From 2009: Brothers bring Buxter Hoot’n back home to their native Mishawaka

Editor's note: This story originally appeared in print June 14, 2009. The Tribune is republishing it, with additional photos, as background to the DeWald brothers' return to the Midway Tavern in Mishawaka.

Type “Buxter Hoot’n” into Google Maps, and you’ll get about 30 hits, although you can’t get there from here, or anywhere.

“Originally, it comes from our grandfather,” Jimmy Dewald says by telephone from his home in San Francisco, referring to his and brother Vince’s paternal grandfather, Jim Dewald. “Real or imagined, Buxter Hoot’n is the name of a place. When we were kids and in his car and we asked where we were going, he’d say, ‘Buxter Hoot’n.’ When you’re kids, you begin to create this place in your head, and it became a real place.”

Now, Buxter Hoot’n isn’t a where, but a what: the band Mishawaka natives Jimmy and Vince Dewald founded in San Francisco with violinist and guitarist Ben Andrews and drummer Jeremy Shanok, later adding singing Melissa Merrill.

Instead of towns named Buxter Hoot’n, those 30 hits on Google Maps all refer to places where the band is scheduled to play, including Mishawaka’s Midway Tavern on Thursday.

“Growing up where we did, the blues is a huge element in our music, and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to play Martha’s,” Vince Dewald says by telephone, also from the home the band shares in San Francisco. “I really respect what (owner Albertina Wassenhove is) doing there, keeping the blues alive. It was a no-brainer about where we would play when we came back.”

The blues play a role in the band’s music, but it also has stronger ties to country, folk and rock ’n’ roll, all bound by the improvisational ethos of jazz, the Dewald brothers’ initial inspiration in forming Buxter Hoot’n.

“We had been into jazz music, and when we first moved to the Bay Area, we were involved in jazz, but both of us had always been influenced by songwriting, beyond the improvisational,” Vince Dewald says. “(Bob) Dylan and Neil Young and John Cougar Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen were what we heard growing up in Indiana. … There came a point where we wanted to incorporate the jazz that had been important to us and the songs that were important to us.”

In San Francisco, Vince Dewald began to add lyrics to the instrumental songs he’d been writing, and then he and Jimmy added Andrews and Shanok. Within six months, the then- quartet recorded its first CD, “Here in America.”

“Our first album is definitely very rootsy,” Vince Dewald says. “Roots Americana is what we were doing, with some blues tangled in it. The next album is not so rootsy, but the rootsy stuff is still there. The presence of the traditional stuff is evolving to a different form.”

“It’s much more electric-driven now,” Jimmy Dewald says by telephone from the band’s home. “It’s still very rootsy. It hasn’t gone into prog rock. It’s more psychedelic. It’s what we’ve always wanted.”

Indeed, on the band’s upcoming second album, the music ranges from the acoustic Spanish-modal narrative of “The Kitchen” to the growling blues-rock of “Captain Long Gone,” from the fiddle-driven, old-timey country of “Martial Law” to the lyrical, psychedelic jamming of the live track “Motion.”

Vince Dewald writes and sings the majority of the band’s songs, while Merrill writes some of the others, singing lead on hers and harmony on Vince Dewald’s.

“A lot of my inspiration comes from frustration, from the limits of people in the society we live in,” he says. “Our first album, ‘Here in America,’ is kind of based on living in a society and in a world where we often avoid and are unaware of the deeper tendency of the soul. … Basically, the idea of living in a world where we know something deeper is going on, but the world around us gears us toward this surface-level state where we go about lives that are somewhat manufactured for us rather than following our free state.”

Both graduates of Marian High School, Jimmy Dewald, 30, graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in accounting in 2000, while Vince Dewald, 26, studied jazz guitar with Bill Boris at Columbia College in Chicago for two years.

Jimmy Dewald began playing bass while at Notre Dame at about the same time Vince Dewald began playing guitar while at Marian. They soon formed the band Zu-Zu’s Petals and played covers of such artists as The Grateful Dead, Neil Young and the Beastie Boys.

“Our goal had always been to reunite and get a band together after we had both immersed ourselves in study and geared our craft,” Vince Dewald says. “He had an opportunity to go to San Francisco, and I had to go with him.”

That was in 2004, and Vince Dewald eventually finished his degree at San Francisco State University.

Like a lot of young people before them, the Dewald brothers were drawn to San Francisco by the city’s cultural heritage as the home of the beat movement in the 1950s and the hippie movement in the 1960s.

“There are a lot of artists here with good intentions, but in general, it’s so competitive,” Vince Dewald says. “In general, it’s a thriving music scene, but the communal element we’ve found has been in our band.”

“To have a group of people who believe in something means something,” Jimmy Dewald says, “and that’s what we’ve got going.”

Living together as a band, the brothers say, has given Buxter Hoot’n much of that communal element.

“We play a lot of music together, we pass around a lot of ideas,” Vince Dewald says. “That whole familial, deep connection that’s essential to a band’s performance is rooted in living together. You have to learn a lot about the people you’re with.”

Obviously, Vince and Jimmy Dewald bring to the band almost a lifetime of living together and knowing each other.

“I think it’s always been a positive thing,” Jimmy Dewald says, “because it gives us the knowledge that there is something sustainable here.”

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Vince and Jimmy DeWald perform with Buxter Hoot'n in Mishawaka