Hayseed Dixie began one innocent Summer day in 2000 when John Wheeler and Mike Daly
drank roughly enough whiskey to float a battleship from the Florida Coast over to Portugal and
back and decided to play around in John’s studio. Having spent the previous few years touring
around with assorted country hat-acts, John had assembled a proper pile of recording
equipment. Thus when he and Mike discovered in their drunken epiphany that the Lost
Highway of Reverend Hank Williams and the Highway to Hell of Bishop Bon Scott were indeed
the same identical stretch of tarmac, they were well and truly prepared to document this
revelation in situ.
East Nashville, Tennessee in the Summer of 2000 was a proper Bohemian party place, and a few
friends stopped by, drank some of John’s whiskey, and played and sang on this recording here
and there, as was the custom of the times. And ten AC/DC songs were suddenly reimagined and
recorded forever anew, entirely reinvented as Appalachian Mountain hillbilly rave-ups.
Everyone danced (oh how they danced!) around the studio room and out onto the porch and
drank more whiskey. (You should have been there. Really. You should have.)
Now, functioning well as “Exhibit A” in the demonstration of how one’s beginnings rarely know
one’s ends, Hayseed Dixie have evolved into a proper force, one that most people either love,
hate, or have never heard of. There isn’t really any middle ground, nor should there be. But
fourteen albums - consisting of both original material and reinterpretations of previously
rendered songs - and global physical *sales in excess of half a million copies, with over 1,200
live shows in 31 different countries testify: Hayseed Dixie are the undisputed creators of the
musical genre, Rockgrass. There are many copycats, converts, and disciples out there. Accept
no imitations.
And now, holding up their own idiosyncratic mirror to an unsettled and unsettling 2017,
Hayseed Dixie offer up their 15 th studio album, a collection of both original songs and
reinterpretations of R&B and Soul classics. Dance with them as they probe the queries: “Why do
we still believe there is such a thing as ‘race’?” “Are concepts like ‘nations’ and ‘nationality’
really useful to people who lay bricks or perform kidney stone surgeries?” and “Why does every
song always sound better with a banjo in the mix?” The boys are seeking after the root core
categorical commonality that runs like an eternal golden braid throughout all of humanity. Then
they will buy it a drink!
Free Your Mind And Your Grass Will Follow is released worldwide on April 14 th on Hayseed
Dixie Records.
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