Reeb Willms

She grew up in a family of wheat farmers near Waterville, on the high desert plateau east of the Cascades, listening to her father and uncles, who sang country and traditional songs as the Willms Brothers. She learned piano as a child and began singing and playing guitar in her early twenties. Klauder first heard her sing at a festival in Idaho, and around 2010 he brought her on stage for a couple of songs at the Blackpot Festival & Cookoff in Eunice, Louisiana, their first time singing together in public. She moved to Portland, Oregon, and in the winter of 2011 joined the Foghorn Stringband on vocals and rhythm guitar, alongside the fiddler Sammy Lind, Klauder on mandolin and fiddle and Nadine Landry on bass, a lineup that has stayed together since.

With Foghorn she recorded Outshine the Sun (2012), Devil in the Seat (2015) and Rock Island Grange (2018), whose songs include “Train on the Island” and “Lonesome Homesick Blues.” With Klauder she made Oh Do You Remember (West Sound Records, 2012), fourteen country and brother-duet songs, and Innocent Road (2016), built mostly on Klauder’s songs, and the two joined Kelli Jones and the fiddler Joel Savoy on Farewell, Alligator Man (Valcour, 2017), a tribute to the music of Jimmy C. Newman. She also sang in the choir on Aoife O’Donovan’s “Oh, Mama” (Fossils, 2013).

In September 2022 Willms and Klauder played the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, opening for the Watchhouse duo with Mike Bub on bass and Christian Sedelmyer on fiddle. By then the two had toured the United States, Canada, western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and had moved from Portland to Orcas Island, Klauder’s home ground in the San Juan Islands. Gold in Your Pocket, the Caleb Klauder Reeb Willms Country Band’s third album, was recorded at the Tractor Shed in Nashville and at Savoy’s Valcour studio in Eunice and released by Free Dirt Records in August 2024. It carries two of her own songs, “Same Little Heart,” about growing up in a farming community, and “All About Love,” which she sings with Klauder’s harmony, and her version of Paul Burch’s “Last of My Kind,” a song she had been singing since she first performed in public.