Fans of Little Red Hen, banjos and fiddles in hand, rally to save Seattle honky-tonk

The Little Red Hen has a sign promoting “live country music.” It’s a honky-tonk landmark in Seattle’s Green Lake neighborhood.

Opened first in 1933, it moved to its current location in 1968. The venue hosts local musicians and dancing, from country to bluegrass to open mic nights and karaoke. But now patrons are alarmed over its potential closure.

On Tuesday nights, the bar’s bluegrass jam attracts so many players, they spill onto the sidewalk outside. Stan Hall is the president of Outlanders Progressive Bluegrass Social Club, which organizes the event.

“This is the overflow jam,” Hall said. “So inside, you’ve got about 10 pickers right now and that’s probably a little large for the circle, so they start to break off. They play out here, and then we have our — we call it the dumpster jam. They play out back in the parking lot.”

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In the wake of the pandemic, Hall’s organization focused on seeking out places for local musicians of all ages and levels to play together.

“Once Covid hit, we lost the longtime jams and people didn’t know where to go anymore after that,” he said. “If we fancy ourselves a musical city, we’ve got to fight for it, right?”

The Little Red Hen survived the pandemic. But now a landlord-tenant dispute is threatening the bar's future.

Gage Clark said he comes to the Little Red Hen on weekend nights to dance the two-step, and that’s when he heard the news.

“I came in on my Friday night like usual and saw the eviction notice on the window, and my stomach just dropped,” he said.

Clark joined the group “Save the Hen,” which is gathering remembrances from longtime patrons and thousands of signatures so far on a petition.

“We want to make sure this is acknowledged as a historic place,” Clark said. “It’s been around since the 1930s, and since then it’s hosted thousands of musicians and cultivated a really good music scene for the region.”

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One of the people enjoying a recent bluegrass jam session was Tom Keeney. He’s hosted a bluegrass program on the local radio station KBCS for 25 years and called the Little Red Hen “a very special place for a lot of people” because it’s both casual and intimate.

“They teach people to dance here,” he said. “People have been coming here for years.”

The bar has “had its ups and downs,” he said, but it’s been a mainstay and “a big part of the country music scene” in the area.

The landlord Ruoxi Zhang said in a statement to KUOW, "We also do not want The Little Red Hen to close. It has never been our intention for the bar to shut down."

Zhang said they need to negotiate with the bar's owner and added, "We appreciate the community’s support for a fair resolution.”

The bar’s owner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.