The Rough & Tumble

folk · americana · roots

The Rough & Tumble is a folk and Americana duo of Mallory Graham and Scott Tyler, who began playing together in 2011 and married on leap day in 2016. The pair describe their sound as dumpster-folk and thrift-store Americana, built on close two-part harmony and a shifting kit of accordion, ukulele, guitar and improvised percussion. They left Nashville in 2015 and toured full time out of a small camper for years, playing roughly 150 shows a year at festivals, listening rooms and house concerts; a 2023 crowdfunding campaign raised about $22,000 to replace the trailer. They now keep a home base in the White Mountains of New Hampshire while still spending at least half of each year on the road. The duo has released more than a dozen albums and EPs since 2011, among them We're Only Family If You Say So (2021), Only This Far (2023), Hymns for My Atheist Sister & Her Friends to Sing Along To (November 2024) and Winter Hare (2025). The 2024 record, introduced by the single Love Them Too, was written for what the duo calls the faithful, the faithless and the somewhere-in-between, and works through questions of belief, doubt and compassion. Their song The Hardest Part won Americana Song of the Year at the 2019 Independent Music Awards, and Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts awarded them an Iguana Fund grant to build out a home studio. Their sets lean on storytelling and direct address to the room, and they work chiefly in listening rooms, folk clubs and house concerts rather than bars.

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