Mighty Deeds by The Cimarron Kings

Mentored by the legendary music writer Stanley Booth, singer-songwriter Brian Kennedy spent the past five years driving tens of thousands of miles across Texas, Oklahoma and thereabouts, writing and taking photographs of America in her joyfully troubled decline.

In the spring of 2021, he began a project focused on the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, during which he met and interviewed champion bluegrass fiddle player Byron Berline, who in his long and storied career played with such greats as Eck Robertson, Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, Bill Monroe, Gram Parsons, and even the Rolling Stones.

While hanging around Byron's home base - the Double Stop Fiddle Shop in Guthrie, Oklahoma - soaking up the Great Plains bluegrass vibe, Brian fell in with two of Byron's protégés, Andrew and Jonathan Hunt, brothers and accomplished musicians who'd been taught by Byron since childhood.

Brian hoped they simply might help him flesh out some songs. But one thing led to another, and the Hunt brothers and he soon realized they'd stumbled on a singularly lovely sound – recently described by a fan as “a cross between the Eagles and a ‘30s string band.”

The Cimarron Kings call their music ‘arthouse country’ out of an abundance of cheek, but it’s more accurately descended from the old-time fiddle blues of the Mobile Strugglers, Frank Stokes, or the Mississippi Sheiks, among others, with songwriting rooted in a firmly apostolic rhetoric - what the noir writer James M. Cain called "this logos of the American countryside.”

Arthouse Country, American Made...

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