Bill Kirchen & Redd Volkaert

Two heavyweight guitar slingers and singers find a common ground with  their deep history in Honky Tonk and Rock’n’Roll and their command of  the electric guitar. Bill Kirchen is a founding father of Commander  Cody. Redd Volkaert spent many years as the lead guitarist for the  mighty Merle Haggard, and has played and recorded with a who’s who of  greats, from Dale Watson to Brad Paisley to Billy Gibbons.

About Bill Kirchen

Upon tallying how many decades he’s worked as a professional guitar  slinger, Telecaster master Bill Kirchen quips, “Well, they don’t make 50  years like they used to.” They don’t often make careers like his,  either.

From performing with his Who Knows Pickers jug band in Ann Arbor High  School’s senior talent show (also on the program: the future Iggy Pop),  to birthing the Americana genre with the original “hippie country  band,” Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, this affable Austinite  has been everywhere, man, flying alongside some of the planet’s coolest  cats — including the Jesus of Cool, Nick Lowe, and Lowe’s old protégé,  Elvis Costello.

Kirchen has toured the world with Lowe, who produced an album by  Kirchen’s post-Airmen band, the Moonlighters, and Costello recruited  Kirchen for high-profile gigs like the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass  Festival — and even named his festival band after Kirchen’s Hammer of  the Honky-Tonk Gods album. Lowe appears on that 2006 album, and its 2010  follow-up, Word to the Wise, along with Costello, Maria Muldaur, Dan  Hicks and other luminaries.

About Redd Volkaert

Volkaert is best known to country audiences as being the lead  guitarist since 1997 for Merle Haggard’s band the Strangers. Prior to  that in the ’90s, he had done sessions in Nashville for artists like Ray  Price, Clinton Gregory, Dale Watson, and Lacy J. Dalton. In the late  ’90s, Volkaert also began a career as a solo artist with Telewacker. In  2001, No Stranger to a Tele followed, with a satisfyingly diverse mix of  country swing, hot instrumentals with steel guitar, and vocal numbers  in the Bakersfield-honky-tonk tradition.