What is the entertainment for Wednesday and what happens building up to that?
Alex Thiel and Reid Haynie are playing on Wednesday, April 5, so for the audience members we do doors at 7. Usually people start showing up at 7 and it’s BYOB so they have a glass of wine. We have a regular crowd, we’ve got like 20 or 30 people that are there every time. For a lot of them it’s like, show up hang and out. It’s a nice big space. People trickle in until about 7:30 and I do a little introduction and talk about our two nonprofits that we fundraiser for, which are Yoknapatawpha Arts Council and Horizons.
How do you pick the music?
So this season it’s a mixture of classic oxford musicians. Tate Moore played, he’s been playing in Oxford since at least the ’90s, always kills it, they did a great job. They’re so professional and played that space so well. We started this season out with Andrew Bryant another local favorite. We try and hit that folksy quiet music spot, but we have Alex and Reid, [formally of Carlos Danger] they’re gonna be playing more laid back tunes compared to Carlos Danger. Sometimes its a surprise for me what a band’s gonna play though, we’ll have conversations about overall tone but I never wanna tell a band what to play. It is different every week that really what we like to foster is for artist to come in and have unique, intimate experience.
How did Small Hall start?
As it is called Small Hall, last fall, but there was Music in the Hall which was run by, Daniel Marrow who did a great job laying the groundwork. He was the first guy to have a show in this venue, [McDavid Law firm] they had a little bit higher production value than us. Then Daniel moved to Chicago and it fell off but he kept it going after he moved and still is [involved] but not as active as once before. So, then Steve McDavid was on the Horizons board and wanted to keep something like that going and it became a couple different names till they finally settled on Small Hall.
Is it always acoustic?
Acoustic in the sense that MTV unplugged was acoustic. We have a small PA system, we use the word acoustic as a baseline to encourage people to go that direction in this space.
What is a two week build up for you with small hall?
Two weeks out I start a Facebook event, we have news later that we send out to people that have signed up for the email. I send the event poster out digitally. We are almost all digital, the actual concert is our core offering. I have background in marketing communications and branding, that’s how I think of everything. The concert is our core offering but we offer a lot online stuff too. Our online stuff is really big, we live stream every show. We had about 30 people at our last show but we had about 900 live views online. It is so fun when people come live but I just love that we get a chance to share this music with people all over. Our live streams stay up, so you can go back and watch the old ones so we have hours and hours of live music up on Facebook.
When do you Start booking for the fall?
Soon, if anyone is interested and thinks they’re a good fit, they should reach out, just Facebook us, that honestly the best way. We’ve got some shows tentatively booked already but nothing permanent yet. I want small hall to represent the spirit of oxford music a little bit, that is what I think is so great about oxford music is that you can see someone in a bar hanging out one night and then up on a huge stage the next night. Musicians are everywhere and music is so entwined in this town. 
