Brigid and Johnny Reedy regularly stand before crowds in cowboy hats, chaps and traditional cowboy shirts singing songs, telling stories, and offering up an occasional yodel. But they don’t aim to present a caricature of long-forgotten singing buckaroos — they’re living it — and working to keep those cowboy traditions alive.
“Arguably, it’s been dying for the past 100 years,” Brigid Reedy said of cowboy culture. “This is something we don’t need to just preserve, but that we can be actively living and innovating in. There’s something really unique and special about this to us.”
“For us, preservation isn’t something that is to be kept static or in a certain way,” Johnny Reedy added. “Preservation comes through continued life.”
Brigid and Johnny will serve as the storytellers-in-residence July 21-25 as part of the International Storytelling Center’s 2026 Storytelling Live series.
Brigid Reedy, now 25, began yodeling at just 2 years old and picked up the fiddle at 5. Johnny Reedy, 20, is a guitar aficionado who can play 16 different instruments. But if you ask them if they consider themselves young performers in an old format, they’ll quickly tell you that’s not how they’ve ever seen it.
“It’s always been cross-generational and so alive,” Johnny Reedy said. “For us, we never thought about it being relegated to a certain age or cultural demographic. For us, the way to experience life and to make art is through storytelling. It never felt like an old-fashioned form. We’re always searching for things that are truly timeless. Those are things that have a lasting quality. There’s a level of beautiful authenticity in things that are timeless. I find this form as truly timeless in the fact that it transcends all boundaries and time. It’s a recent development for this art form to be seen as an older thing.”
Over the years, the duo has performed at festivals and venues across the country, such as Carnegie Hall, the Grand Ole Opry, and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada — a yearly event that left a mark on the siblings.
“That was a real scene,” Brigid Reedy said. “We had some of the greatest poets of the Western world, musicians, working cowboys, and storytellers all in one place. It would set the stage for our perception of our world and our artistic practice.”
After years of soaking in the traditions, Brigid released her first book, “Seeds,” earlier this year. The book combines original poetry and artwork inspired by her life experiences, all with a rural Montana backdrop.
“I’m super excited to bring it to Jonesborough,” she said of her poetry. “It has a lot of personal relationship-inspired stories and influence by the natural landscape that I live in. I plan on sharing a huge portion of this book during my residency.”
For the Reedys, storytelling, poetry, fiddle tunes, and the like have long been tools used to connect to others.
“These were the ways you visited and connected with people, especially growing up rural,” Brigid Reedy said. “It’s these come-together moments through festivals, gatherings, branding, or camping up in the mountains with your instruments for three days. You’re connecting with people through music, poetry, and stories. That’s how we learned you interact with people in the world.”
Brigid Reedy graduated in 2025 from Montana Western, where she earned her Bachelor of Science in natural horsemanship and her Bachelor of Arts in English literature. Johnny is currently working towards his Bachelor of Arts in English literature and a Bachelor of Science in interdisciplinary studies with a focus on culture and sustainability of the American West.
The sibling duo also finds constant similarities in their storytelling and horsemanship.
“The philosophy we bring to our work with horses we also bring to our interactions with each other, people, students, and audience members,” Brigid Reedy said. “If you were to read some of the natural horsemanship literature, it all comes down to feel, timing, and balance that apply equally to audiences.”
“Feel is that unspoken electricity that we understand and experience between each other. That’s when an audience really gets it. When an audience is there with you and together you’re creating something instead of just delivering something. It’s that moment when you’re horseback and you feel them through the reins understanding that float between man and horse, when you reach out to them and they reach back.”
No matter if it’s instruments or reins in their hands, Brigid and Johnny Reedy aim to create a moment they say is both universal but also deeply personal.
“Our absolute priority is connection,” Brigid Reedy said. “Storytelling to me is one of our most deeply human attributes that define our experience. Performing and everything in that process anchors us in who we are. But it also allows us to connect to something bigger. All these things, — storytelling, music, horsemanship — they are rare and special things for us humans to use to connect to each other. It’s one of our few bridges.”