Artist Q&A: The Roe Family Singers Celebrate 20 Years at the 331 Club
We talked to the Minnesota string band about their long-running residency at the storied Northeast Minneapolis club.
The Roe Family Singers.
It’s been a bittersweet few weeks in the Twin Cities as several music and cultural institutions mark the end of their respective eras: Palmer’s Bar, Hymie’s Records, Annie’s Parlour, Bar Lurcat, Disgraceland (maybe? maybe not?). All good things must come to an end, of course. But when faced with so many losses all at once, it makes other longstanding good things all the more precious.
Like the nearly-every-Monday residency that The Roe Family Singers, the feisty social-justice-minded punk-influenced old-time string band, has held down at the even more venerable 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis for nearly two decades. In fact, they’ll hit 20 years this Monday, July 28th, 2025. They’ll celebrate with what got them to this point: by taking the stage at 8 p.m. for a rip-roaring show.
An exuberant fan once proclaimed them “the Ramones of string bands,” only they play about four times as many instruments as those amateurs did: Their press release mentions banjos, fiddle, mandolin, guitar, washboard, accordion, saw, drums and bass; I know I’ve also seen autoharp, clogging, kazoo and maybe a jug at various times over the years.
The band, headed up by married duo Kim and Quillan Roe, describe themselves as “somewhere between hillbilly and heavy metal,” playing “everything from Hank Williams to the Misfits, with plenty of our own originals.” Those originals include some pretty sharp and passionate commentary about the injustices and struggles of our world, all the while making sure you never have an excuse not to dance.
In honor of this auspicious milestone, we asked Quillan a few questions about their triumphant 20-year (so far) run.
Kim and Quillan Roe of The Roe Family Singers
How did your Monday night residency start, and what were your goals or intentions? (I guess what I'm asking is, did you think you'd keep it going for 20 years??)
Kim and I had been playing for two years (2003-2005) before we started at the 331. My friend Rob Rule—who had been the head sound-engineer at the Turf Club throughout the 1990s when I was playing there with Accident Clearinghouse—invited us to be a part of a show there. All I knew about the 331 was that it had a long history of being a biker bar and a great place to get meth, so I turned him down. But Rob insisted it wasn’t like that anymore: the new owners, Jon & Jarret Oulman, were changing the 331 into a place everyone could go.
So we played the gig, and we met Jarret and really hit it off. Kim suggested we should ask if we could have a weekly residency there. I said if SHE set it up, I’d go along with it; I was still pretty burned out on booking from Accident Clearinghouse and didn’t want to get back into it. She asked if we could have a Monday residency. It was low risk for both the club and for us, so Jarret said yes, and we started the next week!
Kim’s goal in setting this up was to have a good time playing music. She was new to being in a band, and wanted more stage time to hone her craft and get comfortable. My goal was more business-minded: I’d spent pretty much every Wednesday night from 1995 to 1998 seeing Trailer Trash play at Lee’s Liquor Lounge, and I’d seen how it honed their skills as a band and helped them grow a large following and established them as a major player in the music scene. I hoped a residency would do that for us, too.
I don’t think either Kim or I had any thoughts about how long we would do the residency for. I know we never thought we’d make it to 20 years! What I can say is that I have OCD, and I tend to obsess about things I love, and I love playing music, and I love playing at the 331, so maybe it was more foreseeable than not.
How have the Roe Family Singers grown and evolved over those decades?
When we started the residency, the Roe Family Singers was truly that: a married couple singing together. It became clear pretty quickly that we didn’t have enough material in our repertoire to play a weekly 90 minute set and keep it engaging to an audience. While we love learning new songs and writing material, it takes time, and this was one of those problems that couldn’t wait long for a solution, or we would have to quit the residency. So I started inviting other musicians to sit in with us on Monday nights, and they could play their music and we would back them up, and they could back us up on our stuff.
Adam Wirtzfeld, our saw player and the longest serving non-Roe in the band, joined us in the late summer of 2005. We knew each other through a local cartooning group called the International Cartoonist Conspiracy. Adam didn’t know that I was a musician, so when it came up at one of the meetings, he jokingly asked if we needed a musical saw. I didn’t know he meant himself, so I said yes! And Adam has been with us ever-since.
Later that Fall I ran into Dan Gaarder, singer and guitar player from Trailer Trash, at the St Paul Art Crawl, where I was showing my cartoon art. I invited Dan to join us; that was a Friday night, and the next Monday he was on stage with us. Over the next year or two, other members joined the band under similar circumstances: they were either friends of ours or friends of our other band members.
I don’t think, in those early years, we really had a thought about what the band was, it was just this collective of people that got together to play music from the vast umbrella of Americana. But over the years, my focus, as the artistic director of the band, became more about polishing the sound and becoming a “real” band.
