April 26, 2025 | 8:00PM
Café Logan
Suggested Donation $10 - RSVP Recommended
Join us for an evening of Country Music featuring powerful performances by St. Paul-based Americana artist Mary Cutrufello and her band, as well as, the country/bluegrass/folk-rock band The Gated Community. Together they celebrate country music’s sonic and social intersections.
This performance is presented by the Logan Center for the Arts and the Department of Music in conjunction with “Country Music as Theory: Intersections & Implications for the Humanities and Social Sciences,” a symposium being held at the Franke Institute for the Humanities on Friday, April 25th and Saturday, April 26th. The symposium will bring together scholars of country music and adjacent sounds, histories, geographies, and materialities to discuss country music’s under-examined corners and explore its place in and potential for contemporary theory and scholarship. To learn more visit: https://voices.uchicago.edu/country/.
Mary Cutrufello has been a Texas honky-tonk heroine, a fiery Midwestern roots-rocker, and a powerhouse acoustic performer in her almost 35 years in the music business. Connecticut-raised and Yale-educated, she’s performed on The Tonight Show and Austin City Limits (twice) and toured in all 50 states and several European countries. Hailed by USA Today as “a fierce guitarist with a blistered-throat voice,” Cutrufello’s music is a captivating, heartland-proud musical stew at once timeless and immediate. And as anyone who’s seen her tear-it-up live shows can attest, her guitar skills put her in a class with the best of the Lone Star, North Star—or any other—State.
Mary Cutrufello’s Band Features:
- Mary Cutrufello: guitar and lead vocals
- Greg Schutte, drums
- GS Harper, bass and vocals
The Gated Community is an Americana band for the 99%. Formed in 2006 in Minneapolis’s storied West Bank neighborhood, the band is known for its gripping original songs, beautiful vocal harmonies, and multiple lead singers. Led by South Asian American singer/songwriter Sumanth Gopinath (aka Sonny), the band’s music is eclectic in style, encompassing country, folk, bluegrass, and rock. The band released its fifth full-length album, The Honor and Glory of The Gated Community, in 2023. The album features poignant songs of personal and collective loss, many of which were written just a few blocks from where the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct station was burned and abandoned following the murder of George Floyd. The Gated Community was recently featured on the Smouse in the House podcast (by Adventures in Americana) in June 2024. They are currently working on their sixth full-length album, due out in 2025. In 2026 they will celebrate their 20th anniversary.
The Gated Community features:
- Sumanth Gopinath, guitar and vocals
- Rosie Harris, banjo and vocals
- Beth Hartman, percussion and vocals
- Paul Hatlelid, drums
- Cody Johnson, bass
- Nate Knutson, guitar
Support for the symposium is provided by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Karla Scherer Center, the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, the Graduate Student Council, and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies. Additional support for the concert is provided by the Evelyn Brody and Jack B. Siegel Concert Fund and friends of the Logan Center.