Jordan Ruyle – Triple Chicken Foot – Knuckle Knockers

Jordan Ruyle is a local Square Dance caller and Old Time musician. After years of square dancing at Old Time festivals and gatherings, he was motivated to try calling as a way to make more dances happen in the Bay Area. Portland’s Bill Martin has been a great role model and mentor providing info on dances and advice on calling. In the past two years, Jordan’s dream of starting a regular Bay Area Old Time Square Dance has come true. The wildly successful First Friday North Oakland Square Dance is in its second year and takes place the first Friday of every month at Oakland’s Niebyl-Proctor Marxist library on Telegraph with the rollicking, haunting, and primitive fiddle tunes of local favorites the Squirrelly Stringband. Jordan is available for weddings, private parties and, of course, Bar Mitzvahs.

Triple Chicken Foot is an Old Time trio playing fiddle and banjo tunes and songs in Los Angeles, California with Ben Guzmán on fiddle/mandolin, Mike Heinle on banjo and Kelly Marie Martin on guitar. They all three sing. For over six years, playing old time music in Los Angeles, they have performed at the Autry National Center, LACMA, The Watkins Family Hour, weddings, numerous clubs around Southern California and on NPR. They have also performed at local festivals: Goleta Fiddlers Convention, Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest and the New Los Angeles Folk Festival, up the west coast at the Portland Old Time Gathering, the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention, and on the Palomino stage of the Stagecoach Festival. They regularly host Old Time square dances and jams in Los Angeles. In 2011 they were voted “Best Folk Band in LA” by the LA Weekly. 2012 they had a full-length feature article in the Los Angeles Times Arts section and a studio session for Roz Larman’s FolkScene radio show on KPFK!

Knuckle Knockers  Hailing from the hayseed neighborhood of Bernal Heights in San Francisco, The Knucs stoke the fires of the Appalachian music tradition to give you a glimpse of the past through the eyes of the present, with voice, fiddles, mandolin, guitar and 5 string banjo. Tunes and songs, like you like ’em! Not only that . . . our debutante recording (in an antique form known as a CD) has been with us for over a year now, and is getting gooood reviews and lots of radio hairspray, er, I mean airplay . . .