a genuine national treasure,” and Country Standard Time says that she “has recorded some of the finest folk-inspired music of the past three decades.”

This year, Laurie’s annual post-Thanksgiving concert will feature songs from the deep catalog that she has developed as well as the band’s latest recording, The Hazel & Alice Sessions, featuring the repertoire of bluegrass trailblazers Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. “Creatively ambitious and utterly unpretentious, steeped in tradition but doggedly progressive,” says critic Andrew Gilbert, Laurie “is a gifted fiddler, deft guitarist, inspired songwriter and powerfully evocative singer.” The Right Hands are her perfect complement. Don’t miss Laurie & the Right Hands in their musical home at the Freight.

Listen to a track from Laurie Lewis:

Visit Laurie's website

Photo by Gene Balzer