Eric Squindo has been running tribute concerts since 2019 — John Prine, Tom Waits, Townes Van Zandt, each one built around players who know the material rather than players who can approximate it. For Labor Day 2026, the subject is Woody Guthrie, and the timing is not accidental. “This Land Is Your Land” was always a protest song before it became a school assembly staple, and a room full of people singing it on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend carries a different weight than most playlists would suggest.
About the Show
Billed as “Talkin’ Hard Work – A Woody Guthrie Labor Day Tribute,” the evening promises “lively, full band renditions of the songs, words, and spirit of Woody Guthrie,” with a program that also covers selections written in Guthrie’s spirit and songs that got washed out by rain at a July 4th Guthrie tribute earlier this year. Guthrie wrote over 3,000 songs, which means a three-hour show can range well beyond “This Land Is Your Land” into material most audiences have never encountered. The lineup is Eric Squindo, Andrew Shober, Michael Hams, and Larry Packer, with special guests Marc Delgado and MacCabes + Shobers.
Packer warrants attention in his own right. The Woodstock-based fiddle and violin player appeared in The Band’s “The Last Waltz,” has played with Lou Reed, Phoebe Snow, and Hall & Oates, and was inducted into the New York State Blues Hall of Fame in 2016. Delgado brings something beyond instrumental facility: his grandparents were Spanish immigrants who worked as migrant field hands in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the same landscape that runs through so much of Guthrie’s writing, and that inheritance comes through in his work as a singer-songwriter and storyteller. Squindo has built a reputation, through years of these tribute evenings, for “masterful hosting” that holds a small room together without letting the production overtake the songs.
Venue & Logistics
Colony Woodstock opened as the Colony Hotel in 1929, billed as “The Smartest Rendezvous in the Catskills” and, at the time, the tallest structure in town. Big band performances in the great room were part of the original draw. The 150-capacity room at 22 Rock City Road in Woodstock, in the Hudson Valley, has kept that tradition of live music going for nearly a century. Doors at 6 p.m., show runs 7 to 10 p.m.
Tickets
Admission is a $20 suggested donation. Attendees under 18 must be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian. No refunds. Buy tickets