The Blind Boys Of Alabama & Asleep At The Wheel in Austin

The Blind Boys of Alabama are an American gospel group formed in Talladega in 1939 by students at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind. Their music draws on traditional gospel, blues and soul; key recordings include their adaptation of “Amazing Grace,” sung to the melody associated with “The House of the Rising Sun,” and the albums Spirit of the Century and Higher Ground. In 1983, the group appeared in the premiere of The Gospel at Colonus at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the production later brought them to Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. After recording There Will Be a Light with Ben Harper in 2004, the two acts toured together, and the concert album Live at the Apollo documented their partnership in New York.

Asleep at the Wheel is an American western-swing and country band formed in Paw Paw, West Virginia, in 1970 and led by singer-guitarist Ray Benson. The group became known for carrying forward the repertoire and dance-band sound of Bob Wills, alongside its own recordings “The Letter That Johnny Walker Read” and “Miles and Miles of Texas.” Its albums include “Tribute to the Music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys” and “Ride with Bob.” Asleep at the Wheel appeared on the first regularly scheduled episode of Austin City Limits in 1976 and returned to the program repeatedly over the following decades. The band later developed “A Ride with Bob,” a stage musical based on Wills’s life and songs, and took the production to theatres after its 2005 premiere. The concert format is a country dance band led by Benson, with arrangements built around fiddle, steel guitar, piano, guitar, bass and drums; saxophone and other horn parts also feature in its western-swing sound. Gruene Hall in New Braunfels is among the dance halls the band plays, while its theatre dates have included Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.