Hank, Pattie & The Current

Two of North Carolina’s veteran bluegrass musicians join forces with some of the Triangle area’s most versatile musicians to create modern, American, acoustic music featuring the full range of their talents as composers and arrangers. The band is on tour regionally and nationally in 2021 in safe, vaccinated and socially distanced venues.

The band makes use of traditional bluegrass instrumentation in a nontraditional way to present original music to the listener that goes beyond the limits of the idiom. The arrangements take on a new level of maturation that follows in the footsteps of Bela Fleck, Mark O'Connor, Chris Thile, Sam Bush, Edgar Meyer, and Tony Rice. Hank, Pattie & The Current want to pick up where seminal crossover groups like The Punch Brothers, Strength In Numbers and the ever changing Bluegrass Allstars call home. The music is vocal and instrumental, allowing the band to experiment with arrangements and tailor the compositions to become vehicles for exploration. Hank Smith plays banjo, Pattie Hopkins Kinlaw plays fiddle and sings. The band is rounded out with Robert Thornhill on mandolin and vocals, Billie Feather on guitar and Jonah Freedman on bass and vocals.