Welcome to The Row Bucker's website

We are a bluegrass band based in Lester Prairie, Minnesota. Band members are: Mick Bates (guitar, vocals), Greg Landkamer (guitar, mandolin, vocals), Nancy Bates (dulcimer, vocals),  and Mary McKennan (banjo, fiddle, viola, vocals).

Mick Bate's story of the Row Buckers:

Why We Call Ourselves The Row Buckers

I was twelve years old and sitting at a painted oak kitchen table. I was sitting on the side of the table where my grandfather sat, the side with all the burns on it from where my grandfather’s cigarettes having burned down in an ashtray had flipped out onto the table. I was lost in a trance as my index finger negotiated the shallow divots of burned away wood. My grandma was at the sink washing dishes while sipping brandy from a coffee cup when the neighbor drove up.  Suddenly, my grandma turned to me and said, “Get my Row Buckers!”

“Your what?” I asked

“My teeth!” she exclaimed. “They’re in the glass by my bed.”

“Teeth are in rows.” I thought to myself as I retrieved her teeth, but where does the “Buckers” part come from. My grandma poured out coffee and chatted with her neighbor as I sat pondering this “Buckers” problem. “Are dentures called Row Buckers because they buck rows of regular teeth?” I wondered, but nothing I came up with really made any sense. Finally, when the neighbors left, I asked my grandma. “Why do you call your dentures Row Buckers?”

“Because my first set of dentures came from the Sears, Roebuck and Company.” She said.

Years later when we were trying to come up with a name for our band I was thinking that our name should describe, to some extent, our music and especially our attitude toward music. “ What What sets us apart -- what do we do that almost no one else does – what is it that makes us different from every one else?” I began to make a list.

1. We play acoustic instruments – not electric instruments, and we don’t press buttons to play preprogrammed sequences of digital music.  
2. We play a lot of traditional music – music that many people would call “old-fashioned” or “old-timey”
3. We are all addicted to music in the sense that we need a daily fix and we can’t stop playing.
4. But the thing that sets us apart more than anything else is that we express ourselves through our music, not with our music. In this day and age there are plenty of people who play music as a means of expression, but for us, music is part of who we are not a medium apart. It is the breath with which we sing, it is the hand with which we paint, and it is the heart with which we feel. 

The name “Row Buckers” seemed perfect in that its origin comes from an earlier age and yet is a statement of what we are doing in regard to modern musical trends.