When Roger McGuinn booked a solo night at OWA Theater in Foley in early 2025, it said a lot about the kind of room the venue is. McGuinn founded the Byrds, the band that helped create folk-rock in the 1960s, and he has spent most of the past several decades playing solo. At this point in his career he is choosy about where he plays, and the 437-seat Foley theater met his standard. An Evening with Roger McGuinn: Songs and Stories took place on Friday, Feb. 28, 2025, at 7:30 p.m., with tickets from $59.99 to $74.99 plus fees.
McGuinn was 82 at the time. He started playing professionally in the early 1960s and has played nearly every kind of venue there is. Over the years he learned that an indoor theater is a better experience for both him and his audience.
“There were times in the past when I’d play anything that would come up, like a club or a casino or a theater or an outdoor festival,” he said before the show, “but we’ve narrowed it down to theaters because that’s my favorite.”
Why a Theater Beats a Festival Field
McGuinn’s reason is focus. Other kinds of shows come with too many distractions to feel right musically. Festivals, he said, can be great fun for fans as long as it doesn’t rain, but they are less rewarding for the people on stage.
“They’re often on a grassy field, and it’s like a picnic,” he said. “And it’s not really about the music, but it’s more about the outdoor experience for people. They bring a blanket, the dog, and a picnic basket.”
In a theater, people sit close together and pay attention to what is happening on stage. McGuinn explained the difference with a firecracker.
“It’s a very intensified audience as opposed to being spread out on a lawn or something,” he said. “The comparison I make is, if you take a firecracker and unravel it and dump out the gunpowder, and you light it, it goes fizzle, right? If you keep it wrapped up in the paper, it goes bang.”
That view lines up closely with how OWA Theater presents itself: a seated listening room where fans come to hear the music and the stories behind it.
From Chicago Folk Clubs to “Mr. Tambourine Man”
McGuinn was born in Chicago in 1942. He took up guitar and banjo in the late 1950s and studied at the city’s Old Town School of Folk Music, which has trained generations of folk musicians. He worked as a backing musician for the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Limeliters and Judy Collins, then went out on his own in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village in New York during the folk revival.
The Beatles changed his direction, as they did for so many musicians. McGuinn started adding a rock ‘n’ roll backbeat to the folk songs he’d been playing and took that sound to California. By 1965 the Byrds had two No. 1 hits: Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” Pete Seeger’s setting of verses from Ecclesiastes. Together, those records did a great deal to create folk-rock.
The Byrds’ other well-known songs include:
- “All I Really Want to Do”
- “Eight Miles High”
- “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”
- “My Back Pages”
- “Chestnut Mare”
The band was known for its lush vocal harmonies and for McGuinn’s ringing electric 12-string guitar, a sound that influenced many later guitar bands. The Byrds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.
Life on the Road in a Camper Van
These days McGuinn keeps things simple. Many musicians of his generation still tour with a full band and crew. McGuinn travels in a Ford Transit conversion van with Camilla, his wife since 1978. He said she does most of the driving. They usually play a couple of shows a week, which rests his voice between nights and leaves time for slow, scenic drives.
He got the idea from folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott while both were on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975 and 1976.
“He said, ‘You know, Rog, the most fun I ever had was when I threw the guitar in the back of a Land Rover and me and Polly went on the road, and we just had a ball.’ I thought that sounded really good.”
What a Songs and Stories Show Looks Like
McGuinn travels with four instruments and plays alone. His shows mix music with memories. He tells stories about his career and his best-known songs and shows the audience some of the guitar sounds and techniques behind the Byrds’ records. He may also play folk songs from his early days in Chicago and New York, before he moved west and helped shape the California sound of the mid-1960s.
That fits a long-running interest of his. Since the mid-1990s, McGuinn has recorded traditional folk songs and shared them online through his Folk Den project, to help keep older songs in circulation.
A Familiar Face on the Gulf Coast
McGuinn had played the area several times before the Foley show, including at the Fairhope Civic Center in 1997 and at Mobile’s Saenger Theatre in 2011. Foley was a new stop for him and Camilla. With no rush to reach the next date, they planned to look around before driving on to Clearwater, Florida, and then north to shows in North Carolina and Connecticut.
“We love to travel,” McGuinn said, “and we love to go to the different cities and hang out and go to the grocery stores and see what people do and what they eat and everything. We have a lot of fun.”
He also said he knows what kind of audience to expect wherever he goes.
“They’re all people in their 60s and 70s, and mostly their kids have grown and gone to college, and they’ve got some time on their hands, so they don’t mind going out on a Wednesday night or whatever,” he said. In Foley, it was a Friday.
What It Meant for OWA Theater
A booking like McGuinn’s shows where OWA Theater has been heading. The venue opened in 2019 as the home of the Legends in Concert tribute revue. Since then it has added more original artists who prefer a small, seated room to an arena or a festival field. For a performer who compares a good audience to a tightly wrapped firecracker, a room this size made sense.
For Baldwin County music fans, the show was a chance to hear songs that shaped 1960s rock played a few rows away by the man who first recorded them. The theater continues to book touring artists throughout the year, and readers can check with the venue for upcoming shows.