Welcome to the official home of
Mountain Fever recording artists...
Travers Chandler & Avery County!
Neo- Traditional Bluegrass for the masses!!...Creating new music while clinging delightfully to the past.
Real songs of heartache, pain, tragedy, home, every day life and redemption.
Travers Chandler and Avery County after two years of hard touring, stand ready to take their place among the bluegrass elite as interpreters and progenitors of all that is old school. Seeking to please both hardened traditional bluegrass fans, and to leave a footprint in the new acoustic scene, the group walks the tight rope between the two while never sacrificing the sound of their music.Theirs is a raw sound submerged in tradition. While their stage show is explosive and energetic centered around Chandler's dynamic pounding mandolin and masterful rapport with the audience, along with his soaring soulful vocals. Barely into his thirties he has already been compared to the likes of Dudley Connell and Junior Sisk. He insists on hardly ever using a set list and sometimes the group is 5 songs in before the audience knows what hit them. The band came together in 2009 with the intent of preserving the legacies of bluegrass music's lost heroes,while bringing the sounds of those heroes to new audience. The band members have garnered much acclaim and even IBMA accolades after stints with The James King Band,Danny Paisley and The Southern Grass, The Country Gentlemen, Spring Creek, Dave Evans, Karl Shiflett and The Big Country Show and numerous others.
2011 was a landmark year for the group finding them on prestigious stages all over the country while having chart success and landing (completely surprising everyone) on the 2nd round ballot for IBMA "Emerging Artist of The Year."
The heart of the group is built around the edgy, soulful singing and mandolin playing of Travers Chandler, and the dead-on bass playing and gutsy singing and masterful songwriting of his partner Jessica Smith playing a music few young musicians today even appreciate- much less master. They are young and their show is full of energy and is an intelligent presentation of classic, traditional bluegrass and country music that can bring in both young and old.
This is the music that moved with hard-luck Southerners from the hills and hollers of the South to the dirty cities of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast in the middle of the last century- when work in the fields and mines was harder to come by than the factories further north. These rural Southern folk then found themselves crowded in a smokey barroom to hear the familiar sounds they once loved to hear on their families' Carolina porches...that had now taken on the rowdiness of the honky tonks. This is the music of Travers Chandler and Avery County...and what we like to call "Baltimore Barroom Bluegrass".
Putting on a show that is as authentic as it is entertaining, the band can go from family bluegrass festival to college night club with an ease that only seasoned professionals can master. While the band works with a reverance for tradition, they are by no means a cliche or cover band. They are busily creating new music while delightfully hanging on to the past. The new record, titled State of Depression, features more obscure,hard-core material from the likes of Charlie Moore, the Easter Brothers, Charlie Monroe, Ted Lundy and Bob Paisley as well as a pair of tunes from the deep catalogue of hardcore country honky tonkers Vernon Oxford and Hank Williams, Jr. These pickers are proud to say that this is your grandfather's bluegrass.
They have already graced the stage at major festivals including ROMP in Owensboro KY, The Durango Bluegrass Meltdown in Durango CO, Pickin' in the Pasture in Lodi NY, OATS in Benton PA, Lil John's Mountain Music Festival in Burlington NC, and have made numerous radio and television appearances including PBS' Song of the Mountains, and many apperances on the historic WPAQ in Mt Airy, NC. They have left audiences buzzing everywhere they have gone, and have commanded encore after encore. They have managed to bridge the generation gap, wowing older audiences as well as packing out shows with younger, diverse crowds in cities like Asheville, NC and Lyons, CO- always professionally presented with an edge and excitement you just have to see.
Click on "Booking" for more information.
Please stop by anytime to keep up with the band!
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