The Get Happy String Band, Feb. 10th.
Triple Chicken Foot (from L.A.), Feb. 17th.
Both shows, 4:30 to 6:30 pm.

No cover charge, but we’ll be sure to ask you to help us pay the bands and we surely hope you will!  Expect very limited seating and a big ol’ crowd and a very, very good time!  All ages very welcome, though do be careful the kids don’t get stepped on (and please leave those big strollers in the car)!

The Get Happy String Band, based right here in the Bay Area, features Meredith Axelrod and Darcy Noonan, who came together through their mutual love of such masters as The Mississippi Sheiks, The East Texas Serenaders and The Memphis Jug Band.  For this show, guest & super guitarist Craig Ventresco will join the fun.  Together, they’ll excite and delight you with raucous rags and bombastic breakdowns in an authentic sound straight out of 1933.

Band fiddler Darcy has taught fiddle at Lark Camp. Meredith is a favorite singer and guitar player of certain people, which might just include you once you’ve had a listen. Craig Ventresco is the best person in America, so we’re told, and he plays mandolin or guitar with the band sometimes.  And those are good times!

HOLY CRACKERS, THIS BAND IS HOT! They’re raising the roof at Bay Area gigs and have recently done the old-time thing at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage and Oakland’s The Awaken Cafe.

Triple Chicken Foot is an Old Time trio playing fiddle and banjo tunes and songs in Los Angeles, California with Ben Guzmán on fiddle/mandolin, Mike Heinle on banjo and Kelly Marie Martin on guitar. They all three sing. Says Jeff Kazor of the Crooked Jades, “They’ve single-handedly revived the whole Americana scene in L.A.”

For over six years, playing old time music in Los Angeles, they’ve performed at the Autry National Center, LACMA, The Watkins Family Hour, weddings, numerous clubs around Southern California and on NPR. They’ve also performed at local festivals: Goleta Fiddlers Convention, Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest and the New Los Angeles Folk Festival, up the west coast at the Portland Old Time Gathering, the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention, and on the Palomino stage of the Stagecoach Festival. And they regularly host Old Time square dances and jams in Los Angeles.

In 2011, Triple Chicken Foot was voted “Best Folk Band in LA” by the LA Weekly, and in 2012 The LA Times Arts section devoted a full-length feature article to the band, and they had a studio session for Roz Larman’s FolkScene radio show on KPFK!  Holy Crackers, indeed!

For their Bird & Beckett appearance on the closing day of the San Francisco Bluegrass & Old-Time Festival, Triple Chicken Foot will be hot off the job at Saturday night’s Big Square Dance at the Swedish American Hall.  Let’s send ’em back to L.A. in high style!

Don’t forget after the show here to head back over to Cafe du Nord for the blow-out closing session of the fest, with Paige Anderson & the Fearless Kin opening for the Crooked Jades.  Better buy those ducats now, ’cause they’ll go fast!

For the full skinny on the Fest, check their website at this link.