Amanda Mae Images / Submitted photoHoney Don’t — from left, Benji Nagel, Bill Powers and Shelley Gray — perform at a wedding at Skyliner Lodge in August. The band will perform at the Bend Fall Festival on the Locals Only Stage on Saturday.

Honey Don’t got its name, at least in part, from a phrase bassist Shelley Gray would often say to her husband, guitarist and songwriter Bill Powers, when the two were still living and playing in Paonia, Colorado.

“Bill would sign me up for all these crazy things that I didn’t necessarily want to do,” Gray said. “I’d be like, ‘Don’t, honey, don’t; don’t make me do this.’”

The phrase stuck (the Carl Perkins song of the same name was also a deciding factor), and the Americana-leaning duo began playing shows around Colorado and beyond with various other musicians in between gigs with their main band, the old-timey, almost vaudevillian Sweet Sunny South. When Sweet Sunny South disbanded in 2010, Honey Don’t became Powers and Gray’s main project.

And when the couple moved to Bend in August of last year, Honey Don’t came with them — only now, Powers was the one pleading “honey, don’t” to Gray.

“I kind of never saw myself leaving Colorado, like ever,” Powers said. “I never thought that would happen, but it was obvious that we needed to, and when it finally sunk in I still was like, augh!”

“Oh, I pretty much did all the packing,” Gray added. “I had to drag him here by his hair, and he doesn’t have any hair.”

“It’s funny, though, that song … the song, ‘Honey Don’t,’ which was our sort of answer to not playing the traditional song ‘Honey Don’t,’ was kind of (an) invocation of — that was kind of my … invitation for Shelley to like, let’s take hold of this group, this thing, and let’s see where it goes,” Powers said. “… And the last (line) of the chorus says, ‘Just don’t tell me honey don’t.’ So now it’s taken on even more meaning, now that we have come out here and it has kind of blossomed in that way.”

The duo found a new musical home in Central Oregon rather quickly, and especially in the last few months has seen its star rise on the local scene. In September, the group made its debuts at the Sisters Folk Festival in Sisters and the Bend Roots Revival festival. They’ll follow up those high-profile gigs with a performance at the Bend Fall Festival on Saturday, as the first of seven bands to hit the Locals Only Stage in the downtown Wells Fargo Bank parking lot.

“All these things were going on when we just got here last year, but (we) couldn’t get into them because they’d already been booked,” Powers said. “We were just fresh, so we saw all this — we landed here, went to the folk festival and we were just like ‘arrgh, this is incredible.’ And then we went to Roots Fest and I’m like, ‘Arrgh, I can’t believe we’re not getting to play this.’”

While Honey Don’t has toured throughout the West and released two albums, 2009’s self-titled collection and 2013’s more electric “Heart Like a Wheel,” moving the band to Bend was “like starting over.” Powers, originally from Mississippi, and Gray, a native of Minnesota, lived for about 18 years in Paonia, a small town that lies at the foot of Mount Lamborn in western Colorado.

It was here the duo first became interested in bluegrass and old-timey music through Powers’ shows on the local public radio station. He formed Sweet Sunny South in 2001 with a group of friends who likewise were just discovering bluegrass for the first time. Gray joined that band two years later — shortly after a fire destroyed Gray and Powers’ furniture business.

“Things were kind of shifting around, and we just took that opportunity to decide, OK, let’s give this a try for a while. And so I joined the band, and we just, we tried to really hit it and do it for real.”

The band did just that, and was gaining some traction — in 2006 it was one of 12 Showcase Bands selected to perform at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass conference in Nashville. But in 2008 the band took a hiatus, and by 2010, it had fizzled out.

The same year of the IBMA conference, Powers and Gray formed Honey Don’t to perform some of the songs that Powers had written that didn’t fit the old-timey feel of Sweet Sunny South. The songs were slower with more laid-back grooves, combining swing, honky tonk, country, bluegrass, Cajun music and rock with Powers’ lyrics about the Colorado mountains and canyons that surrounded the couple.

The duo had just released its second album and was playing more shows with electric guitar and drums, but they realized they needed to make a change. Their son, Jobim, is dyslexic, and no schools in Paonia had programs for him. The couple thought about moving to Nashville, and Gray had a teaching job offer in Aspen, but they eventually settled on Bend after hearing about REALMS Middle School and visiting the city.

“It just reminded me so much of where we came from, only bigger and with more opportunity and more potential, and the one thing we didn’t have there (in Paonia), we could maybe find here,” Gray said. “It wasn’t until we drove into Bend and we saw … Drake Park and went to the Crows Feet Commons and we were like, ‘Yep, we can totally do this.’”

Powers and Gray have been embraced by the local music scene so far. They’ve already found some bandmates, including dobro player Benji Nagel and percussionist Don Hawkins, who will play snare drum with Honey Don’t at the Fall Festival. However, Powers said it took a lot of prodding before Honey Don’t began booking gigs.

“In a year, we just pretty much knocked on every single door 4,000 times,” he said.

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com