Kevin Bronson on June 29th, 2010

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So as a means of introducing you to Judson & Mary – whom you’ve probably met, if you’ve been to a show in Silver Lake or Echo Park recently – I thought I’d share the postscript from the June 15 Buzz Bands LA show at Spaceland.

I’d initially planned to have a “special guest” play the midnight set, but in the week leading up to the show, the guest canceled and I struggled to find a replacement. A couple of days before the show, I was bemoaning that fact to a friend outside of Spaceland when Judson McKinney boldly and earnestly looked at me said, “Kevin, we’ll play that set for you.”

• ||| Download: Judson & Mary, “In the Hands of the Sun” and Judson McKinney (from his solo album “Tangled Wire”), “Say Goodbye”

What I knew about Judson McKinney and his musical project with his wife, Judson & Mary, was this: They’d pounded the pavement outside L.A. clubs handing out homemade three-song sampler CDs – to date, about 1,000 of them – as a way of getting noticed. I had no idea if it was working, but they were a sweet young couple, and the folk music on the sampler was pretty good too.

I wasn’t sure a folk duo was a good fit on a bill with three rock bands, but McKinney vowed to bring a full band and promised to “rock it,” so the morning of the show I e-mailed him that the slot was his.

With a band that included bassist Garrick Hogg, drummer Andrew Lessman and guitarist/fiddler Michael Starr, Judson & Mary rocked it indeed. Maybe only 25 or 30 people stayed for the late set, but all were won over by the quintet’s reconstructed Southern fables. The experience was deserving of a backstory, so here it is:

McKinney moved to L.A. in 2008 from Clemson, S.C., (where he grew up and attended college, majoring in philosophy) landing in the Valley at first before discovering Echo Park in 2009. He recorded a solo album in the fall of ’09, but, he says, “It was hard to get shows, and I was miserable. I was living in my car by the end of the year.”

After a particularly bad gig at Universal Bar & Grill, “I just got in the car and drove cross-country back to Clemson.” There, he reconnected with Mary, also a Clemson native, whom he had met at a poetry jam six years earlier. They’d dated and played music together, but Mary, a violinist/singer, was still living at home and studying to be a medical technician. They played a couple of shows, but McKinney was itching for the world outside his hometown.

“We were talking one night and I told Mary, ‘I really want to go back to L.A. and I want you to come with,'” he says. “Because once you’ve been to L.A., there’s no reason to go anywhere else. … Mary asked, ‘Would we be living together?’ And I said, ‘Oh, we could get married,’ which was interesting because her family did not like me for [leaving her behind] the first time.”

So after one inspiring gig, McKinney told his future bride: “Let’s go to your folks’ house and tell them we’re getting married. Which made for an interesting conversation around the dinner table – ‘We’re gonna get married, your daughter’s gonna quit school, we’re gonna move to California, and by the way, can we have the Toyota Siena?'”

“A lot of alternate plans were offered,” McKinney says.

So they continued working on an EP in a trailer outside Liberty, S.C., but they couldn’t find anybody to marry them. “Everybody wanted to do months of counseling first,” McKinney says, “but then our drummer said, ‘Hey, I’m a pastor, I’ll marry you.'”

They performed at their own ceremony, on the Clemson campus, and a couple weeks later, in the early spring, Judson & Mary were on the road.

A thousand sampler CDs, one finished EP and a lot of time on the sidewalk later, “We’re just here and letting the chips fall,” McKinney says. “Mary had never been to California before, and she loves it so much more than I did. … But it’s been encouraging.”

||| Live: Judson & Mary perform tonight at El Cid.

Photos by Laurie Scavo