Caleb Klauder and Reeb Willms

Klauder grew up in the San Juan Islands and Willms on the high desert plateau east of the Cascades. He had long been part of the Portland, Oregon, music scene, as a member of Calobo in the late 1990s, as a solo artist with records such as Western Country (2010), and as a founding member of the Foghorn Stringband. He first heard Willms singing at a festival in Idaho, and they first shared a stage at the Blackpot Festival & Cookoff in Eunice, Louisiana, when he brought her up to sing a couple of songs. She moved to Portland, joined the Foghorn Stringband as a singer and guitarist, and is heard on its albums Devil in the Seat (2015) and Rock Island Grange (2018). The two later moved to Orcas Island in the San Juans.

As a duo they recorded Oh Do You Remember (West Sound Records, 2012), a set of fourteen country and brother-duet songs such as “Thy Burdens Are Greater Than Mine,” “Sinking in the Lonesome Sea,” “Gathering Flowers,” “Alabama Waltz” and “Are You Teasing Me.” Innocent Road (West Sound, 2016) leaned on Klauder’s own songs, including the title track, “Coming On Strong” and “Stepping Stones,” alongside covers such as “I’d Jump the Mississippi,” “There Goes My Love” and the Cajun “Now’s the Time (C’est le Moment).” Farewell, Alligator Man (Valcour Records, December 2017), a tribute to the music of Jimmy C. Newman, was made with Kelli Jones and the fiddler Joel Savoy, who produced it for his Valcour label in Eunice.

Gold in Your Pocket, released by Free Dirt Records on 28 August 2024, was the country band’s third album and its first recorded outside Portland. Sessions began at the Tractor Shed in Nashville, where the bassist Mike Bub had a connection with the engineer Mark Howard and Chris Scruggs played and helped produce, and were finished about nine months later at Savoy’s Valcour studio in Eunice, with pedal steel and electric guitar added to the duo’s sound. Its thirteen tracks are mostly originals by Klauder and Willms, with a few covers, among them the Pacific Northwest songwriter Dean Johnson’s “Faraway Skies.”