LIVE at Ted’s w/ Hank, Pattie & The Current

Name: LIVE at Ted’s w/ Hank, Pattie & The Current
Start: 2026-03-27T20:00:00-04:00
Location: 2 Castle Street Wilmington, NC 28401-5025

Schedule

Fri, 27 Mar, 2026 at 08:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

2 Castle Street Wilmington, NC 28401-5025 | Wilmington, NC

Doors open at 7pm, show 8-10pm. Tickets are $20 + fees.
Hard-hitting bluegrass pickers who moonlight as symphonic classical musicians, Hank, Pattie, and the Current have forged their unique sound by approaching their string band much as they would a string quartet. The four-piece group based in Raleigh, North Carolina is led by banjo player Hank Smith and fiddle player and vocalist Pattie Kinlaw.
Kinlaw grew up in Williamson, NC, the daughter of a church organist. She began studying classical violin as a kid, but soon discovered and became enamored with the fiddle music of her native rural region. She never felt she had to choose between the two genres, and got a degree in violin performance before moving to Nashville where she worked with the legendary Mark O'Connor, and then Asheville, where she studied with bluegrass master Bobby Hicks. When Kinlaw moved back to the Raleigh area, she soon met kindred musical spirit Smith, and the two began playing together regularly.
Smith grew up in South Carolina, and was a relatively latecomer to music, picking up the banjo at age sixteen. However, once he started playing, he was a man on a singular mission, studying the music of Earl Scruggs and Bela Fleck with extreme tenacity. “I was the kind of kid who would write research papers that were not assigned”, he laughs. “So I kind of did my own independent study in banjo music”.
After completing an undergraduate and then a master’s degree in Middle Eastern History, Smith gave up the academic path to join the burgeoning jamgrass band Barefoot Manner, which brought him to the Raleigh area. However, in 2017, academia came calling again and he became a member of the music faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he now teaches banjo, bluegrass guitar, mandolin and bluegrass ensemble classes.
As Kinlaw and Smith’s various musical projects began slowing down in 2015, the two friends realized that it might be time to start a project of their own. “We were playing in a band, both primarily as instrumentalists, and that band kind of imploded,” explains Kinlaw. “And as the other band members all went back to their regular day jobs, we both looked at each other like, ‘well we are full-time musicians, what are we supposed to do?’” Smith was determined that the two of them should create their own project. “We need to make a band”, he said, “We need to choose our players, play the music we want to play without compromising”
Thus, Hank, Pattie, and the Current was born. The present iteration of the band includes bass player Stevie Martinez, who also performs with the Long Bay Symphony, and interim guitarist Cassidy Beentjes, educated at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester UK. The group embraces their arguable over-education by bringing an academic perspective to Bluegrass. “In the past, we’ve created bluegrass arrangements and then added a string quartet to them, but with this album, we took a new approach to genre-bending, in which we simply treated the bluegrass band as a string quartet”, explains Smith. “The tone of this album reads much more modern than our past work, and my favorite thing about it is that all the band members really had a heavy hand in creating it”, adds Kinlaw.
Website: https://www.hankandpattie.com/

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