Rented Mule Bio Rented Mule is Kate and Jeff McCoy, along with other rented, borrowed, and stolen musicians as catch can (but that is changing--stay tuned).  Kate writes and sings the songs and plays acoustic guitar.  Jeff keeps things grounded and steady on bass and is endowed with a fine set of ears for detail.  The music is a mix of country, old time, blues, and rock, aspiring to storytelling and shit-kicking tradition. In hilly southern Ohio, the outskirts of Appalachia, Kate started singing in church.  Not necessarily because she was a religious child.  She liked to sing up front, smoke cigarettes out back, bet on games of horseshoes, and cultivate other bad habits. Her mother says that the first song she ever sang was Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire.  She took piano lessons, played in high school band, sang in school musicals, and fell in with intellectuals and prog rock bands in college.  Her father would hear their recordings and just shake his head and say that country music was the way to go.          Years later, the idea for Rented Mule took seed when Kate found herself in Brooklyn singing background vocals in a country rock band.  After that outfit dissolved, she put together a short- lived acoustic quintet called Shorty McCoy and the Tall Boys, doing covers of country blues and folk standards.  Like most good things, this didn’t last.  She took a few years to learn to play guitar and start writing her own songs, drawing on her countrified roots, her misspent youth, and stories that had to be told. Kate tried to start something up with an assortment of players and pretenders, but the feel of the songs just didn’t seem to come through until she and Jeff started working together.  A self- proclaimed New York City redneck, Jeff always wanted to play the country and western music that he and his uncle listened to on the car stereo when he was a kid.  He paid for this desire with fist fights, being that he was a freak among his peers, growing long hair, and loving Lynyrd Skynyrd.  With Jeff on bass, the songs began to take shape. Moving to the Hudson Valley has expanded the group in exciting ways.  Mark Primoff has joined us on lead guitar, Fred Perry on drums, and Billy Lee Fraser on pedal steel and harmonica!  Watch for new developments...