SEATTLE – A trio from The Hillbilly Thomists, a group of eight Dominican friars who play bluegrass music, will perform in Seattle July 24.
The concert comes a week after their scheduled performance at the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis.
“We see the band as a creative outlet for preaching,” said Dominican Father Simon Teller, a member of the group, which just released its fourth album, “Marigold.”
Members of The Hillbilly Thomists belong to the Dominican Friars of the Province of St. Joseph, the order’s eastern province in the United States. The band was founded by Dominican Fathers Thomas Joseph White and Austin Litke at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.
Father Litke is from Kentucky and Father White is from Georgia.
“Both of us were feeling like expats and wanted to re-appropriate our southern roots,” Father Litke, now a professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, said in a July 4 phone call while visiting Rome.
Several seminarians soon joined the band, playing Irish, bluegrass, and Americana music, Father Teller said. “We’re all in the seminary together and played music for fun,” added Father Teller, who is now a chaplain at Providence College in Rhode Island.
The band’s name comes from a quote by novelist Flannery O’Connor, who was Catholic.
In 2017, the group released its first album, “The Hillbilly Thomists,” featuring bluegrass and Americana standards.
“It kind of coalesced into something a bit more formal,” Father Litke said.
A week after the group’s debut album came out, Billboard magazine called with the news that the album made the top 10 of the bluegrass chart, Father Teller said. It rose to No. 3 on the chart, according to the band’s website.
After recording albums of original music in 2021 and 2022, The Hillbilly Thomists toured eight cities, including a performance at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, the website said. The band also has a Christmas album in the works.
Father Litke said the band has become more musically sophisticated, with more members contributing original songs.
“There becomes kind of an original, cohesive sound to it,” said Father Litke, who sees a parallel between writing and performing a song and praying and preparing to preach.
The friars tour one year and record an album the next year, Father Teller said. Proceeds from the group’s concerts allow the band to perform and produce music while supporting the Dominican House of Studies, according to the band’s website.
Father Teller said he prefers recording albums because they reach more people. The band records at a retreat house in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, making music between their times of prayer.
Like Father Teller and Father Litke, band members are busy with their work as priests, according to Paul Padgett, who helps manage the band.
Several of the members are university chaplains. Father Teller said two band members live in Rome, where Father White is rector at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas.
“They’re notoriously difficult to book,” Padgett said.
Attend the concert
Three members of The Hillbilly Thomists will perform at 7 p.m. July 24 at the National Nordic Museum in in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. Tickets are $40. Click here to learn more.