Acoustic Guitar Project Reunion – 6/21
June 21 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
$15
Join us for an Acoustic Guitar Project Reunion featuring John Cadley, Alison Mullan-Stout, Wendy Sassafras Ramsay, and Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
One guitar. One week. One song. The Acoustic Guitar Project is a global music platform and concert series that inspires musicians to write and record a song in one week on the same guitar. Syracuse has one of the longest-running projects in the world, with 60 songs written to date by Central New York artists.
For this special show, four past project songwriters reunite to share their project songs and other originals in an intimate, collaborative acoustic setting.
John Cadley began playing guitar at 13 and hit the charts at 18 as a member of the Glen Coves, which had a Top 40 hit in 1963 with the folk anthem “Hootenanny.” Cadley has played with such seminal Northeast bands as the Down City Ramblers, Cross Creek, Texas Hots, and the Lost Boys and toured out of Nashville with the Clay and Sally Hart Show. Cadley’s song “Time,” recorded by Lou Reid and Carolina with harmonies by Ricky Skaggs and Vince Gill, topped the bluegrass charts for three months, and his song “The Hard Years” won Best Bluegrass Song in the Just Plain Folks Awards. Cadley’s songs have been covered by national artists such as Tony Trischka, Jim Hurst, Missy Raines, and Dede Wyland. Cadley’s current CD, I Never Knew, won the 2023 Sammy for Best Americana Recording.
Alison Mullan-Stout is an Irish-born singer-songwriter based in Syracuse (Haudenosaunee land). You can catch her with Honey for the Bees (queer-fronted indie-rock band, heavy with harmonies and a dose of angst), Alison and Zoë (folky emotional storytelling with sibling harmonies), co-facilitating therapeutic music groups with Singing Soulutions, or leading the crowd in song at local pro-democracy rallies. Her songwriting style and stage presence are candid, down-to-earth, and deeply resonant.
Links for Allison Mullan-Stout
Wendy Sassafras Ramsay studied clarinet at Crane School of Music, and artists such as Simon and Garfunkel, They Might Be Giants, the Violent Femmes, and Liz Phair inspired her to write songs. Along with her famously quirky originals, she is a versatile multi-instrumentalist (flute, clarinet, accordion, guitar) and vocalist. She performs with Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers as the duo Pepper and Sassafras and with the band Dead to the Core, and with the alternative rock band Starting Off Red.
Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, curator of the Acoustic Guitar Project in Syracuse, has combined his twin passions for words and music into a multifaceted career as a musician, author, and teacher. A grand prize winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, he plays kinetic folk-rock, combining vivid imagery and storytelling with masterful band-in-a-box guitar playing. Along with his original music, he leads the acoustic collective Dead to the Core, which hosts the Shakedown Sunday series at the 443 and performs around the Northeast. Rodgers is founding editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine and author of The Complete Singer-Songwriter and many other books and videos for musicians. In 2024, he was inducted into the Syracuse Area Music Hall of Fame as a music educator.
