Wyoming Arts Council

Three Wyoming groups hit the road in May and June for regional WYOmericana Music Tour

Featured News | March 15, 2013

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JShogren Shanghai’d, Jalan Crossland and Screen Door Porch have joined together for WYOmericana Caravan in May and June. They kick off the tour with a May 15 concert in Laramie’s Gryphon Theatre and wind their way through venues in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and Idaho. They wrap up the tour June 8 at the Hi-Water Hoedown at the Yard in Saratoga.

JShogren Shanghai’d (shown in photo above) play original hard acoustic music from lives lived in loud proportions. Their style of WYOmericana is a modern interpretation of traditional roots music; an amalgamation of blues, old timey, country/western, jazz, vaudeville, rockabilly roll, ballads, and polka. Their varied sound has a rawness and vitality reminiscent of 1920-40s blues and dancehall music filtered through a contemporary dissonant transmitter. They have fun too. Shogren just got back from representing Wyoming at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, and his new album was named to House of Mercy Radio’s Top 50 Albums of 2012.

Quartet Screen Door Porch (shown on home page photo) delivers a Wyoming-grown fusion of soulful Americana, Roots-Rock, and Country-Blues that has been likened to “Gillian Welch meets The Band, with Ryan Adams and Bonnie Raitt hanging out backstage” (605 Magazine). The core female/male singer-songwriter combo of Seadar Rose & Aaron Davis thrive in a space that houses colorable harmonies, varied acoustic & electric instrumentation, and have “a sort of Lennon/McCartney arrangement and get it right every time” (Americana UK). SDP’s two studio albums—Screen Door Porch (2010) and The Fate & The Fruit(2012)—were internationally recognized in six “Best Albums of the Year” lists and hovered in the Top 25 of the Euro-Americana Chart and Top 30 of the Roots Music Report Roots-Rock Chart.

In a blue collar, John Hartford, van-down-by-the-river, porch-pickin’ sort of way, Jalan Crossland’s down-home style makes you wonder what’s in the water in Tensleep. Crossland is one of the very few alt-country artists his age who still claims the “country” as home. Maybe this explains the lyrical, “truth is stranger than fiction” wobble to his songs about 21st century rural life. Despite becoming a roots music virtuoso spanning six studio albums, he managed to revert to his true slacker past by placing a mere second in the Winfield National Guitar Fingerpicking Competition. Crossland was recently awarded the 2012 Governor’s Arts Award and released his sixth studio album, Portrait of a Fish.

Go here for complete schedule of tour dates — and ticket info.

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