Keenan Wade and Grace Adele, doing a brisk business as The Farmer & Adele (hi-ho the derry-o… get it?), have become the latest Nashville denizens to simultaneously honor and update the Western Swing tradition. The pair got together with an ear toward contemporizing the singing cowboy/cowgirl routine and came up with a whole lot more than merely Roy Rogers and Dale Evans in the 21st century.
The Farmer & Adele currently host a morning radio show on WSM 650 in Nashville and have become the station’s house band for their pre-show coverage of Grand Ole Opry events. Their debut album, 2015’s Into the Wide Open Sky, features the acclaimed Riders in the Sky as their backing band, and in 2018 and again this year they were nominated in the annual Ameripolitan Music Awards for Best Western Swing Group.
The band began in the duo’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Wade was a Jazz player who was looking to find a place for the mandolin in his chosen genre when he discovered Country and Western Swing, while Adele, a classically trained ballerina, pursued auditions as a Rockette and sang at home to finance her New York trips. Eventually, singing overtook dancing and led to the Nashville move, and with Wade’s capable help, she formed Grace Adele & the Grand Band, which played a blend of Country, Swing, Folk and Indie Rock and ultimately morphed into the more traditional rootsy Swing stylings of The Farmer & Adele.
In addition to writing their own Western Swing material, The Farmer & Adele continually mine the genre’s past for obscure songs to populate their sets, from classic artists like Bob Wills and Gene Autry to forgotten relics like Al Clauser and His Oklahoma Outlaws. The duo offers a potent balance of Western Swing’s Southwestern traveling dance band origins and the cowboy/cowgirl home-on-the-range/cattle lullaby traditions, creating an amazing campfire stew of hoedown and slowdown.
As befitting the time of year, The Farmer & Adele are headed to Newport's Southgate House Revival on Wednesday, Dec. 4 for their annual Country Western Christmas Ranch Party, featuring our very Mike Oberst on a busman’s holiday from The Tillers as their special guest. The setlist for the show typically includes a number of classic holiday tunes, a few seasonal originals and a brilliant Western Swing version of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite,” which guarantees an evening of countless hoots and a couple dozen hollers, all with the distinct scent of pine, eggnog and trail dust.
Get tickets and more show details at southgatehouse.com.
