Ragged Union

• Bluegrass

Ragged Union’s signature bluegrass-and-beyond music has appeared at festivals, concert series and events all across the USA, England, and China, since 2013. Past performances include IBMA Wide Open Bluegrass, John Hartford Memorial Festival, Northwest String Summit, Durango Meltdown, Shrewsbury Folk Festival (England), and the Qingdao International Beer Festival (China), to name a few. Their music appears on celestial and satellite radio, and can be found on Spotify, Pandora, and anywhere music can be found, streaming or otherwise. The band toured as a five, or six-piece unit from 2014 until 2019, and from 2020 to 2023 as a quartet or trio. 2024 brought back the five-piece format, and to the delight of audiences, the music once again reaches its full potential.

The band’s recipe for tasty contemporary bluegrass contains three main ingredients. Geoff Union’s ‘Outsider Songwriting’ makes use of poetic lyric ideas that stretch beyond the ‘normal’ country themes to include personal, and even historical, stories, often presented in creative rhyme meter. Ragged Union sets their sometimes obscure-in-a-good-way lyric content to ‘Timeless Melodies’ that are new, yet sound familiar and classic. The songs are further enhanced with ‘Unexpected Arrangements’. Changes in feel, tempo, and time signature, along with rich compositional ideas, and atypical song structure (like putting the bridge at the end of the song) set Ragged Union’s original material apart. All of these concepts come together in an impressively exciting live performance that is equally at home at the festival, concert series, or nightclub.

The band has released four albums, 2015’s Hard Row to Hoe; 2017’s Time Captain, and Live at Leeds (recorded live at the Seven Arts Theatre in Leeds, England) and 2022’s Round Feet, Chrome Smile. A new release is in the works for the winter of 2024-25.