Betsy Badwater & The Hillbilly Chrome is a Swampbilly-Blues/ANTI-Pop Country/Rockabilly band out of Pensacola, Florida. Betsy Badwater & The Hillbilly Chrome hammer down a stout distillation of rockabilly, country, blues and high-lonesome. The band’s insistence on stripped-down instrumentation and guts-out-gospel vocalization gave birth to a powerful hybrid Americana sound driven by Betsy’s one-man-band -with a band- style. Betsy Badwater sings, plays guitar, and tambourine-topped bass drum all at the same time. TALES of the WAYWARD was the introductory record of Betsy Badwater’s Hillbilly Chrome band. The players at that time included Lang Hollowman on slide guitar/upright bass, Joe Green on upright bass, and mandolin, Jeff Glickman on banjo, Katelyn Merrill on percussion, upright bass, and organ, and Pete Kareski on mouth harp. Part of the album was recorded live outdoors on Betsy’s back porch (engineered and co-mixed by Lang Hollowman), and also includes a handful of the studio recordings from TALL TALES with extra instrumental parts added by Betsy Badwater, Lang Hollowman, and Katelyn Merrill. All songs on TALES of the WAYWARD were written by Badwater, recorded in one take, and several of the live recordings were the band’s first time playing the songs together. In fact, Betsy wrote “Fired Today,” which has been featured on CNN, Headline News, PBS Television, and commercial and public radio, sitting in her empty bathtub 15 minutes before recording. The track you hear was the very first time BB & HBC ever played the song. The powerful storytelling, the chemistry between the players, and the sound of the crickets and frogs in the background is what makes these raw recordings a tasty sample of what is to come from Betsy Badwater and her ever evolving band in the future. Betsy is quite a prolific songwriter, having written the words and music for more than 150 songs and at least 5 thematic albums worth of material that is just waiting to be recorded. For now, she and her band are taking it to the next level for a record of all-new songs, in process at The Shed Recording Studio in New Orleans, with Grammy-winning movie star, and blues/Americana hero, Chris Thomas King in the Producer seat. New instrumentation added to the line-up includes Aaron Clark on fiddle, Michael Danielson on upright bass, Jeff Mills on full drums & percussion, and Paul Buller on pedal steel. –Stay tuned!