There is a line Jim Lauderdale wrote — something about how everybody’s got a problem, delivered flat and plainspoken as a screen door swinging — and when you hear it, you understand immediately why George Strait and Patty Loveless and George Jones spent decades calling him up. Lauderdale has always had that gift: the economy of a great country song, the truth of it landing before you have had time to brace yourself. On Sunday, July 19, he brings that gift to Colony Woodstock — a 150-seat room on Rock City Road where the distance between the stage and the last barstool is close enough to see the Telecaster strings vibrate.
About Jim Lauderdale
Lauderdale is one of those figures who has existed at the center of American roots music for so long that his presence there has begun to feel constitutional. Born in Troutman, North Carolina and raised in Due West, South Carolina, he came up through Nashville in the early 1990s and almost immediately began placing songs with the biggest names in country. George Strait recorded his compositions, including two that reached the top five. Patty Loveless and George Jones recorded “You Don’t Seem To Miss Me” — a song that holds up as a quiet masterpiece of the form. The Chicks recorded him. Old Crow Medicine Show, Lucinda Williams, Charley Crockett. The list of artists who have found something essential in a Jim Lauderdale song is as long as the genre itself.
In 2025, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame made it official, inducting Lauderdale in recognition of a career that has shaped the sound of American music more than most listeners will ever know. It is the kind of honor that fits him — not a flashy award, but a permanent acknowledgment of craft, of a life’s work done in service of the song. The Americana Music Association gave him their Wagonmaster Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016; he has won two Grammy Awards for Best Bluegrass Album; and between 2004 and 2013 he collaborated with Robert Hunter — the lyrical architect behind the Grateful Dead’s best-known songs — across six albums that stand as some of the more unexpected and rewarding left turns in his catalog. Elvis Costello has described him as having “great style” and being an “exceptional songwriter.” Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show is more direct: “He’s my favorite part of Americana music.”
What makes the Colony show particularly worth your Sunday evening is that Lauderdale arrives not in retrospective mode but at full creative throttle. His 38th album, Country Super Hits Volume 2 — a follow-up, twenty years on, to his 2006 record of the same name — is a thirteen-track honky-tonk statement built around pedal steel, country piano, and Telecasters. “I feel like I’m writing and recording more than ever,” he has said, and the record bears that out. He has also been touring Europe this year alongside Emmylou Harris. When someone of Lauderdale’s stature walks into a room that holds 150 people, the intimacy is not incidental — it is the point.
What you will hear on the 19th is a live performer who has spent decades refining his relationship with these songs in small theaters and listening rooms. There is a quality that comes from watching a great songwriter perform his own material — the way the phrasing shifts slightly from the recorded version, the way a lyric lands differently when delivered three feet from where you are standing. Lauderdale has been doing this since 1991. He knows what a small room wants from him, and he gives it without calculation.
Opening the Show: Reed Foehl
The evening opens with Reed Foehl, a New England-raised, Vermont-based singer-songwriter who has spent years building a catalog of what his own press describes as “weathered, honest and quietly devastating” material — “grit in the stories, grace in the melodies.” Foehl has recorded more than eleven studio albums and earned a Grammy nomination for “Fly,” co-written with Brent Cobb and covered by Lee Ann Womack. His new 2026 album was recorded right here in Woodstock, NY — a local connection that gives the evening a particular resonance. He is the right kind of opener for a show like this: a songwriter’s songwriter who earns his set.
About Colony Woodstock
Colony Woodstock sits at 22 Rock City Road in the Hudson Valley — a 150-capacity bar and music venue that has become one of the more reliable rooms in the region for this kind of music. Woodstock has always carried a certain weight when it comes to American roots music, and Colony fits that legacy without making a fuss about it. At 150 people, every seat is a good seat. There is no back-of-the-room problem here, no sight line issue, no crowd noise swallowing the details of a lyric. A songwriter of Lauderdale’s caliber in a room this size is not a compromise — it is an opportunity, and you should not miss it.
Tickets & Show Details
Doors open at 6:00 PM; the show begins at 7:00 PM. Tickets are priced from $23 to $45 and are available now. The show is all ages; guests under 18 must be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian. No refunds.
Get tickets for Jim Lauderdale at Colony Woodstock ↔