Bruce Archer plays a rollicking combination of blues, bluegrass, country, and folk that doesn’t fit tidily into a single genre. His finger-picking and slide guitar display a level of talent and mastery that can only come from 40-plus years of sifting through musical styles and keeping the bits that resonate with him. He coaxes from his guitar an instrumental voice that is authentically his own. Masterful finger-picking and slide guitar punctuate the highly autobiographic lyrics of his latest release, THE HALLOWED LAND. This eclectic, sometimes rollicking, sometimes reflective, genre-bending album is a paean to traditional story-telling.

There have been plenty of highs and few lows—from open mic nights in college to forming and writing for bands that regularly played high profile alt-music clubs in Uptown, Downtown and West Bank Minneapolis, to returning to solo gigs in the north woods of Minnesota.

He’s enjoyed playing with some topnotch musicians and, occasionally, moved on through collaborations that just didn’t work. Archer has opened for legendary bass guitarist Ronnie Lane (Small Faces), the Uppity Blues Women, the Jayhawks, the Gear Daddies’ frontman Martin Zellar, the Phones, and Run Westy Run—to name a few.

Yet through it all, he has relied on his Iowa roots and sense of who he is. Archer brings a raw authenticity to his gigs, which are best suited to listening environments.