Henhouse Prowlers

bluegrass

The Henhouse Prowlers are a four-piece bluegrass and Americana band formed in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood in 2004. The current lineup is Ben Wright on banjo, Jon Goldfine on double bass, Chris Dollar on guitar and Jake Howard on mandolin, with all four singing; Wright and Goldfine are founding members, and Howard, a Berklee College of Music alumnus, joined in 2020. Wright has said a banjo he saw in a shop window in 1999 set the whole thing in motion, and Dollar came to the band from bluegrass country in southern Indiana. The repertoire runs from traditional bluegrass toward progressive Americana, and sets mix originals with arrangements of tunes picked up abroad, sometimes sung in languages the band does not speak, delivered alongside storytelling from the road. Since 2013 the Prowlers have toured as cultural ambassadors under the U.S. State Department's American Music Abroad and Arts Envoy programs, playing dozens of countries across five continents, with stops in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Russia and Bolivia. Out of that work they founded Bluegrass Ambassadors, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that runs school workshops and community exchange programs; its 2024 Common Chords project traced historical links between American bluegrass and the string-band traditions of the former Czechoslovakia and is the subject of a planned documentary. The recorded catalog runs to roughly a dozen releases, beginning with a self-titled album in 2006 and including Live From Kyrgyzstan (2017), The Departure (2021), Lead and Iron (2023) and Unravel (2025), which draws on touring life, war, loss and endurance. The band keeps a heavy domestic schedule as well, working listening rooms and festivals such as Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Official site

Past shows in New York

Where they play in New York

Past shows in Massachusetts

Where they play in Massachusetts