There are singers who learned their instruments in lessons, and singers who learned them from a musical family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, passed hand to hand, instrument to instrument, until the music felt less like a discipline than a dialect. Martha Spencer is the second kind: guitar, fiddle, banjo, bass, dulcimer, mandolin, all of it absorbed before she ever played a stage, and you can hear it in how she moves between them and in how she carries that tradition into a room, which tends to feel less like a performance than a continuation of something that began long before she walked onstage.
About the Show
Martha Spencer & the Wonderland Country Band plays Daryl’s House in Pawling on Sunday, February 21, 2027. The group around her is more than accompaniment: Jamie Collins on bass and vocals, Lucas Pasley on fiddle, banjo, and vocals, and Jake Dwyer on percussion, washboard, and dance. That last credit (percussion, washboard, and dance) is not something you see on a rider every day, and it signals what kind of evening this is. Mountain music at its source was built to move through a body; those three words suggest the band has not forgotten that.
Spencer’s work has been covered in Rolling Stone Country and No Depression, and she and the band have performed across the US, Australia, the UK, and Europe, with appearances at the Topanga Banjo Fiddle Festival, the Buck Owens Crystal Palace, and the Ashkenaz Center. Those credits give some sense of the breadth of what Spencer does — singer, songwriter, mountain musician, dancer, all four labels doing actual work. She carries them without apology, and without any of them functioning as honorifics. The Wonderland Country Band gives her the room to move between all of them at once.
Venue & Logistics
Daryl’s House at 130 NY-22 in Pawling sits in the southern reaches of the Hudson Valley, close enough to the region’s edges that it draws from a wider audience than its address might suggest. At 300 seats, it keeps you close: the right scale for music that was never meant to fill an arena. The show is all ages. Doors open at 5:00 p.m. EST for a 7:00 p.m. start.
Tickets
Tickets are $22.03–$28.69, on sale now. Buy tickets