Producers
owners
musicians
Years of History
Small Town between Here and There
In 1970, with a vision to start a music club, Connecticut teenagers Bruce John and David ”Lefty” Foster cobbled together enough money to buy a century-old silk mill. It was located in Mansfield, a small town bordering their blue-collar, hometown of Willimantic, and the village of Storrs, an intellectual haven and home to the University of Connecticut. While seemingly out of the way, the mill was a perfectly situated music venue—the halfway point between Boston and New York, and Hartford and Providence.
Artist Interviews
The Shaboo Inn closed in 1982, and the building disappeared in a blazing inferno shortly thereafter. Fifty years later, what it left behind in the ashes is a uniquely American music story worth telling, celebrating and preserving.