Hackensaw Boys

The Hackensaw Boys are an Americana band from Charlottesville, Virginia inspired by punk, bluegrass, and old-time music.

The Hackensaw Boys were founded in the Fall of 1999[1] by Rob Bullington, Tom Peloso, David Sickmen, and Robert "Bobby" St. Ours who were all living in Charlottesville, Virginia at the time.

Sickmen lived in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the early 1990s. Bullington, originally from Hagerstown, Maryland, attended James Madison University there (playing in a band called Fried Moose).[2][3] St. Ours had started the Route 11 Boys with Ketch Secor and Chris "Critter" Fuqua in 1994--together with brothers Johnny and Phillip St. Ours--all from Harrisonburg. Fuqua and Secor would go on to found Old Crow Medicine Show in 1998. All had performed as young musicians on the open mic stage at the Little Grill diner in Harrisonburg.[4]

In August of 1999, to celebrate his birthday, Sickmen got together with Bullington, Peloso, and St. Ours at Miller's restaurant in Charlottesville--the place that launched Dave Matthews onto the music scene[5]--to watch Fuqua perform with Old Crow Medicine Show. Sickmen and Peloso had been talking about helping each other restart bands they'd headed up in the region. When the Old Crow sound reminded Sickmen of Peloso's band Chigger,[6] he suggested to Peloso that this is the kind of music they should be playing. Bullington "recalls that by night’s end, the four of them were onstage jamming and having a ball."[7]

Peloso and Sickmen asked Bullington and St. Ours to join their new group the next day, and immediately had their first practice and payday busking on the Charlottesville downtown pedestrian mall. According to Bullington, they were met with: "Smiles. That's what told us we should keep doing it. Smiles and some change [laughs]. They'd smile and throw change at us and we'd keep playing. It worked out pretty well."[8] They would develop their sound busking on the mall.[9]