Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams at City Winery

Larry Campbell was born in New York City and in the 1970s and 1980s played guitar, mandolin, and anything with strings in local bands and in four Broadway productions. Teresa Williams grew up on a cotton farm in Peckerwood Point, Tennessee; as a young adult, she moved to New York City, where she sang and played guitar in bands including Southern Comfort and Swing Fever. Campbell and Williams met when he was hired to play pedal steel guitar for her at a New York gig. They married in 1988 but their separate careers kept them musically apart, as he backed Bob Dylan and others and she backed Emmylou Harris and performed her own music. Whenever they were home, however, they joined Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble band in Woodstock, New York. Committed to working together, the duo known as Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams released albums in 2015 and 2018.

At City Winery tonight, Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams remained faithful to country roots music, adding resonator and steel guitar player Cindy Cashdollar to the ensemble for most of the set. Campbell played guitar, mandolin and fiddle, and Campbell and Williams' vocals harmonized with substantial twang. Sweet, lilting vocals alternated with speedy fingerpicking throughout the set. Appalachian-styled country and bluegrass dominated, but the set's inspirations also drew from Memphis soul, Chicago blues, and Delta honky tonk. When the temperature seemed right for rock and roll, bassist Jesse Murphy of Brazilian Girls and drummer Justin Guip, who also performs in Hot Tuna, delivered a driving tempo, and Campbell wailed on his guitar. Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams proved equally skillful in playing casual back porch music and energizing booty-shaking songs.