COVID-19 has hit few professions harder than touring musicians. Like players all across the country, when the pandemic shut down live performances, Nashville bassist James “Hags” Haggerty lost his primary source of income. Facing an uncertain future, Haggerty decided to try to make some bread by, well, making some bread.
“It’s not that different from music,” Haggerty says of his baking business Haggerty Sourdough. “You spend a lot of time working on it, you make it with your hands, you share it with people, it makes them happy, and they give you a little bit of money.”
Haggerty is best known as a member of Nashville bands Joe, Marc’s Brother and The Autumn Defense, and for his extensive work backing Josh Rouse. But he didn’t just learn to make sourdough bread at home last year during his COVID lockdown. His journey to becoming an artisan bread maker began several years earlier.
“My mom passed away in 2016, and she was a good cook,” he says. “When I was cleaning out her house, I took a lot of her recipes and cookbooks, and some pots and pans — and also a KitchenAid mixer.”
As the new owner of a heavy-duty mixer, Haggerty decided to see what he could whip up with it. He first made pasta, then he turned his thoughts to bread. “I did The New York Times no-knead recipe a couple of times,” he recalls. “It tasted really good, but then I started thinking about more flavor, and that’s when I got into the sourdough thing.”
Haggerty made his own sourdough starter from scratch, a process of combining flour and water over a period of days until it becomes a yeast culture, which then can be used to make the dough rise. “You just keep feeding it,” he says. “My starter’s probably three years old now, but there are sourdough starters in Europe that are, like, 400 years old.”
Pursuing his new interest with a passion, Haggerty spent the next few years experimenting with the recipe for his bread. “Initially, I was just using regular bread flour,” he explains. “After a while I started to think about how to make it even more flavorful, and was like, ‘Well, what about milling, you know, fresh wheat and rye?’ So my girlfriend Tania [Cirone] got me a home mill, and I experimented with a bunch of different types of grains.”
Within a few months, Haggerty had settled on a consistent blend of grains for his bread and was giving away several loaves a week to some of his friends and fellow musicians in East Nashville.
“I was making so much of it, I started giving it away to Joe and Marc [Pisapia], Jack Silverman, Audley [Freed] and Jen [Gunderman], and just neighborhood people,” he says. “Then after a while, people started to say, ‘You know, this is really good. You should sell it, I’d buy it.’ ”
And that was the beginning of Haggerty Sourdough. When the pandemic brought live touring to a halt, Haggerty decided to try to turn his hobby into his primary source of income, at least until live music could make a safe return. So he commissioned a logo and had bags for the bread printed.
“I kind of really dove into this bread thing not only for sanity reasons, but literally for the financial reasons,” he says. “At the beginning of the pandemic, I had about 12 people that were buying it. So then 12 went to 24, then it went to 40, and then it kind of settled at 60 for quite a while.”
Haggerty baked twice a week, and people would stop by his house to pick up their bread, which he would leave on his front porch. Pickup was on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Before long, his front yard became a socially distanced hangout on those days, attracting even more well-known Nashville musicians: guitar legend Steve Cropper, Tom Petersson of Cheap Trick and Pat Sansone, a member of Wilco as well as Haggerty’s Autumn Defense bandmate. Sometimes, an impromptu unplugged jam would break out.
“That became sort of my social life,” Haggerty says. “We would stand in the front yard separated from each other and have conversations. It’s been really great to have that kind of social interaction twice a week, sometimes with strangers that found me on social media and a lot of times with people that were friends. So it became like a hang twice a week, especially on nice days.”
That’s one more way in which making bread is like making music: It can bring people together. Yet another similarity to the music world is that you can take your bread-making business on the road. Haggerty plans to do that mid-June when he and Cirone travel for the summer to North Adams, Mass., where he owns a small home that he typically rents out.
“I’m going to take a little break, but I’m going to sell some bread up there. People I know there are excited about the bread, people that have been following me [on social media]. Then I’ll resume music — and baking — when I get back to Nashville in September.”
