Happy accidents can lead to lasting magic.<\/p>\n
That’s what happened in the summer of 2012, when a local venue called The Arts Block in Greenfield, Massachusetts staged an Americana music festival called The Whiskey Treaty.<\/p>\n
Four local bands headlined: Greg Smith and The Broken English, Bright Lines, Tory Hanna and the Pondsiders, and Billy Keane and the Misdemeanor Outlaws. But the magic happened when Smith, Hanna, and Keane joined forces on stage, along with fellow local artists Chris Merenda and David Tanklefsky.<\/p>\n
Five solo musicians, each with their own bands or careers. They never intended to form a new band together, but they were so caught up by their collaborative chemistry that they knew they couldn’t leave it a one-night stand.<\/p>\n
So they didn’t.<\/p>\n
Instead, they took the Whiskey Treaty Festival on the road across Massachusetts on a four-night mini-tour they called The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow. And that might have been it for the quintet, had a filmmaker friend of Hanna named Tim Bradley not captured the experience in a documentary film called The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow <\/em>that went on to captivate audiences and win national film festival awards in 2015.<\/p>\n