Twice a month, most months, Beer and Hymns brings all kind of people together at either Bike Rack Brewing in Bentonville or the Tontitown Winery. The sing-along includes hymns, but also secular songs tied to a monthly theme. Say America in July or Pride in June. And each month, a notable nonprofit benefits from the community and from financial donations. Beer and Hymns is marking a 10th anniversary in Northwest Arkansas Sunday at Bike Rack Brewing.
Now, the concept of Beer and Hymns originates in the U.K. at a music festival called Greenbelt. It was a Christian music festival, complete with beer tent, where guitars, beer and hymns combined. From there, the guitars and hymns migrated back to local pubs, then eventually crossed the ocean.
Ken Weatherford, co-founder of the Northwest Arkansas iteration of Beer and Hymns with his wife Casey, says most of the stateside versions exist in that more traditional mode.
Weatherford: Beer and old school church hymns. And that’s it. And we started that same way 10 years ago, summer of 2016. And it was great. It was fun, but it was insular.
Kellams: Mhm.
Weatherford: When we got started, it was the people that we knew at our church. And yes, we were in a pub, and some people were kind of like, yeah, it’s okay. But it really was hard for it to be anything more than that.
And so in early ‘17, we started adding songs on a theme, and that started changing the game. But the bigger thing was we lost our venue, our first venue. I don’t know exactly what happened, but they had to move. And so we were without Beer and Hymns for two or three months in the early summer of ‘17. And so our first event back was August of that year at Bike Rack Brewing Company.
And I will always sing Jeff and Brooke Charlson’s praises. They came that night. They were some of the owners of Bike Rack. And we happened to be raising... Casey and I, we were doing the ramp EMS research trip fest, and we were both in one of the races, and we were raising money for them. We said, hey, can we put our guitar case out and, like, raise a little money for that? And would y’all donate, you know, a percentage of your bar sale? So they did 5% that night.
And because we’d been off for a couple of months, I know that this is why this happened, we had, like, 125 people that first night.
Kellams: Right. They were missing it.
Weatherford: Yeah. Because they were missing it. But, like, typically that was not a night yet for us. And so, like, Brooke and Jeff, they got so excited. Like, we want y’all to do this every month. We’re going to give a percentage of the bar sales. We want to pay you. They were the ones. And we want a different charity every month. And they were really the ones that kind of helped kick us into that whole charity mindset.
So we started doing it. Then again, mostly just my wife and I at the time and an acoustic guitar, and I think we started having a few musicians join us. Gloria Echevarria, who’s no longer here but lives up in New York, and she sells coffee and she’s rocking and rolling up there. But she used to play cello with us. And I think Matt Nelson, who’s our keyboard guy still to this day, kind of came in pretty early with it. But it was a small thing. And it has since grown and grown and grown, and I can’t believe where it has come to.
Kellams: There’s something about the organic nature of that.
Weatherford: Oh, without question. I mean, it’s not manipulated. It’s just, you know what? This is a good idea. Let’s pitch in. Yeah, it’s been grassroots from its inception, I think. And that’s an important piece to me.
People have always, you know, asked, you know, don’t y’all take a percentage of the sales? Right? So that’s how... you know, we keep none of this for ourselves, because we just wanted to do something good in our community. Now we’ve got sponsors, and thank God for them. Greenwood Gearhart and the Beyond Us Foundation and other wonderful companies that have supported us, and churches as well locally. But we couldn’t do it the way we do it today without them.
I mean, when it was Casey and me, yeah, it was helpful if we could pay our babysitter then. Right? But now, you know, I mean, yeah, an event costs us a few thousand dollars every time we put one on to host it. And so those sponsors help do that.
But it’s that small-dollar donation. Across NWA and across charitable organizations throughout this past year, past couple of years, we have seen corporate giving as well as government giving depleted in big, big ways, 30-plus%, and many organizations shutting down and that kind of thing. Because we’re small and grassroots the way that we are, and the funding mechanism that we are, it’s almost all on individual gifts. We have only experienced about a 5% decrease in giving this year.
Kellams: Wow.
Weatherford: And I know that’s the grassroots nature of who we are, that that’s enabled us to continue to move forward.
Kellams: All right. 10 year. Beer and Horns.
Weatherford: Yes.
Kellams: Oh, boy.
Weatherford: All right. So Beer and Horns this coming weekend, Sunday night. We’re at Bike Rack in Bentonville. And yeah, this became a theme of ours once a year, you know, a few years back, and we bring out some of the great horn players here locally and just have a lot of fun. We just become a party band for the night. And I just have a blast.
And I always pick a selfish song, something that maybe others might not know. So I think mine this year is a Nathaniel Rateliff tune. There’s plenty of good fans of Nathaniel Rateliff, but not everybody knows it necessarily is going to sing along. But that’s my selfish indulgence song this year for it.