Once that goal solidified in my head, we started using the Monday nights as an unofficial rehearsal time, and as a place to test out new material, to see how it landed with audiences, and if it warranted a place in the larger playlist of the Roe Family Singers.
As some of the original members of the band started retiring or otherwise leaving the band, we started bringing on new members, and that necessarily changed the sound of the band. Kim and I still lead and guide the course of the band, but the cool thing about music is that it is never solid, it is always growing and changing and adapting, and our sound has done that over the years as players have come and gone.
What's changed about the 331 or your experience there?
I always liked the idea of a Big Band. The Roe Family Singers, at its biggest, was 12 members. Then for a long time we hovered around 7 or 8. With the latest changes in personnel we’re at 10 members that are consistently at our 331 shows, and make most of our other shows, too.
While the band has grown in size, the stage at the 331 hasn’t, so one of the biggest changes is that we went from sitting in chairs in a horseshoe shape, to standing up, so we could fit everyone on the stage. It’s a tight fit, and it takes everyone consciously deciding to give their fellow bandmates the tiny bit of space they need to play.
We’ve had a slew of sound-engineers over the years, but have been lucky in that they’ve all been great at their job, and that a few of them stayed on for quite awhile. Kevin Scott was with us for a long time, before he moved out West, and Phil Dumka after him was our longest-serving engineer. For the last two years or so we’ve had Claire Loveall as our main engineer, and they are super awesome to work with.
We’ve also had a bunch of great bartenders and bar-backs behind the bar. Our longest serving bartender is Dick Donovan, who has been with us pretty much the entire time we’ve been there. Austin Brown was with us for over a decade, and Matt Dahl has been with us for at least five years now.
But even with all the change in personnel, both on stage and off, what we’ve loved about the 331 is that it has only gotten better as a venue and a place to play music. Crowds come and go as people grow older, and fads and trends in music change all the time; that’s inevitable. But the 331 has always had a culture of inclusion and welcoming, and they’ve always been a place that welcomes new bands and gives them a chance. Even though we don’t live in Northeast, it’s important to be a part of a community, and the 331 has consistently been a place for community-building. In other words, that HASN’T changed, and we love that.
What's a highlight or fond memory that sticks out to you about the Monday shows?
There was a period of about 3 years where our Monday nights were packed to the gills every single week, and the crowds were super-engaged with the band. That is absolutely my favorite way to play music: to a packed house that is throwing all their love at the stage, so that the band can absorb it and funnel it into the music and give it back to the audience, and it goes around in a circle like that.
We haven’t been consistently that busy in a while, but our Mondays continue to draw good crowds—and some of them are packed houses—and that still feels awesome.
When we had fewer people in the band we would have guest musicians sit in with us from various bands. That was really cool. We’ve got to play with some of the best of the best at the 331, and it’s all been unrehearsed and improvised, which is absolutely magical, and keeps things fresh, both for us and for the audience.
I'm sure even at a magical place like the 331 there've been some bad times too during that many years. What's one of your worst experiences (bonus points if it's something you can look back on and laugh at now)?
Before the upper level of the 331 building was converted into Jon Oulman’s salon, it was a rooming house, with folks living upstairs, and there was a communal bathroom up there that they all shared. You wouldn’t think this would have any impact on us, but there was a problem with the plumbing in the building: any time someone flushed the toilet upstairs, it created a vacuum in the sewage line that sucked sewer gas up INTO the pipes of the building, and that, for some unknown reason, then vented directly onto the stage. So on any given Monday we’d be playing a song, and out of nowhere the stage would be flooded with the smell of the worst, thickest, most lingering fart you can imagine. We’d all glare at each other accusingly, thinking, “How could you do that to the rest of us?” but we never knew who to blame. I don’t remember how we figured out that it was sewer gas, not someone’s swamp-ass, flooding the stage, but, once we did, it lowered tensions in the band. It was still super gross, but at least we knew we didn’t have a bandmate to blame for it.
20th Anniversary Show at the 331 Club
(Thankfully Sewer-Gas-Free!)
Monday’s 20th-anniversary celebration opens with beloved Twin Cities country music veteran Pop Wagner opening at 6 p.m. As is always the case at the 331, there’s no cover.
The show also coincides with something the Roe Family Singers call “Mustache Monday” means you show up with a mustache. The rules are pretty loose, according to the band: “If you can’t grow one, doesn’t mean you can’t own one: Draw it, tattoo it, whatever you fancy.” Their only caveat: “That said, no ‘Hitler mustaches’ are welcome at our shows, anytime, anywhere. But if you’re that kind of people, you probably know better than to come to a Roe show on a Monday night.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Adventures in Americana co-founder Carol Roth is a novelist who publishes both under her name and the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley in a range of genres, from horror to thriller to YA. She loves to play guitar and sing and occasionally write songs. Her wide-ranging passions also include vegan cooking, personal finance, watching queer romance TV/movies and learning to speak Thai. By day she’s a marketing writer/brand strategist.
