Robbie Fulks w/ Max Wareham – Woodstock, NY

Robbie Fulks w/ Max Wareham

SAT March 8th, 2025

Doors 6pm | Show 7pm

ROBBIE FULKS

Robbie Fulks is a singer, recording artist, instrumentalist, composer, and songwriter. His current release, Bluegrass Vacation on Compass Records, returns him to his bluegrass roots, with a large group of masterful musicians including Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Justin Moses, Ronnie McCoury, Alison Brown, David Grier, Tim O’Brien, Todd Phillips, John Cowan, Brennen Leigh, Randy Kohrs, Sierra Hull, Stuart Duncan, Shad Cobb, and Chris Eldridge. Across 11 new original songs (and one freewheeling interpretation of the Delmore Brothers), Robbie covers themes like small-town blues, the endurance of childhood memory, inebriation, love, divorce, the role of music in strengthening family bonds, losing a loved one to Alzheimer’s, and bluegrass itself.

His most recent release, 2017’s Upland Stories, earned year’s-best recognition from NPR and Rolling Stone among many others, as well as two Grammy® nominations, for folk album and American roots song (“Alabama At Night”).

Fulks was born in York, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a half-dozen small towns in southeast Pennsylvania, the North Carolina Piedmont, and the Blue Ridge area of Virginia. He learned guitar from his dad, banjo from Earl Scruggs and John Hartford records. He attended Columbia College in New York City. In 1983 he moved to Chicago and joined Greg Cahill’s Special Consensus Bluegrass Band. He taught music at Old Town School of Folk Music from 1984 to 1996, and worked as a staff songwriter on Music Row in Nashville from 1993 to 1998.

His early solo work — Country Love Songs (1996) and South Mouth (1997) — helped define the “alternative country” movement of the 1990s. For most of the present century, Robbie has been playing acoustic music through microphones, which lets him give more attention to his flatpicking and banjo playing, and complements his more sepia-toned subject matter — the slings of time, the troubles of common people. His repertory of traveling players includes folks like Shad Cobb, Missy Raines, Robbie Gjersoe, Jenny Scheinman, Matt Flinner, Don Stiernberg, and Jesse Cobb. However, two non-acoustic recent side projects are his 2018 duo record with Linda Gail Lewis, Wild! Wild! Wild!, an NPR favorite which leans to rock-and-roll and classic country-and-western, and his double-vinyl reinterpretation of the Bob Dylan record Street-Legal, which is titled 16, is musically unbounded and is no one’s favorite. Radio: multiple appearances on WSM’s “Grand Ole Opry”; PRI’s “Whadd’ya Know”; NPR’s “Fresh Air,” “Mountain Stage,” and “World Cafe”; and the syndicated “Acoustic Cafe” and “Laura Ingraham Show.” TV: PBS’s Austin City Limits; NBC’s Today, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Later with Carson Daly, and 30 Rock. From 2004 to 2008 he hosted an hourlong performance/interview program for XM satellite radio, “Robbie’s Secret Country.” Artists who have covered his songs include Sam Bush, Kelly Hogan, Andrew Bird, Mollie O’Brien, Rosie Flores, John Cowan, and Old 97s.

Robbie’s writing on music and life have appeared in GQ, Blender, the Chicago Reader, DaCapo Press’s Best Music Writing anthologies for 2001 and 2004, Amplified: Fiction from Leading Alt-Country, Indie Rock, Blues and Folk Musicians, and A Guitar and A Pen: Stories by Country Music’s Greatest Songwriters. As an instrumentalist, he has accompanied the Irish fiddle master Liz Carroll, the distinguished jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman, and the New Orleans pianist Dr. John. As a producer his credits include Touch My Heart: A Tribute to Johnny Paycheck (Sugar Hill, 2004) and Big Thinkin’ by Dallas Wayne (Hightone, 2000). Theatrical credits include “Woody Guthrie’s American Song” and Harry Chapin’s “Cottonpatch Gospel.” He served twice as judge for the Winfield National Flatpicking Guitar competition. He tours yearlong with various configurations. Besides country and bluegrass music, Robbie is fiercely fond of Charles Mingus, P.G. Wodehouse, quantum mechanics, his wife Donna, comedy in almost all forms, cooking, swimming laps, the past, Arthur Schopenhauer, Universal horror movies, his grandson and even his sons, coastal towns in the offseason, and rye whiskey, though in nothing like that order.

MAX WAREHAM

Max Wareham is a banjo player, songwriter, and author from Boston, MA. He is a member of the Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band and was featured on the Grammy-nominated album “Calling You From My Mountain.”

After two years of touring nationally with Peter, Max recorded his own album, Dagommit! (due out later this year). The album features Chris Eldridge and David Grier on guitar, Laura Orshaw on fiddle, Chris Henry on mandolin, Mike Bub on bass, Larry Atamanuik on snare drum, and guest singer and producer Peter Rowan. Recorded by multi-Grammy winning engineer Sean Sullivan (Molly Tuttle, Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson, Jerry Douglas), Wareham’s commitment to early innovators of the instrument shines on this forthcoming record of soulful original songs, highlighted by the hard-driving chemistry of Nashville’s preeminent bluegrass stars.

Max’s interest in history extends to his writing. His first book, “Rudy Lyle: The Unsung Hero of the Five String Banjo” chronicles the life and music of early bluegrass banjo master Rudy Lyle by presenting exhaustive and largely never-before-published transcriptions and analyses of every break Lyle recorded with Bill Monroe, the “father of bluegrass.” Lyle’s historical significance is explored in interviews with banjo legends and members of Rudy’s family. Beautiful portraits of each interviewee are included alongside several never-before-published photos of Lyle himself.

In addition to his work as a banjo player, he has studied jazz guitar performance at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in NYC, written songs for and co-produced the album “Cousin Moon,” played bass with psych-pop outfit Sun Parade, and produced and recorded songs under the alias “Sir Orfeo.”