Kellams: You’re allowed.
Weatherford: Yeah, it’s great fun. The band just gets to cut loose on a night like that. And this month is in support of Beer and Hymns. So every dollar raised is supporting us in the month of October, and it’s going to help us continue to grow into the next year.
Kellams: Yeah. Beer and Carols coming up, too.
Weatherford: Beer and Carols coming up. That’s our big one each year. Dec. 13 this year, Sunday night. And we’ll have 25, 30 musicians on stage this year. Strings, horns, guitars. We’re going to do a little Trans-Siberian Orchestra for you. There’s going to be... yeah, I just... I can’t believe, you know, again, it started with me and an acoustic guitar and Casey and just singing hymns, and now it’s this full-blown production.
And we’ve got a production team this year for it, where I’m like, oh... the Rogers Metroplex, that way, you know, a good middle ground, I feel like, for everybody. And it’s a wonderful event. They do it so well. They decorate the space to the absolute nines. And so, but, you know, it’s come as you are or come festively dressed. There will be people in suits and beautiful dresses. There will be people there in Christmas onesies.
Kellams: All right. So from this October to next October, when it’ll be an 11th anniversary, anything else special planned?
Weatherford: Yeah. So we are working on kind of a... this has been our 10 years to this point. We’ve nearly raised $700,000 for local nonprofits.
Kellams: $700,000.
Weatherford: And again, it’s all grassroots, just about. Right? Like, almost all of that is small-dollar donations. What does the next 10 years look like? And so over the next year, we’re going to host four special events. We’re going to have a special event probably at the end of this year that we’re looking forward to. We’re going to do two house shows next year, and we’re going to be putting together a big barn stomping night as well. And just all kinds of fun stuff.
Those nights will be benefiting Beer and Hymns. We’re seeking to raise $100,000 over the course of the next year to help us look at what the next 10 years will hold. Part of that is to launch our first new venue that Casey and I don’t lead, and a franchise. So yeah, so starting to kind of franchise it. We’re going to do that locally, and that’s going to be a Fayetteville location, and we’re really excited about that.
But the longer-term goal of that is to go, okay, great. How do we come alongside existing Beer and Hymns communities, which... we were the first ones to do the charity thing. So we want to come alongside those others that exist out there and say, hey, how can we help support you and help you give back locally where you are? As well as to launch new venues and new sites around the country as well that start just in that exact vein. So that’s kind of the goal over the next year, to kind of get that seed money to help us go that next step.
Kellams: We all get so many requests for help for great organizations, public radio included. Direct mail, text, go to banquets and things. But there’s something about Beer and Hymns where it’s just like, oh, yeah, while I’m having a good time, I’ll give you that money.
Weatherford: You know, Sunday night this past week, we were down at Tontitown, and we’ve got a director of operations. Thank God, Eron Huenefeld. She is a saint, if you don’t know her. And she spoke for the first time at the event, and she has captured the voice over the last two years of Beer and Hymns and what we are trying to be just absolutely incredibly, but it’s always been in writing. And so to hear her speak for the first time, it was hard to not get back up in tears. Right?
We close out all of our events with a song called “All of the Hard Days Are Gone.” Now, the chorus of that... and it’s written by Kevin McKrell. He’s an Irish singer-songwriter who now lives up in upstate New York, and he said, look, the song is yours. Use it. And we’re so grateful.
But the reality is, and what Eron was saying is, when we sing that, we know good and well all of the hard days are not gone. The world that we look around and see, we experience stressors all around us every single day. And we wouldn’t be raising money for these nonprofits if there wasn’t a need for them. Right?
I have the privilege of getting together and drinking beer and singing songs. I don’t do the hard work. These other organizations that we’re working with, like November, our charity is the Northwest Arkansas Center for Sexual Assault. These organizations are out there truly doing the hard, gritty, necessary, needed work.
So Eron was talking about it, and she goes, you know, I struggle to sing this song every month. But then again, it is why we gather. We are rehearsing hope so that when we come to those times ourselves, when we find ourselves in those positions of challenge and difficulty, we know what to do. We come together, we come together, and we give back to our community. And we love each other in that way. And I think we need more and more and more of that in our world.
And it’s the thing that I think I’m most proud of, is that people come together from different places in our community, from different political points of view, from, you know, different beliefs, whatever that might be. And they say, you know, this is just fun.
Ken Weatherford is co-founder, with his wife Casey, of the Northwest Arkansas version of Beer and Hymns. A 10th anniversary celebration called Beer and Horns is set for Sunday at Bike Rack Brewing in Bentonville, and then Dec. 13, Beer and Carols.
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