Clover-Lynn brings gothic bluegrass to Lily’s Snack Bar on Nov. 19

The Virginia banjo player, known online as hillbillygothic, plays a 100-capacity Boone room on a Thursday night for $7.

There are about a hundred spots inside Lily's Snack Bar, and on a Thursday later this month one of the more distinctive banjo players in Appalachian music will be playing to them.

Clover-Lynn plays Lily's Snack Bar in Boone on Thursday, Nov. 19, at 9 p.m. Tickets are $7 through DICE. The show was announced Oct. 27, and the JamBase listing has the details. With a capacity of 100, it won't take much to sell out.

Clover-Lynn is a bluegrass and gothic country musician who plays banjo and fronts a band, Clover-Lynn and the Hellfires, according to her Wikipedia entry. She grew up in rural Virginia listening to country and bluegrass. Passim, the Cambridge, Mass., folk club that has hosted her, says she grew up in rural Franklin County, worked in the tech industry on the West Coast, and then came back to Virginia to make music. The Hellfires were previously called the Laurel Hells Ramblers, Passim notes.

The sound is the hook. Music of Our Desire describes it as a blend of southern gothic, bluegrass and gothic country, often with folk-punk mixed in. Those categories have always been close. Bluegrass and old-time music are full of murder ballads, ghosts and dark hollers, and a goth sensibility mostly brings that out into the open. A banjo, played the right way, can sound as eerie as anything.

A banjo, played the right way, can sound as eerie as anything.

She also has a big following online. Clover-Lynn is a trans woman associated with goth subculture, and she has built a large audience on TikTok and Instagram as hillbillygothic, posting banjo videos and pushing back on misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ content, according to Wikipedia. A lot of people found her through a phone screen. A $7 Thursday show in a hundred-capacity room is a chance to hear the music in person, with nothing between you and the strings.

She's played the old-time circuit too. Wikipedia notes a 2024 appearance at the Floyd Country Store, a Virginia room with deep roots in mountain music. For an artist pulling bluegrass in a darker direction, that's a meaningful room to have played.

For the High Country, the booking makes sense. Boone is mountain-music country, and an artist working in that tradition while taking it somewhere new belongs on a local stage. A 9 p.m. start on a Thursday is a typical late-week schedule for a small room.

The practical note: 100 tickets is not many. At $7 this is one of the cheapest good nights out on the calendar, and that tends to sell out. Buy on DICE soon. If you can, get there early enough to get a spot near the front, where you can watch her hands on the banjo.

Some music is built for small rooms in the mountains on a cold November night. This should be one of those shows.

Sources: Clover-Lynn (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org); Clover-Lynn (Passim) (passim.org); Clover-Lynn (Music of Our Desire) (events.musicofourdesire.com); Clover-Lynn at Lily’s Snack Bar (JamBase) (jambase.com); Tickets (DICE) (link.dice.fm)