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LIGHTNING PHOTOS: Walking Guys sing for their lunch at Hubba Hubba

The Walking Guys play at Hubba Hubba Smokehouse.

By Bill Moss, Published: October 7, 2015

FLAT ROCK — The Walking Guys carry a sign.

“The Walking Guys,” it proclaims. “Google Us!”
An evangelical mission? Not in the conventional sense. A political movement of four? Hardly. A throwback? Sort of.
Singer-songwriters in their early 20s, they booked 50 lives shows from July through mid-November and decided to walk the whole 1,600 miles — from Portland, Maine, to their home in Nashville.
The Walking Guys are Benjamin Butler, Christopher Kessenich, Will Stevens and Riley Moore. On Wednesday, a friend from Edgefield, S.C., Sam Northrop, hiked with them.
Stevens said they really didn’t know what to expect.
“We started out knowing it was going to be 17 weeks,” he said.
They figured there would be a lot of roadside tent camping along the way. What they didn’t count on was the generosity of so many people along the way.
“I would say 90 percent of the time we’ve spent at people’s homes along the way,” Stevens said. “They’ll stop us and ask what we’re doing and they’ll say, ‘I’ve got a spare bedroom or a backyard you can camp in.’ People have given us food.”
The Walking Guys pointed to a bag of grapes they had almost polished off and a bag of oranges they were working on. A woman who had just emerged from a grocery store handed them the fruit.
Most people that put The Walking Guys up also feed them dinner.
“We’ve kind of become foodies because we’ve been in all these different cultures,” Moore said. “We’ve met a strange amount of chefs.”
They played at the Root Bar on Saturday and the Town Pump on Monday in Asheville before setting out for Hendersonville along busy U.S. 25 and more serene Blue Ridge Parkway.
They spent Tuesday night at the home of Chris and Lisa Swain in Hendersonville. They found them on the couchsurfing website. Turned out it was Chris’s birthday.
“I never thought I would be eating butter cream cake at a random birthday party,” Kessenich said.
“Kind of Harry Potter like,” Moore added.
In a YouTube video explaining why they’re walking 1,600 miles to play music, the Walking Guys say they were looking for something that got them out of the conventional. Their motto: "Live Simple. Spread Music."
“We believe that a good pair of walking shoes instead of a tour bus will simplify our lives — placing us on the ground floor of our music and the people we get to share it with,” they said.
Using a GoPro camera, they’re filming the journey for a documentary they plan to make when they get home.
Just as they were telling about all the amazing acts of kindness, a Nissan Venza with a "Co-Exist" sticker on the back pulled up. Virginia Spigener popped out to greet them. The owner of the Wrinkled Egg, Spigener (who had heeded the sign and Googled the guys) asked Hubba Hubba barbecue owner Starr Teel if he’d treat The Walking Guys to lunch.
“He said yes, if they’ll play a few songs,” she said.
The musicians loved the idea.
“I wish we could make that trade all the time,” said Kessenich.

“We started as individual acts. Now we’re playing together,” Kessenich said. “We’ve become much more cohesive as the tour has gone along.”
That was evident when they played a five-song set on the picnic grounds at Hubba Hubba.

Moore sang a song he wrote about growing up with three brothers in Tennessee, eating buttery pancakes and catching crawdads. The Walking Guys closed with an upbeat story song about drinking PBR. The diners sitting at picnic tables applauded.
“Thanks to all of you for being our forced audience,” Moore said.

They planned to spend Wednesday night “somewhere between here and Greenville.” They’re playing a show Friday night at the Cliffs at Keowee Springs. It’s sold out.
The most gratifying part of the journey is “how many people have been welcoming to us and treated us to dinner and brought us into their homes without knowing us," Moore said. “It’s really broken down the walls of quote-unquote strangers.”