Finishing up his 2025 tours across the United States and Europe, Jeffrey Foucault (“invokes the silent watches of the night in pre-electronic American consciousness” — New York Times) returns to the Trempealeau Hotel this December (12/3) for an intimate split-bill with legendary Iowa songwriter Dave Moore.
In two decades on the road, Foucault — who grew up in Whitewater, WI — has become one of the most distinctive voices in American music, refining a sound instantly recognizable for its simplicity and emotional power. With a string of critically acclaimed studio albums – “Stark, literate songs that are as wide open as the landscape of his native Midwest” (The New Yorker), “Beat-up troubadour folk whittled to dolorous perfection” (Uncut), “Songwriting Brilliance,” (Irish Times) – he’s built a brick-and-mortar international touring career and a devoted following that includes hard-to-please luminaries like Van Dyke Parks, Greil Marcus, and Don Henley (“Jeffrey Foucault clocks American culture about as good as I’ve heard anyone clock it”).
Dave Moore represents a uniquely rich seam in the tapestry of roots music coming out of Iowa in the twentieth century. A celebrated rack-harp and button accordion player, as a youngster Dave absorbed the blues recordings of Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Walter, learned to play country-blues guitar, and then disappeared on a series of extended pilgrimages to Texas and south of the border to study Tejano and Conjunto accordion with legends Fred Zimmerle, and Santiago Jimenez Sr. (father of Flaco and Santiago).
Eventually Dave Moore brought what he’d learned back north, mixing it with country and blues, folk and Gospel, Ragtime and Tin Pan Alley, and releasing three seminal albums on Red House Records, in addition to playing regularly with Greg Brown, and influencing the generation of Midwestern songwriters that includes Foucault, Pieta Brown, Erik Koskinen, The Pines, and many others. ‘Dave is pure magic’.-Jeffrey Foucault