Bill Kirchen & Redd Volkaert

  • Acadiana Center for the Arts (MTS)

    101 West Vermilion Street
    Lafayette, Louisiana 70501
Ticket Price $45.00-$65.00 This event is now over
Description

Tickets:

  • $45 – Mezzanine
  • $55 – Rear Orchestra
  • $65 – Front Orchestra

Two heavyweight guitar slingers and singers find a common ground with their deep history in Honky Tonk and Rock’n’Roll and their command of the electric guitar. Bill Kirchen is a founding father of Commander Cody. Redd Volkaert spent many years as the lead guitarist for the mighty Merle Haggard, and has played and recorded with a who’s who of greats, from Dale Watson to Brad Paisley to Billy Gibbons. 

About Bill Kirchen

Upon tallying how many decades he’s worked as a professional guitar slinger, Telecaster master Bill Kirchen quips, “Well, they don’t make 50 years like they used to.” They don’t often make careers like his, either.

From performing with his Who Knows Pickers jug band in Ann Arbor High School’s senior talent show (also on the program: the future Iggy Pop), to birthing the Americana genre with the original “hippie country band,” Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, this affable Austinite has been everywhere, man, flying alongside some of the planet’s coolest cats — including the Jesus of Cool, Nick Lowe, and Lowe’s old protégé, Elvis Costello.

Kirchen has toured the world with Lowe, who produced an album by Kirchen’s post-Airmen band, the Moonlighters, and Costello recruited Kirchen for high-profile gigs like the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival — and even named his festival band after Kirchen’s Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods album. Lowe appears on that 2006 album, and its 2010 follow-up, Word to the Wise, along with Costello, Maria Muldaur, Dan Hicks and other luminaries.

About Redd Volkaert

Volkaert is best known to country audiences as being the lead guitarist since 1997 for Merle Haggard’s band the Strangers. Prior to that in the ’90s, he had done sessions in Nashville for artists like Ray Price, Clinton Gregory, Dale Watson, and Lacy J. Dalton. In the late ’90s, Volkaert also began a career as a solo artist with Telewacker. In 2001, No Stranger to a Tele followed, with a satisfyingly diverse mix of country swing, hot instrumentals with steel guitar, and vocal numbers in the Bakersfield-honky-tonk tradition.

Venue Details

Acadiana Center for the Arts (MTS)

101 West Vermilion Street
Lafayette, Louisiana 70501 Acadiana Center for the Arts (MTS)
Acadiana Center for the Arts

Our mission is fostering art and culture in Acadiana.

Founded in 1975, Acadiana Center for the Arts (“AcA”) is a community-supported nonprofit organization that fosters art and culture in Acadiana. Since its founding, AcA has developed as a major force, shaping the future of public education and community development in South Louisiana.

AcA supports the creation of new works of art, exhibits, festivals, performances, and public art across an eight-parish region that includes Acadia, Evangeline, Iberia, Lafayette, St. Landry, St. Martin, St. Mary, and Vermilion Parishes.  

AcA aims to bring equitable access to the arts and supports fair compensation of artists. On average, AcA serves over 300,000 people annually and provides fair compensation to 2,700 artists.  

In 2013, the AcA merged with the Performing Arts Society of Acadiana (“PASA”), whose mission was to educate, inspire, entertain, and culturally enrich the people of south Louisiana by providing local access to a diverse range of the performing arts. This merger supported the vision of both organizations and provided much-needed support to PASA’s programs. Founded in 1989, PASA served as a leading voice in the performing arts in South Louisiana for close to three decades.


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