Chicken Wire Empire Brings Wisconsin's Jam-Grass to a Cornfield Taproom

Friday night, July 24, the stage at Alluvial Brewing belongs to Chicken Wire Empire, a bluegrass band out of Wisconsin, and if you've never made the drive out W 190th Street for a string band, this is the one to break the streak. Fifteen dollars in advance, twenty at the door, all ages, in a taproom small enough that you'll feel the mandolin in your sternum.

Chicken Wire Empire come from the modern, restless end of bluegrass — the wing of the genre that grew up on both Bill Monroe and jam bands, and treats the acoustic five-piece format as a launch pad rather than a museum piece. That's a good fit for Alluvial, which has spent the last few years proving that central Iowa will turn out for exactly this kind of act if someone bothers to book it. The taproom has made a habit of catching touring string bands as they thread through the upper Midwest, and a Wisconsin group dropping down into Iowa on a summer weekend is precisely the routing Alluvial has learned to capitalize on.

Put this show in the context of the month around it and the picture sharpens. The night after Chicken Wire, Lawrence, Kansas alt-country band The Keen plays the same stage for free. A week later it's a folk-and-indie double bill. And the string-music thread runs straight through August to "Latingrass" duo Larry & Joe and then to Grammy-winning fiddler Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on the 8th. Chicken Wire Empire isn't a one-off; it's one strong node in a summer-long run of acoustic touring music that has turned a brewery into the region's roots-music clearinghouse.

Here's the part that matters beyond Friday. Bands like this are how a scene stays connected to the wider touring circuit. A group from Wisconsin playing Ames means Ames is on a map that includes Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Madison, the whole Midwestern string-band corridor. Every time one of these acts has a good night in the taproom — sells some merch, gets a warm crowd, gets asked back — Ames gets a little stickier on that map. That's how a town of this size keeps punching above its weight: not by landing the stadium show, but by being a dependable Friday stop for the working touring bands who actually build the connective tissue of American roots music.

And it's a cheap, low-stakes way to gamble on music you don't know yet. Fifteen dollars for a band you've maybe never heard is the kind of bet the Ames scene runs on. Some nights you get a competent set. Some nights you get the show you talk about for a year. With a jam-leaning bluegrass band in a small room on a summer Friday, the odds are better than you'd think.

So make the drive. Get there early enough to get a good spot, order something from the taps, and let a Wisconsin string band remind you that the best seat in Ames this weekend is twenty minutes past the last stoplight.

Sources: Alluvial Brewing events calendar