Henhouse Prowlers

The banjo player Ben Wright, a founding member, came to bluegrass in Chicago after buying a banjo he saw in the window of the Old Town School of Folk Music in October 1999. With the bassist Jon Goldfine, who has also been with the band from the start, he played on its first album, The Henhouse Prowlers, released on the Slackjaw label in April 2007, alongside Brian Koehler on guitar, Martin McWhorter on mandolin, Ryan Hinshaw on fiddle and James Weigel on Dobro; it included “Sitting Alone in the Moonlight” and “California Cotton Fields.” The live album Direct from Chicago (2012) had Starr Moss on guitar, Grant Ziolkowski on mandolin and Dan Andree on fiddle.

Studio albums followed every two years or so: A Dark Rumor (2009), Verses, Chapters & Rhymes (2011), Breaking Ground (2013), Still On That Ride (2015), Separation Man (2017) and The Departure (2021), with a second live record, Live from Kyrgyzstan, in 2017. Bluegrass Ambassadors Sessions, Vol. 1 (2022) gathered songs and collaborators from their travels. Lead and Iron came out on Dark Shadow Recording in September 2023, and Unravel, produced by Stephen Mougin, in April 2025.

By then the band was a quartet of Wright, Goldfine, the guitarist Chris Dollar, from central Indiana, who had played with the New Old Cavalry and the Flatland Harmony Experiment, and the mandolinist Jake Howard, from the Akron area of Ohio, who studied at Berklee and joined in 2020; all four sing. Bluegrass Ambassadors, the band’s 501(c)(3) arm, runs school programs and workshops that combine American and international folk music, and in 2024 it and the band held a symposium and concert in Prague, called Common Chords, about the history of bluegrass and country music among the people of former Czechoslovakia.