Live In-studio: Aunt Bunnie’s Parlor 2.19.18

Words by Andrew Stellmon.
Video & Audio by Ryan Evans.
March 1, 2018.

To spend time inside the warm, inviting space folk group Aunt Bunnie’s Parlor creates is to keep the company of Nebraska music history. Vocalist Rachel Mulcahy-Lowe, aka Miss Katie Rae, has performed professionally on and off since age 17, moving to Nebraska in 1994 and performing with the likes of Ken Hoage, John Walker and her current playing partner CA Waller. Waller, the band’s vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, has performed across the country and is well-known in Lincoln for work in the Gerardo Meza Band, the Crescent Moon Blues Band and Kitchen Blues. Upright bassist Jenny Richardson and fiddler Terry Keefe are firmly entrenched in the local scene, Jenny also playing in Pickle Grass and Kitchen Blues and Terry in Paddywack and Toasted Ponies.

Not just numbers on a musical resume, their combined several decades playing Americana lend a delicate and casual fluency to this, their most recent project. Their brand within the genre relies heavily on soul and gospel in a way that is comforting, protective and enduring, like a sturdy dinner table, a favorite sweatshirt, a carpet by the burning hearth. You can hear the lives lived around the songs themselves and the stories within them, smell cornbread and stew wafting in from the kitchen, feel the thick, work-worn skin on your neighbor’s hand. From labor to lovin’, grief to rejoicing, Aunt Bunnie’s Parlor thrives within the things we do together — perfect for, say, the cozy, historic Ferguson House, where they’ll play this Sunday for KZUM’s Soup & Songs, or like tonight, over the airwaves of your local nonprofit radio station.

Here’s Aunt Bunnie’s Parlor with “You Can Stick Around”