Tonight we welcome a co-bill of Terri Hendrix & Lloyd Maines and Brooks Williams. Texas-based Hendrix is spending most of this year touring Texas and points west. She is coming to this area for a couple of weeks to do one of her enormously popular “Life’s a Song” workshops at Berklee and a select few concerts. Don’t miss this rare chance to see her. Lloyd Maines performs with Hendrix and plays dobro, guitar, and mandolin. They will be joined by me&thee favorite Brooks Williams, a blues singing, guitar picking, bottleneck slide playing certified road warrior who has toured continuously for over twenty-one years.

When Terri Hendrix, originally from San Antonio and now based in San Marcos, Texas, walked away from her opera scholarship in college, it was only because she found the classical music path too narrow for her free spirit. But there was just no shaking her love of music. She began hauling her own P.A. in the back of her beat-up pick-up to gigs throughout the Texas Hill Country, gradually building a following. Hendrix released her debut album, Two Dollar Shoes, in 1996. She released the record independently, and never looked back. Now, nine self-released albums later, Hendrix is still thriving — and grateful she made the fateful decision more than a dozen years ago to not only follow her own path through her music career, but to ultimately “own her own universe.” In the wake of her breakthrough 1998 sophomore album, Wilory Farm, and 2000’s Places in Between — both of which were met with widespread Triple-A, Americana and public radio support — Hendrix’s grassroots fanbase spread like wildflowers across America and all the way to Europe. Fortunately, by then the World Wide Web had caught up with her, enabling her to better manage her label, bustling e-commerce store and mailing list (at that point up to 50,000 fans) from both home and on the road. For the last decade, Hendrix has toured constantly, packing listening rooms and theaters from coast to coast and also playing before thousands at such premiere events as the Newport Folk Festival, the Philadelphia Folk Festival and, closer to home, the Texas State Fair at the Cotton Bowl, the Austin City Limits Music Festival and the Kerrville Folk Festival. She’s also appeared on the nationally syndicated World Cafe and Mountain Stage radio shows.

As one of the few artists anywhere who can proudly lay claim to owning all of their own masters, Hendrix is indeed a DIY queen. Though she’s consistently insisted she’s “not a business person,” she’s worked as hard at “the part that’s not art” as she has the part that is art — and shares her creative spirit and seasoned wisdom on both with the students in her periodic “Life’s a Song” workshops. Each workshop exposes songwriters and musicians of all levels to a positive, non-critical and creative atmosphere for a weekend. In 2008, she released her 10th CD, Left Over Alls, which has songs from recording sessions for her previous CDs which for one reason or another never made it into a released CD until now.

Terrix Hendrix photo by Mary Keating Bruton

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Brooks Williams has released more than 16 albums on labels like Signature Sounds, Green Linnet Records, Red Guitar Blue Music, and Solid Air Records. The Time I Spend With You, 2008’s tour-de-force, went to #3 on the FOLKDJ charts (with three top ten singles, including the Mississippi Fred McDowell standard, “61 Highway”) and remained on the charts for six months.

A devoted educator, Brooks Williams is in high demand on the summer guitar camp circuit, teaching at The Swannanoa Gathering, Acoustic Alaska, Cedar Run Song Workshops, Newport Guitar Festival, and WUMB’s Summer Acoustic Music Week, to name but a few. He also runs a two-week Guitar For Kids program near his home in Western Massachusetts, as well as sponsoring an annual Guitar Day celebration. Williams’ unique approach to teaching has resulted in the highly anticipated release of his first guitar instructional DVD, Guitar Groove: A Session With Brooks Williams, on Woodhall Music.

As one of the world’s premier acoustic guitarists and singers, Brooks Williams continues to tour worldwide, delivering the deepest and most intense interpretations of everything from early blues songs to his recent original compositions. He is quite simply one of the most entertaining and engaging performers on the circuit today. From coast-to-coast, country-to-country, Williams and his guitars roll and tumble like nobody’s business.

Brooks Williams photo by Tracey Eller

Simply put, Terri Hendrix creates the kind of music that makes you feel good, conceived and delivered with utter sincerity. Texas Music Magazine

Terri Hendrix is good natured and whimsical but hardly toothless; there’s no question she finds nothing at all funny about peace, love and understanding. Light, folky/bluesy, this disc, produced by Lloyd Maines (daddy of Dixie Chick Natalie), invokes St. Christopher, Buddha, the Dalai Lama (“The Spiritual Kind”) and Mother Nature (“Acre of Land”). . . . She rails against racism, excess injustice and just plain meanness, on a foundation of clean, unhurried music graced by [Lloyd] Maines’ work on various stringed, mostly acoustic, instruments. Too smart to be cynical, too sharp to be naive, Hendrix nonetheless believes the human mess can be fixed. Right or wrong, she makes a delightfully listenable case. Rick Allen, HARP

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[Brooks Williams’] slide, finger-picking and lead work is excellent and there is the best cover of Fred McDowell’s 61 Highway we’ve heard in a couple of decades. fRoots

A consummate artist, Williams ranks among America’s musical treasures. Dirty Linen

Harmonically sophisticated and breathtakingly beautiful... Guitar Player