Henhouse Prowlers’ Ben Wright on Bluegrass cultural exchange ahead of Sunday’s Bottleneck show

Henhouse Prowlers. // photo courtesy the artist

One of our favorite discoveries from this year’s Folk Alliance International conference was Chicago’s Henhouse Prowlers. In addition to playing lovely bluegrass tunes, the quartet interspersed their songs with stories and information about their work as musical ambassadors for the US State Department, making for sets just as educational as they were entertaining.

As the Bluegrass Ambassadors, Henhouse Prowlers has traveled the world and done musical exchanges with the folks they meet, leading us to wonder what a club show from the band might be like, rather than crammed into a hotel room seven stories up. When we spoke with the band’s Ben Wright ahead of their Sunday, June 2, show at the Bottleneck, we took the opportunity to ask what a regular Henhouse Prowlers set is like, or if there even is one.

“It really depends on the audience,” Wright says, who plays banjo alongside mandolin player Jake Howard, guitarist Chris Dollar, and bassist Jon Goldfine. “Like, we’re playing a Billy Strings aftershow in a week, and that’s going to be a bunch of people who just want to dance, so I’m not going to be giving the Bluegrass Ambassadors pitch. That being said, we’re on our home turf, and a lot of people here know and are fans of the music that we play from our travel, so I’ll be able to play some of those songs and not have to give context.”

Wright explains that there have been a handful of times when they’ve gotten up at a bluegrass show and played “Sura Yako,” which the Prowlers sing in Swahili. He says—without giving context—people respond with, “What is going on? How is this even remotely bluegrass?”

“And while I enjoy that, it makes me feel also uncomfortable,” Wright jokes. “So it’s a listening crowd, like sitting down, listening. I’ll always give some context before we play one of those songs. If we’re playing a two-set show, we’ll play at least one of those songs in a set, if not two, and so it is part of what we do every night.”

Wright says that the amount of contextual backdrop he and his bandmates give depends on the audience and how much tolerance that audience has for talking. This is quite interchangeable for the band, as they haves traveled far and wide, hitting 28 countries across North America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa— though they’ve yet to make it to South America or Australia.

“It’s funny that’s just never happened,” Wright says. “We actually have an offer on the table right now that we’re trying to make happen to go to Bolivia and I’m really excited because weirdly, I went to high school and learned Spanish. Now, my Spanish isn’t great, but we’ve spent so much time in Francophone countries, and I don’t know French for squat.”

With so much time spent abroad, as well as touring the States, one had to wonder how much of the Henhouse Prowlers’ touring is the cultural diplomacy aspect, and how much of it is just traditional touring—if there’s even a way one can separate the two.

“There’s an argument that even a show played in Chicago has some cultural diplomacy elements to it,” Wright says, going back to where we began our conversation. “Because unless it’s a bunch of hippies dancing, which I also love playing for, I’m giving some kind of cultural context to what we’re doing.”

The hardcore cultural diplomacy aspect—which is working with the State Department or the growing amount of programs the Henhouse Prowlers do on their own—is hard to quantify, Wright says. And these things happen so quickly that, if we would’ve asked him two or three months ago, he would have said, “Well, I’m not sure we’re doing any of this year.”

Now, it’s clear that they’re doing a cultural diplomacy tour of the Czech Republic in November, as well as the possible route through Bolivia. There’s also the other element of the education work Henhouse Prowlers do at schools, which would also be categorized as cultural diplomacy.

“It really depends on your definition, but I’d say probably a fifth of what we do is that diplomacy work, but everything we do still is colored by all that,” Wright says.

As to how this all came to be? That’s a winding road of an answer. Henhouse Prowlers has been around for almost 20 years, and for about half of that lifetime, they’ve included the ambassadorship aspect. Do any of the members have educational backgrounds, or was it a lot of on-the-job learning for the foursome?

“Bluegrass at its heart is a language that is shared through education,” Wright says, pointing out that there are a handful of schools you can go to and learn bluegrass as a college degree. However, when they began playing, none of those were in existence. Nonetheless, they all took music lessons, and once they started the band, one of the things they learned was that it’s hard to make a living doing what they love.

“You got to diversify and teaching is a natural thing to do,” Wright says. “By year five, and I had some fundamental chops, I was able to teach, and I did. I taught at a music store and stuff like that.”

The turning point came when an organization asked the Henhouse Prowlers to visit schools in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. They visited every elementary and intermediate school in the town, teaching 45-minute bluegrass workshops to students.

“That was when we were like, ‘We have no idea what we’re doing,’” Wright jokes. “But we did that for like three weeks and visited schools every day. And by the end, we got real good at it.”

The first handful of tours with the State Department took the Prowlers to music schools in far-off countries, where the band had two hours to spend with the folks in these schools, forcing them to figure out how to fill that time in an enriching way.

“We got better at it as we did it,” the banjoist says. “You realize there are different things you think about in different parts of the world. There are just things that we take for granted that may not be as available in abundance.”

Wright remembers that on some of those early tours, he’d end up having conversations with young musicians who wanted to try to make a career of music in West Africa, where there’s multitudes of hurdles to clear.

“We did recognize that some of the things we could pass on to them were less about the musicality and more about the professionalism,” he says. “We all very consciously chose to wear suits to those workshops in those countries, ’cause we felt like that was a big thing that we did that shows we’re professionals.”

That said, one of the things the band enjoys the most in those workshops is meeting people face to face and having conversations about the similarities and differences between the music cultures in our countries.

“And that’s fascinating to recognize how different somebody’s existence is halfway across the world from yours, even though you have the same goals,” Wright says. “It’s one of the things I love walking away from these tours with.”

One of the things we gleaned from Henhouse Prowlers performances and getting to briefly chat with them at their booth during Folk Alliance is that, while what they do is an ambassadorship, it is also a diversifying cultural exchange. Wright feels like his counter-part band members are getting a lot out of these trips, as well.

“I have this feeling these days that I need to have these experiences because I get so much out of them,” Wright says. “If we hadn’t taken this, I’m not sure how long I would have continued on this path if the cultural diplomacy stuff hadn’t presented itself to me, because it’s great.”

Wright admits that he loves the aspects of live performances, but he says that it’s not hard being a music performer in the United States as a way to sell alcohol for the venue where they’re performing.

“When you do it every night, that starts to become more and more apparent,” Wright says. “And so these exchanges, we leaned into that and realized there were these opportunities to come back from these tours with a lot more than we went with.”

Wright says that just feels right and good, and so, he craves those experiences and has learned to love those differences, as they let the band cherish who they are and what they’ve been given, while also valuing the things that other people have around the world.

“It’s really a beautiful thing, as dippy as that sounds,” Wright says.

Henhouse Prowlers play the Bottleneck on Sunday, June 2. Details on that show here.