Betsy Badwater & The Hillbilly Chrome is a Swampbilly-Blues/ANTI-Pop Country/Rockabilly band out of Pensacola, Florida.
Betsy Badwater & The Hillbilly Chrome hammer down a stout distillation of rockabilly, country, blues and high-lonesome. The band’s insistence on stripped-down instrumentation and guts-out-gospel vocalization gave birth to a powerful hybrid Americana sound driven by Betsy’s one-man-band -with a band- style. Betsy Badwater sings, plays guitar, and tambourine-topped bass drum all at the same time.
Since 2005, Badwater has been performing with her Hillbilly Chrome, a band of friendly guest musicians from coast to coast that hold it together in a pinch, performing with as many as 8 players on stage at once, right on down to Betsy’s One-Woman-Band performances, some owing to Betsy’s big voice, completely unamplified. Betsy and Lang Hollowman also appear as power-duo HOLLOWMAN BADWATER.
Multi-instrumentalist, Lang Hollowman joined Badwater in the summer of 2009 as a partner, seeking the honesty and passion he felt so deeply in the roots music he’d played in Mississippi church houses and with a string of talented bands along the Gulf Coast of Florida. Hollowman’s gut-wrenching slide guitar style has become the ultimate companion to Badwater’s fearless low-down country-blues vocals and story-song writing, a paring that has been likened to the spirit of Jay Farrar & Mark Spencer, early Hank Williams Jr., and Tedeschi and Trucks. Hollowman was a co-writer, multi-instrumentalist, engineer, and co-mixer on the Betsy Badwater & The Hillbilly Chrome 2009 twenty-song record, “TALES of the WAYWARD.”
Gulf Coast blues favorite, New York City native, and one of Betsy’s most significant musical and performance influences: Jeff Glickman, joins “The Chrome” on harmonica, hobo percussion and National Steel Guitar. Glickman affords a perfectly mysterious balance of whimsy and calculation to the songs through his often-syncopated percussive attack using tambourines, cheese graters and shoe-shine brushes, washboards, sinks, snare drums, auto parts, and even a decoy mallard filled with birdshot.
The newest addition to The Chrome is bassist, Joey Harrison, who has spent his entire adult life as a working musician in successful bands all over the United States. Joey’s rock & reggae roots and grab-hold-with-both-fists attitude manifests as major inspiration for current and future creation. With Joey riding shotgun to Betsy on upright and jazz bass, Betsy and Lang are feeling freer, reaching farther, and even harder than ever before.
In the last year, Betsy Badwater & The Hillbilly Chrome have performed for delighted crowds with international blues musicians The Ten Foot Pole Cats, Ramblin’ Steve Gardner, Bill Steber, and RJ Malloy, shared a signature HOLLOWMAN BADWATER barndance with classic country songwriter Lamar Morris, and opened for Grammy-winning acts Buckwheat Zydeco and Asleep At The Wheel, as well as the “Legendary Outlaw” David Allan Coe, rocking a sold out crowd at Vinyl Music Hall, in their hometown of Pensacola, Florida. Betsy Badwater & The Hillbilly Chrome have played in true music venues in 25 cities, have been featured on NPR radio shows as well as commercial radio stations in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, and have been featured on PBS television, CNN and Headline News.
“TALES of the WAYWARD” is the introductory record of Betsy Badwater’s Hillbilly Chrome band, and was largely recorded live outdoors on Betsy’s back porch. The record also includes a handful of studio recordings, all songs on “TALES of the WAYWARD” were recorded in one take, and several of the live recordings were the band’s first time playing the songs together. In fact, Betsy wrote “Fired Today,” which has been featured on CNN, Headline News, PBS Television, and commercial and public radio, sitting in her empty bathtub 15 minutes before recording. The track you hear was the very first time BB & HBC ever played the song. Period. The chemistry between the players and the live, outdoor atmosphere is what makes these raw recordings a tasty sample of what is to come from Betsy Badwater & The Hillbilly Chrome.
Betsy Badwater & The Hillbilly Chrome are currently stepping up the intensity for their new album, recording in process, entitled “ENGINE No. 9”, set to be released December 7, 2011.
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