The Winfield-born band Good Time Charley puts fun first

Depending on whom you ask, the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, sounds either idyllic or just sort of awesome: rollicking campfire sing-alongs, drunken camping, an impossible amount of great music. It’s the kind of setting that leads to deep friendships. And sometimes, those newly forged bonds lead to more music, as when longtime Winfielder Melissa Butler put together her first band, Good Time Charley.

The group, minus one member, has assembled in a chilly, cluttered Crossroads practice space on a Monday night. Lead singer and guitarist Butler is here, along with banjoist Clayton Smith, keyboardist and accordionist Grant Buell, drummer Shawn Wright (everyone calls him “Klaus,” for no real reason), and co-founder and ukulele player Barb Corley. New bassist Sara Dranuski is the only absentee, and it’s hard to imagine where she would have stood without falling over all of the various amps and gear in the room. (Good Time Charley shares this space with two other bands.)

The band is running through tracks from its debut album, Cautionary Tales, set for release Saturday at Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club. Smith, on his Taylor T5 guitar tonight, fills in for Dranuski, creating swampy, haunting bass lines. Corley, whose harmonies elevate Butler’s rich voice, switches from ukulele to banjolele between songs. Buell’s notes sound purposely clunky, as though he’s laying down the soundtrack for a cartoon. One song calls for a melodica.

Good Time Charley’s sound is off-kilter and quasi-vaudevillian, the kind of thing that goes over best after three rounds at a bar that takes only cash. It’s a good vehicle for Butler and Corley’s lyrics — “story songs,” they call them, which might pass for murder ballads if they weren’t written instead about, say, extraterrestrial romance (see “Alien Seduction”).

After the band finishes practice, I confess to Butler that I’ve never made it to Winfield. Deep sympathy washes over her face.

“This band wouldn’t exist without Winfield,” she tells me. “This will be my 11th year. In the beginning, I just went with a friend of mine, not knowing really what to expect. And I just remember the first 10 minutes I drove in, there was just music everywhere.”

Butler, 35, explains that she has always enjoyed singing and being surrounded by music, but she was no musician. The Winfield campfire sessions were the closest she had come to any sort of spotlight, and without an instrument, she relied on someone else to play a tune that she could sing with.

“I went back to Winfield one year, about six years ago, and I just remembered feeling like I could go home and learn to play guitar and can sing to my own guitar,” she says. “I had this classical guitar that was just sitting at home, and for three hours every day, I played it and learned how to strum chords. I’m still not a good guitar player. I can strum some chords and I can get by. But just through that, things sort of came together.”

When Good Time Charley started, in the winter of 2012, it was mostly, as Wright remembers it, Butler and Corley drunkenly making up absurd lyrics. (“Chimpanzee,” one of the band’s first tunes and a live staple, centers on a pet chimpanzee that eats its owner’s face.) Were it not for a minor snafu, the band wouldn’t have had its first gig: opening for the Kansas City Bear Fighters (of which Buell is also a member) at Davey’s Uptown two years ago.

“We hadn’t ever played a show,” Corley says, “but we just said yes. And Byron [Baird, Davey’s sound guy] has seen us from then to now, and he’s said to us a couple times, ‘You guys have really gotten a lot better. You guys are doing good.’ He knows where we’ve been. He’s done our sound every time we’ve been there, and it’s been cool to gauge our growth from someone who’s outside the band.”

For Butler, releasing Cautionary Tales at Davey’s is second only to being able to play her songs in September at Winfield. It’s a joyful mark, she says, of how far the band has come in the last few years.

“We didn’t ever have expectations for ourselves,” Butler says. “We’re doing this because we love to do it. Especially being someone who came into music later on in life, I think that’s an important thing to remember. If you don’t go into something expecting the moon, then you’ll never be disappointed. I don’t expect to be the best. I just want to have a good time, and I think we’re good at that.”