Punk-bluegrass mash · Black Hills, South Dakota
Sugar and Grains Mash Band
Old-time and bluegrass played with punk-rock hands — mandolin, banjo, fiddle, and a stand-up bass built out of a gas tank. Co-written by Jason Kimmer and Adam Stratmeyer, run out of the Black Hills. The tracks live on YouTube.
The Sugar and Grains Mash Band is what happens when musicians who came up in punk turn their attention to bluegrass and old-time and refuse to treat it as a museum piece. The instruments are traditional — mandolin, banjo, fiddle, upright bass — but the energy underneath is straight out of the punk world the players came from: fast, loud where it counts, and completely unpolished in the best way. It is string-band music with a set of calluses.
Even the name is a recipe. Sugar and grains is the base of a mash — the raw material you ferment and run through a still. That is a fitting description of the band's whole method: take the plain ingredients of old-time string music, add heat and a little chaos, and see what comes out the other end at proof. The result is punk-bluegrass that sounds handmade because it is.
The Sound
Built By Hand, Down To The Bass
The signature of the band is a homemade upright bass. In the tradition of bluegrass-punk outfits like Split Lip Rayfield, the low end was built rather than bought: an old metal gas tank, a salvaged bass neck bolted straight into the frame, a single machine head, and heavy-duty weed-eater line for a string — tuned to an open note and slapped for all it was worth. It is not a novelty. It is the actual rhythm section, and it carried entire live sets.
Over that foundation sit the melodic instruments. Mandolin drives most of the arrangements; banjo and fiddle fill it out, trading leads and holding down the drive. The songwriting ranges from straight-ahead old-time stomps to originals that carry real weight underneath the speed. The band could execute complex covers and write serious, structurally sound songs of its own — the punk background shows up less in the notes than in the attitude and the refusal to over-produce anything.
Live
Bars, Barns, And Hoedowns
Sugar and Grains was, first and last, a live band. It played bars, barns, hoedowns, and every kind of function in between, across blistering Dakota summers and hard winters. There was one standing rule: the band worked for pay, not for exposure. That is not posturing — it is the same self-respecting logic that runs through the whole Blind Text catalog. Know what the work is worth, and treat it that way.
The recordings that exist capture that live spirit more than any studio gloss. There is no aggregator distribution behind this project yet; for now the tracks live on YouTube, which is exactly where music this direct belongs. Co-writing credits run to Jason Kimmer and Adam Stratmeyer, with additional players featured across the catalog.
Listen
Tracks On YouTube
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