New owner, same melody at Boulder’s HB Woodsongs

BOULDER — HB Woodsongs, a 55-year-old musical instruments seller in Boulder, has a new band leader, but the store’s owner intends to continue playing a familiar beat.

Music-industry veteran and former customer Kevin Drost, who recently bought the shop at 3101 28th St. from Sondra Blanchard, told BizWest that he hopes to maintain Woodsongs’ community spirit and legacy with an eye toward ensuring its relevance for decades to come.  

When founders Ned and Laurel Alterman first opened the store, then called Folk Arts Music and Leather Supply, in 1971, “it was a little counterculture, hippie shop,” Blanchard said. 

The store, which has moved locations a handful of times over the years, was bought in 1985 by Jon Eaton, Bill Eaton and Craig Ferguson, who cranked up the volume on the vibes that made it uniquely Boulder.

That new ownership group renamed the shop HB Woodsongs, a whimsical moniker that Blanchard said was a combination of a late relative’s initials and fictional, fantastical musician of legend.

“The idea (for Woodsong) is that it was a mountain man character who plays guitar by the campfire and draws down the stars with his music,” she said. 

After a few years, the Eatons and Ferguson moved on to other ventures in the music industry, and Dana Flitcraft took over the business in 1989 after her husband “wandered in” and fell in love with HB Woodsongs, Blanchard recalled. “He was looking for a banjo and they ended up with a shop.”

Flitcraft owned the store for 28 years, expanding beyond retail sales and launching a popular rental program for students in school bands and orchestras. HB Woodsongs built a loyal following populated, according to a 2017 Daily Camera report, by “acts with Boulder roots, including String Cheese Incident, Yonder Mountain String Band, Leftover Salmon, Hot Rize, Elephant Revival and Gregory Alan Isakov.”

For about half of Flitcraft’s nearly three-decade ownership tenure, Blanchard’s late partner Shawn Cupolo was an HB Woodsongs employee. 

“He’d been working there for 14 years and he always said, ‘Well, someday I’d love to own the shop,” Blanchard said of Cupolo, a guitarist in local blues band Hotfoot who died from cancer in 2021. “… When Dana was ready to retire, we asked (to buy the store). And we were able to make it work by pulling together absolutely everything we owned.”

After taking over in 2017, the couple ran the business together for a time before Blanchard redevoted the lion’s share of her energy to her day job and passion project: leading Lafayette’s Public Works Theatre Company. 

In the years since Cupolo’s death, Blanchard said she shifted her focus back to HB Woodsong, operating the business as a solo act backed by a quintet of “extremely enthusiastic” employees. 

“I’ve been the sole owner of this business and also a mom for the past five years, and that’s been a lot,” Blanchard said of her decision to pass the HB Woodsongs legacy on to its next caretaker. “Also, my background is in theater, and I have a calling to get back into that.”

Enter Drost, an Illinois native who moved to Colorado a couple of decades ago to study jazz guitar at the University of Denver. 

While at DU, Drost would make regular trips up U.S. Highway 36 to shop and hang out at HB Woodsongs in Boulder. 

During school, Drost said he worked at “a guitar store that was very similar to Woodsongs” before graduating and embarking on a global two-step through the music biz.

“I did a little bit of touring and recording and playing, but then I was hired by Sony Music as a talent scout,” he said. “My job was to go out to clubs and find bands to sign. So I did that in London and New York for a while, working for different record companies before I started my own record company.”

Drost eventually sold his company and started consulting work for media, entertainment and technology firms before landing an executive position in 2015 at Reverb.com, a leading musical instrument e-commerce platform. 

“Buying an instrument is a pretty special experience, both because it’s expensive — it might be the most expensive thing somebody owns besides their car — but also because an instrument is the tool that allows you to create art,” he said. “… So (at Reverb) we were trying to create an experience that replicated walking into a cool local guitar shop, but doing so online on a much bigger scale.”

Reverb was acquired by e-commerce giant Etsy in 2019; Drost moved back to Colorado soon after, and he began plotting his next career move. 

During his time in the corporate world, Drost said that he “worked with high-growth tech companies with lots of venture capital and private equity behind them.” So for his next act, “I wanted just something that felt like a really good, stable, smaller business — and also something that really played a role in the community.”

While he knew he wanted to take over a music shop, Drost said he “didn’t set out specifically to find HB Woodsongs — it was sort of serendipitous. I was talking to a business broker who had just posted a listing for a business that he was representing. It didn’t say that the name of it was Woodsongs, but by the description I knew immediately that it was.”

Drost said that he “didn’t know Sondra at the time” when he was initially presented with the opportunity to buy the business. 

“I didn’t know her story and Shawn’s story. I had known the store about 20 years before” as a customer during his DU days, “but it sort of felt like almost fate” to be reconnected with HB Woodsongs at this inflection point in his career. 

Drost and Blanchard began conversations this spring, and he officially took over as HB Woodsongs’ new owner late last month. 

While his work selling instruments online with Reverb certainly helped prepare him to own a music shop, Drost noted that, when it comes to instruments, there’s no substitute for an old-school, brick-and-mortar operation.

“I think the more people who play music, the better the world is,” he said. “And getting into playing music usually requires some amount of in-person experience. An instrument is a tactile thing. It’s very hard to just order something online, have it show up to your house, and have the wherewithal to know how to do it. So most people’s musician journey starts at a brick-and-mortar store.”

The Woodsongs team specializes in “aligning the person with their instrument,” Blanchard said.

While Woodsongs might now have “a new owner, it’s the same mission and the same culture,” Drost said. “I’m really looking forward to continuing to meet all the people that have been coming in here for the last 50 years.”

Share on Facebook on LinkedIn