Foghorn Duo

The two had played together in Portland since 2000, the year the Foghorn Stringband’s founders met at the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest in Weiser, Idaho. Lind, from Minneapolis, had met Klauder through the Portland band Pig Iron. As a duo they swapped instruments freely, Klauder on mandolin, guitar and fiddle and Lind on fiddle, guitar and banjo, and they played a regular run of Tuesday nights at McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale, east of Portland; in January 2008 they played there before leaving on a trip to Ireland, Denmark and Finland. They worked without set lists, moving between old-time tunes, bluegrass, country songs, ballads and Klauder’s originals.

Lonesome Song was self-released and launched on 12 June 2008 at Mississippi Studios in Portland. The fifteen tracks were recorded live in the studio with three microphones and mixed on the fly, so any take that went wrong was left off. The opener, “My Horses Ain’t Hungry,” long a mandolin and guitar number for them, was tried on the spot as a banjo and guitar duet and kept from the first take; the album also includes “Billy Gray,” a song Klauder had long wanted to record, “Old Love Letters,” “Little Black Train,” “Greenback Dollar,” “Girl in the Blue Velvet Band” and “Wild Hog in the Woods.”

The duo was still playing Edgefield in October 2009, but by then a full Foghorn Stringband was back, with Patrick Lind on guitar, Peter Leone on banjo and Nadine Landry on bass. Lind, Klauder and Landry later worked as the Foghorn Trio, and since the winter of 2011 the two men have played in the Foghorn Stringband quartet with Landry and the guitarist Reeb Willms.