RangeFest 2026 — Saturday, September 26, 2026, 6–10 PM, at Serenade Range · Whitehouse, TX. A celebration of East Texas music roots. The festival has played; these are the photos.

The Wesley Pruitt Band is Wesley Pruitt Jr on guitar and vocals, Mike Mims on drums, and Chris Gipson on bass.

Wesley Pruitt Jr. got his records from two directions at once. His father played him B.B. King, Elmore James, Waylon Jennings and George Jones. His mother played him Mahalia Jackson and Shirley Caesar. The band he has led since 2001 is still arguing those two sides out on stage — blues and country with the gospel left in, which is what they mean by their own line: one mind, one band, one goal, playing Texas music with soul.

He started on drums, picked up a guitar on Christmas Day 1997, was working professionally by 1999, and in 2005 quit everything else to do it full time. Line'm Up put “Poor Man Blues” at No. 39 on the Texas charts with no label behind it. Gypsy Soul followed in 2021. “The road has been very rough,” he told the East Texas Weekend, “and I’ve learned so much along the way.”

Faber and Friends at RangeFest includes Jim Nolet on violin, Ralph Devereux on bass, Eric “Chewie” Taylor on drums, Anita Faber on vocals, and George Faber on piano.

George A. Faber, II started at piano recitals in Kilgore and has not stopped since — Stephen F. Austin for a BA and an MA, then stages from Lincoln Center to the Great Wall of China. Keyboardist, bassist, producer, arranger; smooth jazz out front, with gospel, country, classical, funk, big band and R&B behind it. He toured with Sunshine Express in the early eighties on bills with Charlie Daniels, the Statler Brothers, the Oak Ridge Boys, Percy Sledge and Chubby Checker, and his Faber & Friends Jazz Ensemble later opened for Freda Payne and Al Jarreau.

If you came up through Tyler ISD and played an instrument, he had something to do with it: 35 years with the district, from band director to Visual and Performing Arts Director over 18,000 students K-12, plus Director of Jazz Studies at UT Tyler. Stephen F. Austin named him Music Alumni of the Year in 2016. He still plays organ at Green Acres Baptist Church. His own summary of all of it: “Playing music is for the soul.”

The house band is the point of the whole thing. Chandler Apel and Colton Tucker both came up through the room — rehearsals, reels, EPKs — and on September 26 they took the same stage as the headliners.