Larry Long & Fiddlin’ Pete Concert
Saturday, October 19, 2024
Music Starts @ 7:30 PM
The New York Mills Regional Cultural Center’s 2024 Fall Concert Series continues with Larry Long & Fiddlin’ Pete on Saturday, October 19, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Join us in the Cultural Center’s intimate listening-room-style gallery space for this special reunion tour concert. It is a show you won’t want to miss!
Adult tickets are $12 in advance or $15 at the door ($2 member discount); student tickets are $5. You can buy your tickets online (click below) or get them at the door. Doors open at 7:00 p.m. and music starts at 7:30. Light refreshments and cash bar available.
Get Larry Long & Fiddlin’ Pete Tickets NOW >
Larry Long & Fiddlin’ Pete Watercott’s life story is something out of a John Steinbeck novel. Throughout their early twenties, they hitchhiked and hopped freight trains throughout the West passing the hat from bar to bar, performing most anywhere that people gather.
In exchange for the hospitality and generosity shown by those who helped them out along the way, Larry would write a song in their honor. The lyrics were left pinned onto their refrigerator door with a magnet before Fiddlin’ Pete and Larry headed back on the road.
In the course of their travels they joined up with bassist Larry Dalton, who they met in the High Sierra Mountain town of Truckee, California in 1976.
As Larry Dalton tells it, “What bass does for music is transformative. It provides free shipping for all the other notes.”
The music they perform together is deeply rooted in the American song tradition of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Hank Williams, and Bob Wills.
Their live performances are an equal measure of lyrical ballads, country-swing, and old-time fiddle tunes woven together with threads of explosive instrumental improvisation.
As the legendary Jesse Ashlock, who performed with Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys throughout his career, remarked,
“You guys got an entirely different sound and I like it.” And then with a twinkle in his eye, replied, “After sitting and listening to you play Pete, looking back, I should have never picked up the fiddle.”
Now fifty years later, Larry Long and Fiddlin’ Pete Watercott have come back together with bassist Larry Dalton for this 2024 Reunion Tour to celebrate five decades of friendship. They are also releasing their new live acoustic recording entitled ‘As In Those Early Days’, which they recorded along the banks of the Mississippi River.
Larry Long & Fiddlin’ Pete both have had remarkable solo careers, while Dalton has been performing and recording with bluegrass, jazz, rock, rockabilly, gypsy jazz, big band, and orchestral groups.
Larry Long went on to write and perform hundreds of ballads both individually and collectively with communities throughout the United States. His work has taken him from rural Alabama to the Lakota communities in South Dakota. Long organized the Mississippi River Revival, a decade long campaign to cleanup the Mississippi River, was first-mate on the ‘Circle of Water Circus’ flagship boat called the Calapso, official troubadour on the Soviet/ American peace cruises along the Missisippi and Volga Rivers, sang for Mrs. Rosa Parks at the 45th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and assembled the first hometown tribute to Woody Guthrie in Okemah, Oklahoma.
Long has over a dozen albums including two released on the prestigious Smithsonian Folkways label. One of his songs, ‘Hey Coal Miner,’ is featured in the Smithsonian Folkways Children’s Music Collection along with works by Huddie Lead Belly, Langston Hughes, Suni Paz, Ella Jenkins, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie.
Author, historian, actor, and broadcaster Studs Terkel called Larry “a true American Troubadour.” When Pete Seeger was told that Larry is often referred to as the Pete Seeger of Minnesota, Pete replied, “I would be honored to be called the Larry Long of New York.”
After their wanderings, Fiddlin’ Pete found a home in the mountains of California where he has been a musical favorite ever since. He is always a mainstay at local events like the Mill Pond Music Festival and Bishop, California’s Mule Days. He has produced events and albums to highlight the western art called Cowboy Poetry, also traveling each year to perform at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada along with nationally beloved “Buckaroo Poet” Waddie Mitchell. Pete also performs classical violin as a member of the Eastern Sierra Symphony.
Fiddlin’ Pete has produced six albums, including “Songs of Curley Fletcher,” the only recording dedicated to the work of that great Western poet. Be it singing traditional or original ballads, picking mandolin, guitar, Irish tenor banjo, or sawing on the fiddle, Pete Watercott brings joy to those wherever he goes.
We sure hope that you can join Larry Long & Fiddlin Pete Watercott on their 2024 Reunion Tour with bassist Larry Dalton on Saturday, October 19, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. at the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center. All are welcome!
Adult tickets are $12 in advance or $15 at the door ($2 member discount); student tickets are $5. You can buy your tickets online (click below) or get them at the door. Doors open at 7:00 p.m. and music starts at 7:30. Light refreshments and cash bar available.
Get Larry Long & Fiddlin’ Pete Tickets NOW >
Call the Cultural Center at (218) 385-3339 with any questions.
