Davina & The Vagabonds

blues · roots · americana

Davina and the Vagabonds is a Minneapolis-based blues, jazz and roots band fronted by singer and pianist Davina Sowers, who founded the group in the Twin Cities in 2004. Sowers grew up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, learned piano on a spinet at home and absorbed pre-war American records from her stepfather's phonograph alongside 1960s rock. She finished high school at fifteen and played in a Pennsylvania children's orchestra, then spent years struggling with addiction and homelessness, busking in Key West before a musician friend paid her bus fare to St. Paul. The band came together on short notice when a sound engineer asked whether she had a group available for a slot and she said yes; the name came from a description people had long applied to her. The ensemble is deliberately guitar-free, pairing Sowers' piano and vocals with upright bass, drums and a two-horn front line of trumpet and trombone, a setup that pushes the arrangements toward New Orleans jazz, early blues, rockabilly and vaudeville-era song. Recent members include trumpeter Becca Lozier and drummer Connor McRae Hammergren. Its first album, Songs from Thomas Avenue, was recorded in 2005 and 2006, and was followed by Under Lock and Key (2008), Live @ The Times (2009), Black Cloud (2011), Sunshine (2014), Nicollet and Tenth (2016), Sugar Drops (2019), A Lovenest Holiday (2022) and Shoot for the Moon (2024), the last of them fan-funded; several appeared through Red House Records. Sunshine reached number 13 on Billboard's blues chart, and Rolling Stone named I Can't Believe I Let You Go one of the ten best Americana songs of 2019. Before the pandemic the band worked roughly 285 dates a year, playing the Monterey Jazz Festival and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and touring the United Kingdom and Europe.

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