The Hooten Hallers Are the Loudest Ambassadors Columbia Has

Every music town needs a band it can point to and say: that's us, but louder. Columbia's is the Hooten Hallers — a blues-punk-Americana trio that formed here in 2007 and has spent nearly two decades exporting a very mid-Missouri kind of chaos to stages across the country and, since 2015, across Europe.

The lineup is deceptively small for the noise it makes. John Randall plays guitar and sings lead in a growl; Andy Rehm drums and answers back in a startling falsetto; and since 2014, Kellie Everett has anchored the low end not with a bass guitar but with a baritone and bass saxophone, which is exactly as unhinged and wonderful as it sounds. The result is a sound critics have struggled, gleefully, to categorize. No Depression once wrote that their music "evokes images of Tom Waits tending to a trotline at Lake of the Ozarks." Vice's Noisey called their self-titled record "an exciting mix of blues, punk, and folk." Rose Music Hall's own bio splits the difference: "Morphine meets ZZ Top mixed with a dash of George Thorogood and Tom Waits."

What matters locally is that they never really left. Signed to St. Louis's Big Muddy Records in 2012, the Hooten Hallers built a catalog — Greetings From Welp City! (2012), Chillicothe Fireball (2014), the self-titled 2017 album that hit No. 24 on the Roots Music Report Americana chart, Back in Business Again (2022) — while keeping Columbia as home base. Their 2024 record The Devil's Egg, released that August, is a full-blown rock opera, which is an absurd thing for a three-piece to attempt and precisely the kind of swing this band takes.

Why does a hometown band's ambition matter to the rest of us? Because scenes calcify without a ceiling. When a Columbia trio can share stages with Blues Traveler, Pokey LaFarge and Reverend Horton Heat, play SXSW and the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and still be the band your neighbor's kid saw at a Rose Park all-ages show, it tells every younger act in town that the door is not, in fact, closed. The Hooten Hallers are proof of concept for the whole ecosystem.

There's also the matter of the baritone sax, which deserves its own paragraph. In a genre lousy with interchangeable bass tones, Everett's horn gives the band a physical low frequency you feel in your sternum. It's the single most distinctive thing about their live show and the reason the Hooten Hallers can headline a room and still sound like nothing else on the bill.

It helps that the band's story is legibly local. They came up through the same rooms this paper covers every week — the Blue Note, Rose Park, the DIY circuit — and their history is dotted with the collaborators who make a scene a scene, including a 2013–14 stretch with Paul Weber adding harmonica and tuba and writing songs like "She Used to Love My Music." That's the texture of a real music town: bands that swap members, records that trade a Big Muddy catalog number back and forth, a sound that could only have been assembled here, at the confluence of blues bars and college-town punk basements. The Hooten Hallers didn't import their weirdness. They grew it in Columbia soil.

If you're new here and want the fastest possible education in what Columbia sounds like when it stops being polite, start with The Devil's Egg, then catch them the next time they're back on a hometown stage.

Loud, weird, ours. That's the assignment.

Sources: The Hooten Hallers — Wikipedia; The Hooten Hallers — Rose Music Hall; Back In Business Again — Bandcamp