NOTE: “Today” and “tonight” refer to Friday, Oct. 23.
PORT ANGELES — From West Africa to the mountains of Tennessee, the Barefoot Movement is about sitting a spell and letting music melt your cares away.
The band, on a meandering tour of the United States this fall, is here for a “Living Room Concert” tonight at Studio Bob, the upstairs space in downtown Port Angeles.
Sponsored by the Juan de Fuca Foundation for the Arts, the Barefoot Movement is a young but well-traveled outfit, playing at a healthy variety of venues: East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, in a Charleston, S.C., church and at the U.S. Embassy in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The band was chosen as the Art Envoy to join a Fourth of July celebration there last year.
This is the Barefoot Movement’s first foray to the North Olympic Peninsula; show time is 7:30 this evening at Studio Bob, 118½ E. Front St.
Tickets are $15 via JFFA.org with any remaining to be sold at the door.
The dress code calls for bare feet, at least in spirit.
The quartet — Noah Wall, Tommy Norris, Alex Conerly and Hasee Ciaccio — play country and bluegrass from “a simpler place and time,” they’re fond of saying.
Their newest record, “The High Road E.P.,” combines songs such as “Wade in the Water,” “Lawdy Papa” and “Jim Along Josie,” making set lists a mix of traditionals and originals.
Besides their shoes-free style, this band has a distinctive look: The four gather around one microphone, to distill their sound in a way that’s both practical and natural.
This leaning forward together is the only way it’s ever been done, says Wall, the singer and fiddler.
Having a single mic makes it easier to set up and tear down at gigs, after all.
And at a Barefoot Movement show, you don’t have a sound engineer riding several microphones.
It all comes through the one, Wall says, so “what you hear is what we are.”
It does require a good bit of choreography, considering she has a bow in her hand, Ciaccio has a stand-up bass and Conerly has the long neck on his guitar.
There’s so much that goes into getting the band in front of that mic, Wall says, that when the four finally do stand up as one, it’s the reward.
“The best feeling is feeling like you’re entertaining people, especially with music that we wrote,” she adds.
“When people are enthusiastic about an original song, that’s the best compliment.”
The Barefoot Movement has done about 100 gigs this year, as traveling is “the name of the game, as we’re trying to build and build. We don’t say no a lot.”
Originally from Jonesboro and Johnson City, Tenn., the band migrated to Nashville last year.
Living in the mountains was pretty fine, but they had to be near a big airport for trips like the one they made to Burkina Faso.
“The people there are just so receptive,” recalls Wall.
Music, after all, is a basic part of life for the Burkinabe.
Their hosts then turned around and played their music: lots of percussion and rhythm plus the kora, one of which Norris brought home with him.
Wall grew up in Oxford, a little town in Granville County, N.C.
Always a singer, she started violin lessons in second grade but didn’t take to them at first.
In high school, though, she started writing songs.
Music began to matter a lot.
Wall knew she had a gift for it, so she decided to develop her violin playing.
Her mother, Lyn, is a songwriter while her father, Norman, is a welder who runs his own business. Both gave unflagging encouragement: Do what you love to do, but make sure you work hard at it.
With the Barefoot Movement, “we book our own tours; we make our own CDs and our own press kits,” Wall says.
That’s part of what she learned from her father. Don’t expect someone else to promote you.
When they at last leap onto the stage tonight, “the point is to have fun,” and forget about the stresses in your life.
“Let’s bond,” she says, “over music.”
