Naemanson,
I've been trying to figure out why this won't work, but I'm not coming up with anything. The mechanics would be fairly simple -- local musicians would set up a gig in a normal way, except that they would split the evening with a performer from a town not too far away. At some later point, they would go share a gig set up by someone else in a different town. Sounds pretty easy. The folks from out of town get to play a gig without having to set it up, or attract an audience all on their own. Mudcatters get to meet and jam with each other. Sounds great.

OK, here's a potential hurdle to overcome. The world of folk music covers an extremely wide spectrum. Our audience may not go for a bluegrass band. A singer/songwriter audience may not like our music. I have seen split evenings with very different types of music work well, but I have seen some very unfortunate pairings as well. Usually it seems better to have similar but not identical genres next to each other. This might be hard to arrange. Or we could just stick anything together and see what comes up.

It might also be fun to ask the performers who are sharing an evening to work up at least one song together. I could see great possibilities here, both for performers in similar genres and for people who don't have much in common.

This is a wonderful idea. I live in Seattle and perform around the Pacific Northwest. I know of two or three venues I can probably book with a couple of months' notice, and we have a nice guest room in our house.

John