Bronwyn Keith-Hynes Played Ames Last Week. Her New Record Explains Why That Matters.
Five nights ago, on August 8, one of the best fiddle players working in bluegrass stood on the stage of a brewery taproom outside Ames and played for a room you could walk across in twenty steps. Bronwyn Keith-Hynes — two-time IBMA Fiddle Player of the Year, veteran of Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, a Grammy in her history — brought her show to Alluvial Brewing for a $20 advance ticket. On Friday, August 14, she releases a new solo album, "Rattlin' Bones." The two facts are connected, and the connection says something about Ames.
Keith-Hynes is a genuine bluegrass virtuoso, someone whose day job has been playing in one of the most celebrated bands in the modern genre. "Rattlin' Bones" is her step further out front as a solo artist. Ahead of the record she premiered "Johnny Ray," a haunting song that, per the exclusive premiere reporting, takes on addiction — not the fiddle-showcase you might expect from a player known for her instrument, but a songwriter's subject, handled with weight. That's the tell of an artist expanding: the album isn't just a lap around the fingerboard, it's about something.
So why does a musician of that caliber play a taproom in a cornfield outside a 66,000-person town? Because Alluvial has spent years making itself the kind of room touring roots artists route through — and because Keith-Hynes's August 8 date sat inside a summer-long run of exactly this music at exactly this venue: Wisconsin's Chicken Wire Empire in late July, "Latingrass" duo Larry & Joe on the 4th, Keith-Hynes on the 8th. When a scene builds a reliable home for touring bluegrass, this is the payoff — a Grammy winner on her album-release run treats your small town as a real stop, not a skip.
That's the part worth sitting with for the local scene. It would be easy to assume artists at this level only play cities. The reason one played Ames is that someone here did the unglamorous work of booking string band after string band until the room earned a reputation on the circuit. An album like "Rattlin' Bones" gets made in the wider bluegrass world, but the tour behind it touches down in central Iowa specifically because Ames made itself worth touching down in. The record and the room are two ends of the same pipeline.
If you were at Alluvial on the 8th, you got to hear this material in a space small enough to catch every bow stroke, days before the record was even out — the kind of early, intimate hearing that big-city fans pay a lot more and stand a lot farther back to get. If you missed it, the consolation is excellent: "Rattlin' Bones" lands Friday, and you can hear what she was playing, minus the drive out W 190th.
Either way, remember how this happened. A world-class fiddler released a serious record and played a brewery taproom outside Ames on the way to it. Towns that keep their music rooms alive get nights like that. Towns that let them close get the record and none of the room. Put "Rattlin' Bones" on Friday, and be a little grateful Ames still has the room.
Sources: Bronwyn announces new album "Rattlin' Bones"; Exclusive premiere: Bronwyn tackles addiction with "Johnny Ray"; Alluvial Brewing events calendar