Tris Munsick and company bringing homegrown country to county fair

Get ready for live, authentic country music when Tris Munsick and The Innocents take the stage at the Washakie County Fair on Thursday, July 25 for a set listed from 9 p.m. until midnight. Entry is free.

Munsick, a lifelong country musician who grew up in rural Sheridan County is excited to bring his band to play in Worland this summer. "The last four or five years we've been playing out of the state more and more, but there's nothing like playing to Wyoming folks; they're our kind of people," said Munsick.

He described his band, saying, "We play western country music. We've been on the road full time for a handful of years - I think we're pushing 10 years now. The line-up has changed over the years, you know, people's lives change and it's tough to get five guys going the same direction at the same speed. We've been lucky to have a lot of people be apart of our band family over the years."

Currently, the band's roster includes: Dave Barker of Sheridan playing drums, Shawn Day of Sheridan playing bass, Daniel Ball of Guernsey playing lead guitar, Tom Broderick of Arvada, Colorado, playing pedal steel guitar, and Munsick playing guitar and vocals.

Try not to be surprised when you see Munsick and his guitar, though; something people may not know about him is that he's left-handed. He said, "People are always confused about why my guitar is pointing the wrong way, and they tell me it looks weird. Heck, even I think that when I see it."

Munsick grew up with his younger brothers Sam and Ian on a ranch south of Sheridan, where the three spent their early childhood working on the ranch and playing music with their rancher/songwriter father, Dave Munsick, while their mother Trudy worked as a nurse in town.

The family moved closer to town for the boys to attend school at Tongue River in Dayton when Tris was in middle school. There, he said, "They bought a little place outside of town, and we ran a few cows and put up some hay."

"It was a great way to grow up. My dad being a songwriter and musician himself, my younger brothers and I grew up with music in the household since we were just little kids. We really had the best of both worlds with both ranching and music in our DNA, you know? All of our music really reflects that in our own ways," said Munsick.

He added, "As I've gotten out and travelled the world, living in different places, I've really come to realize just how special that way of life really is. I feel like there's not a lot of folks who have had the opportunity to grow up that way."

Munsick also spoke about the early days playing music with his brothers and his dad in their band The Munsick Boys. He said, "That started as us just playing around the campfire or our living room; we didn't have any real plans to do anything with it back then. We were aware of the possibility of playing for audiences because our dad had a band and that's what he did at that time. We started just out of the love of playing music together, but over time we started booking out a handful of shows."

He said that the show that really solidified his music career for him was the first time his family played a Christmas concert at the WYO Theatre in Sheridan. He said, "It turned into an annual tradition, and we did it for 15 years. It's crazy to think about, because we started that when we were kids, and were doing it when we were adults, out of the house and living in different places. The show evolved as our music evolved and we got better."

"With the Munsick Boys, it just worked; people really resonated with the family aspect of it, and they resonated with the music because it just clicked for them. Playing with my brothers and my dad, it was like we had this common unspoken language between us where we're in the zone right away. As I've gotten to experience playing with other musicians, it takes work to find that zone," said Munsick.

After he graduated from high school, Munsick left to pursue a music career in Texas where he assembled the first iteration of his band.

Munsick said, "My brother Sam is still making and playing music, but he's also running a ranch and raising a family on the Powder River. He doesn't make it into town as much as the rest of us but he's still playing."

Of his brother Ian, he said, "You're probably familiar with my youngest brother. He moved to Nashville to go to college about 10 years ago and he hasn't left since, and he's tearing it up in the country music world these days."

Munsick said, "Everybody branched off into their own careers, but we're all rooted just the same. Even now we'll get together and play once in a while when we have the opportunity. That's always the most fun."

Aside from the musical influences of his family, Munsick said that he and his brothers grew up listening to classic country. "We'd be listening to Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, Ray Price; we really liked the old stuff."

He continued, "Really though, we were listening to anything and everything from Mozart and Beethoven to Black Sabbath and Megadeth. Any music we wanted to listen to our parents supported. I'm really grateful for that. To me personally, Ian Tyson was always a huge influence as a songwriter. He was really one of the pioneers in capturing real ranch life and western lifestyle, and not the silver screen, glossy stuff. He captured the reality of that way of life, and that has always really resonated with me as a songwriter."

Munsick is grateful for the experiences he's had through music, having played everything from Cheyenne Frontier Days and Red Rocks Ampitheatre to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, even a music festival in France a couple years ago. "Music has been really good to us, and taken us a lot of places, and allowed us to meet some amazing people. We love seeing different parts of the country and meeting new people and we've gotten to do a lot of that through music which has been awesome," he said.

"Still, there's nothing quite like going to some packed, honky-tonk bar in a little town and having the whole community show up and throw down with you; with the lights dimmed and the crowd right in front of you, the energy is about as high as it can be."

Munsick is hoping his band can find that energy at the Washakie County Fairgrounds when they play on July 25.

He said, "We have a couple new singles out, we're in the process of dropping a brand new record that we are super excited about. So, we've got some new songs that we've been incorporating into the show this summer, and folks have been real receptive to them so far; it's kind of the dream of a musician to write your own songs, go record them, then show up in some town and play them live with the crowd singing them right back at you ... I'm looking forward to seeing some of our friends over there and showing those guys our new tunes!"