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“There are a lot more people out there with Jay-Z and Johnny Cash on their playlists than you think,” says Gangstagrass Mastermind Rench. He should know – he’s toured the world with a band of bluegrass pickers and hip-hop MCs to the delight of standing-room crowds everywhere.
Making beats for local NYC rappers and hosting country music nights in popular NYC venues, Rench had a musical itch that needed to be scratched – he was listening to the 1970s recordings of Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys and couldn’t help imagining what classic bluegrass would sound like with Outkast and Mos Def spitting rhymes alongside them. The result was a genre-demolishing new formula by the name of Gangstagrass. He put it up for free download and people took notice. Hundreds of thousands of downloads followed creating an intense underground buzz. When FX Network came to Rench looking for the Gangstagrass sound for the theme song to their new series Justified, he had bluegrass players lay down an original track with rapper T.O.N.E-z, the younger brother of early hip-hop legends Special K and T-LaRoc. "Long Hard Times to Come" was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2010, contending for best theme song after critical praise and massive fan response.
Rench assembled a crack team of bluegrass pickers and battle tested MCs, and has produced a bunch of full length albums exploring the many possibilities of this genre fusion. 2020’s “No Time For Enemies” reached #1 on the Billboard bluegrass charts (the first time an album featuring real hip-hop MCs had done so). Gangstagrass has toured internationally, blowing minds on main stages from SXSW to Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, Glastonbury to America’s Got Talent. The live act taking full advantage of the improvisational aspects of both hip-hop and bluegrass. With MCs R-SON and Dolio the Sleuth trading verses, Dan Whitener on banjo, B.E. Farrow on fiddle, Rench on guitar and beats, and frequent three-part harmonies, the Gangstagrass stage show has garnered a reputation among fans for its dynamism and spontaneity. You have to see it to believe it.
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