Pony Bradshaw In a Trio Configuration

with Support by Tyler Key

February 15, 2025  Doors: 7pm  Show: 8pm

                    $24 Advanced ticket are On Sale Now

                                      All Ages Show

Pony Bradshaw

Like his previous two releases, the tracks on Thus Spoke the Fool feel more like immersive experiences than mere songs, serving as odes to the land and language of Appalachia. These lyrical landscapes pay tribute to the region where Bradshaw settled nearly two decades ago. The songs are rich with imagery of mountain laurel and tobacco leaves, transporting listeners to mill towns, American Legion halls, and Mineral Bluff, GA. The songs offer a hybrid, textured sound with hints of bluegrass and Americana, rich with rustic guitar leads, fiddle and pedal steel.

Tyler Key

Tyler Key grew up in Bowdon GA, a tiny town between Atlanta and Birmingham, surrounded by farmland and generations of kinfolk. Sharecroppers and mechanics and truck drivers and seamstresses made up both sides of his family, not a musician in the lot. Instead of playing an old time fiddle tune, they did what good southerners do best: they told stories, shot the bull, carried on. All this “carrying on” tuned Key’s ear to the cadence of a good story from the get-go. 

After stumbling his way through college with a degree in literature, he found his footing in Athens GA, a college town and hub for creative types and eccentrics. There he wrote 2019’s Local Supportand started touring regionally. Key honed his musicality as a pedal steel guitarist for country-ish acts like The Howdies, T. Hardy Morris, Little Gold, and Pony Bradshaw.  

His most recent album, Wild Azaleas and Other Tall Tales, sounds a bit like Sticky Fingers-era Stones with the offbeat lyricism of John Prine. It’s comfortably weird, and weirdly comfortable.

For Key, it’s his way of carrying on that grand tradition of telling stories, lies, half-truths, and tall tales.