Make that Bluegrass in Parade.
Today’s (2/7) edition of Parade magazine, distributed to millions of subscribers to popular American newspapers, has a piece about a small restaurant in Montana where bluegrass music is as big a part of the draw as the tasty food they serve.
The article by Ed Kemmick of the Billings Gazette begins thusly:
The Prairie Winds Cafe in Molt, Mont., seats 56, which is about four times the population of Molt itself. Yet on most Saturday mornings, every seat is taken, and another 15 or 20 people are standing in the hallway near the kitchen, patiently awaiting their turns.
It’s not just Fran Urfer’s pies that bring people in. Nor is it simply the setting–a tiny island of commerce in a sea of rolling grassland that runs to the foot of the Crazy Mountains in south-central Montana. What draws folks from miles around–and from every state in the nation and 42 foreign countries, according to the guest book–is the live music played there on Saturday mornings from 9 to noon.
Jerry and Fran Urfer opened the cafe in 2001, after spending three years remodeling Kepferle Mercantile, an old general store that featured hardware on one wall and groceries on the other. The music was Larry Larson’s idea. He lived just down the road and thought the cafe would be a fine place for his band, The Hogback Five, to get in some practice.
It’s a nice reflection of the bluegrass scene in the upper Midwest, and a terrific plug for bluegrass music.
If it isn’t in your Sunday paper, you can read the complete article online.
