“Everybody who has read Wise Blood thinks I’m a hillbilly nihilist, whereas . . . I’m a hillbilly Thomist.”
— Flannery O’Connor
The Hillbilly Thomists are a band of friars of the Order of Preachers.
After playing music together for several years, they released their eponymous debut album in 2017, which reached #3 on the Billboard bluegrass chart and mostly consisted in bluegrass standards and Americana favorites.
Since then, the friars in the band have been doing what Dominican friars do: contemplating, studying, and preaching.
They’ve also been writing songs. In 2021, they released their second studio album, Living for the Other Side, released on the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (the original Thomist).
A year later, they published a third record, Holy Ghost Power (released July 7, 2022), which peaked at #5 on the Billboard bluegrass chart.
In the wake of the release of Holy Ghost Power, the friars embarked on The Old Highway Tour (July 23–August 4, 2022), taking them through eight cities, from NYC to Cleveland, OH, including a stop in Nashville to perform at The Grand Ole Opry House.
In August, 2023, The Hillbilly Thomists returned to the Alberthaus to record a fourth album.
Rumor has it that the HTs will be touring again in Summer of 2024…
Proceeds from album sales, donations, and merchandise sales support the formation of friars at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., where the Hillbilly Thomists first came together.
GALLERY
An Apostolate of the
Order of Friars Preachers
Flannery O’Connor said that her fiction was concerned with the ways grace is at work among people who do not have access to the sacraments.
The Thomist (one who follows the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas) believes that the invisible grace of God can be at work in visible things, just as the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, in the person of Christ.
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