Hot Buttered Rum

Biography

Hot Buttered Rum, perennial favorite of American bluegrass and jamband circuits, began in 1999 as a young string band seeking a 21st century take on traditional bluegrass and old-time music. Guitarist Nat Keefe, banjoist Erik Yates and bassist Bryan Horne worked together with a slew of talented collaborators to create a new, multi-faceted vision for the music they all loved. It worked: their hometown San Francisco Chronicle soon took note of the band’s “sheer, infectious buoyancy,” and audiences did too. The five-piece group hit the road hard, tallying hundreds of club dates in their first few years alone. Their strengths in songwriting and crowd connection took them to marquee festivals like Telluride Bluegrass, Merlefest, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and the Newport Folk Fest, and albums featuring luminaries like Peter Rowan and Mike Marshall cemented the group as a west-coast outpost of modern bluegrass. In 2010, the group added percussion and soon found what Americana journal No Depression called “the rock-and-roll edge of an acoustic band that opts to add a drummer.” Hot Buttered Rum has continued to hone that edge over the past decade, and now, with the backbeat of drummer James Stafford, who doubles on mandolin, and the soaring melodies of journeyman fiddler Dan Andree, the band can both steer through the curves of their string band roots and open the throttle on some rock-and-roll straightaways. As Bluegrass Today noted many years ago, “it’s that working man regimen that ensures their consistency from one offering to another. That’s the kind of quality that makes Hot Buttered Rum always seem to go down smoothly.”

The band was honored to bring their talents to central Africa in 2020 under the aegis of American Music Abroad and the US State Dept. (As it happened, they were the last AMA-sponsored group to tour before the COVID-19 shutdown took effect.) With the partners guidance of these partners, Hot Buttered Rum performed all over Rwanda and Zambia in venues ranging from large auditoriums to single-room schoolhouses. They held workshops, concerts and cultural outreach events intended to forge links through music and entrepreneurship with people from both nations, and the band continues to collaborate with many artists they met there. In August of 2020, HBR produced two socially-distanced, remotely-edited collaborative videos with Zambian bands Loudhouse and Nomokanjani (viewable on the American Music Abroad outreach page) and, at the time of this writing, in June 2021, the band is working on dual renditions of the U.S. and Rwandan national anthems for a July 4th celebration at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali. HBR looks forward to further bridging the gaps between nations and finding common ground with musicians worldwide through AMA’s 2021 virtual programming.