This Saturday
The Ukulele Connection plays a unique blend of musical styles including standards, popular, bluegrass, and gospel songs. Bass, tenor, and banjo ukuleles along with a tuba, guitar, mandolin and harmonica provide the background for the three part vocals.

Musicians in June

June 7 - Jim Roeder
June 14 - Kevin Boyd
June 19 - Larry Lockwood
June 28 - Terry Stone

Okay Dads, June 14th is a great event for you to bring the kids to the Farmers Market. We have lots of activities for the kids and the kids can make dad a special surprise.

June 14 - Children's Festival 
June 14 -  Dads and kids day at the Market
June 14 -  Health fair in east lot: Bouncy House, Balloon Man, Tattoo painting Lady, Liquid chalk sidewalk drawings,  clown(s) and much more. Rain date June 19.
June 21 - Cake Walk. Proceeds will go to Friendly House Food Pantry.
June 28 - Children bring a white t-shirt.  They will decorate the t-shirts in red and blue paint (fireworks theme).

Crosswinds Farm just had their new "crop" of lambs come in. You just have to take a look at their Facebook page pictures She also has a blog with more wonderful pictures. while you are at the market stop and see Corrine and you can take home some wonderful greeting cards, yarn and home made treats that you can share on special occasions.

Strawberry, Blackberry, Blueberry, Raspberry lots of your favorite berries. I picked up some plain pastries and topped them with berries, oh what a treat.  Top it off with whipped cream or ice cream and you have a divine treat!  Enjoy!

At the Market in the morning,buy your lunch goodies and have a picnic lunch on the river then catch a game in the evening! 6:00 pm home games June 7,14,21 Click here for the River Bandits Schedule.

The seminal crossover-thrash band D.R.I. released its seventh studio album, Full Speed Ahead, in 1995, and fans hungry for an eighth album ... well, they'll need to keep waiting.

Founding vocalist Kurt Brecht, in a recent phone interview promoting D.R.I.'s May 30 appearance at RIBCO, said the band isn't against the idea and has made fits and starts. It recorded four demos in 2004 and released a Web-only track from those sessions. And, he added, founding guitarist Spike Cassidy "was saying something about recording the next time we're in L.A. with the engineer that used to do our old albums when we were on Metal Blade Records."

But, he said, if something comes from that studio time, it will likely be an EP. "Not that we couldn't write a full album," he said. "It's just we've been so busy touring and stuff, we don't want to stop to put out an album. ... We're just so happy to have an unlimited amount of dates thrown at us all over the world to play, so we don't want to slow down." Plus, without a current record deal, the band is under no obligation to release new material - and getting a record deal or self-releasing an album would require energy that could be devoted to touring.

Few people would be surprised to find Julie Byrne working in the service industry. The singer/songwriter, after all, is in her mid-20s with one album to her credit, and it's hard for an emerging musician to make ends meet performing for small audiences and selling records one by one.

But if you see Byrne working at Rozz-Tox in the coming weeks, it's not for that reason. Instead, she's the first artist-in-residence at the venue, and her one-month stay in the Quad Cities - running through early June - will include a show on May 28.

The residency, Byrne said last week, originated with the idea of finding something to fill the gap between a two-month tour and her summer concert bookings. "I knew that going on such a long tour would be really wonderful and really exhilarating but also challenging just because there's no privacy and no space to reflect on these constant, rapid experiences - each day in a new place," she said. "So I was trying to figure out a calm, tranquil environment where I could exist after the tour to kind of take it all in and begin working on new material."

In putting together his new album One House, Blue Grass, Iowa-based David G. Smith "ended up with 10 issues-oriented songs," he said in an interview last week.

This was a bit of an accident. Smith - who will be celebrating the album's release with a May 17 show at the Redstone Room - said he brought 21 songs to producer Blue Miller and "figured we'd find an album out of that. ... We ended up recording two albums. ... We've got another one on deck. It's already been mastered."

And when Smith considered which songs to put on which album, One House's 10 tracks seemed to naturally go together in the order they appear.

The title track asks the question "Can we live in one house built on higher ground?" "Ivory" deals with the illegal trade of elephant tusks. "Jesus Is in Prison" is about a death-row inmate. "Angels Flew" tells the story of a boat lift rescuing people on 9/11. "Doesn't Take Much Light" and "Ariel" are specific narratives based on real people - with Parkinson's disease and the extremely rare Rett syndrome, respectively. (The River Music Experience concert is also a platform to raise money for the latter illness.)

It's a heavy collection, and for some tastes it will likely be too on-the-nose, even though it's rarely preachy - which Smith called "the mortal sin of songwriting": "It's a supreme challenge to try to write something that will strike a chord with people and at least make them pause and maybe think a little bit."

The subject matter and directness are countered by folk arrangements that are thoughtful and evocative, but more importantly the album - Smith's second studio effort - is also filled with hope, conviction, earnest heart, and lovely turns of phrase that elevate it. Smith is at his best finding unexpected light in the darkness.