Culture
The Wayfarers to Appear on ‘Song of the Mountains’ Oct. 6
By: Emily Votaw
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Oct. 6 Southeast OH-based The Wayfarers will make their television debut on Song of the Mountains, an award-winning public television series devoted to promoting the best in bluegrass Americana and old time music. The performance, which was recorded in March 2015 at the Lincoln Theatre in Marion, VA, will air at 8 p.m. on WOUB-HD 20.1 in the Athens area and on WOUC-HD 44.1 in the Cambridge area.
Brandon Bankes, a vocalist and mandolin player for the band, (as well as an Ohio University alumni,) said he is honored to have the band, which has been playing progressively larger gigs since their formation in 2010, featured on a program that he said that he and his band mates have been watching long before the creation of The Wayfarers.
The upcoming televised performance is just one of many aspects of the band’s career that is currently on the up-and-up.
“As the years go on we get more and more established, we travel more and more,” said Bankes. “This year we were in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina; and the goal is getting to play bigger events. It’s always good to get our music out there to a wider audience – and right now we’re kind of spreading by word of mouth.”
Bankes said that the band is currently unsigned, and operates without a manager of any kind – a system that he said has worked enormously for the outfit so far.
“It’s great because as a band we have complete control over what we do,” he said. “There’s no one telling us what we have to do, and as long as we agree to something as a band, we can pursue it. We’ve really been figuring out what we’re doing as a band from the beginning, and that’s kind of our aura as a band, that’s what it has been since the beginning.”
Bankes said that while the band still has a number of live dates this fall, they’ll take a break this winter to work on a gospel EP, a project that has been highly anticipated by their fan base.
“A lot of the music that we play is traditional, and we’ve always gotten lot of requests for old gospel tunes,” said Bankes. “We choose most of the songs that we play from source material, like old recordings and stuff from the Library of Congress. We do a lot of songs from the 1800s, the early 1900s, and even the originals that we write are written in the style of those songs. With the gospel EP, we’ll be playing some more obscure songs, songs that nobody has heard in a while.”