Anvil Blasters to play at The Open Door

The Anvil Blasters will bring their Americana, Western-folk-based music to The Open Door on Monday, January 11, from 7 to 9 p.m.

The songs of The Anvil Blasters are peopled with border renegades and desert dreamers, poets, pirates and ghosts of the old, weird America. It's a rollicking recipe of gunpowder, twang and tequila that has earned The Anvil Blasters a loyal following across Central Oregon.

The Anvil Blasters are Jim Cornelius (vocals, guitar), Mike Biggers (vocals, guitar, mandolin), Lynn Woodward (vocals, mandolin, fiddle) and Jeff Wester (banjo, vocals).

Wester named the band for an old-time holiday celebration known as "blasting the anvil" (also "blowing" or "shooting" the anvil). Celebrants would stack a pair of anvils on top of each other, the bottom one upside down so that cavity at the bottom of each anvil met. The resulting opening was packed with black powder and lit off to blast the top anvil into the air.

"No anvils will be blown at The Open Door," said Cornelius. "Too much glass. But we will have a blast."