The American dream was a song long before it was anything you could hold. It lived in parlor tunes and field hollers, in protest verses and Sunday hymns, in the things the country sang to itself to keep believing. Ghosts of the American Dream moves through that inheritance like a slow walk through rooms no one lives in anymore. A Stephen Foster lament about hard times sits beside Woody Guthrie's argument over who the land really belongs to; Sister Rosetta Tharpe's vow to study war no more leans against the breadline weariness of "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" These are not covers so much as visitations.

The band is built for this kind of conjuring. Jay Sanders, equally at home in the bass chair of Acoustic Syndicate and in the improvised guitar music he plays most weeks in this room, leads here on guitar; Matt Smith lets the pedal steel keen and glow above the songs; Will Boyd's reeds give the music a voice that can pray or protest; Zack Page holds the low end while Evan Martin keeps a pulse that knows when to mourn and when to march. They can make Paul Simon's exhausted hymn and Oscar Peterson's dream of freedom feel like they were always meant to share a single night. Nothing here is reverent for its own sake. The point is to find what is still breathing inside the old promises.

This is the kind of program Little Jumbo's free weekly series exists to hold: serious, strange, and a little haunted, an American songbook turned over by people who love it enough to be honest about it. These are tunes that linger after the last chord has gone, drifting up toward the creature in the corner, who has kept company with American ghosts far longer than any of us.

Featuring: Jay Sanders - Guitar and Effects, Zack Page - Acoustic & Electric Bass, Evan Martin - Drums, Will Boyd - Sax, Flute, Clarinet, EWI, Matt Smith - Pedal Steel, Guitar