Photo by Stephen Maloney

Video: Royal Street Buskers Katie Weller and Neil Dean

For OffBeat’s inaugural “Bicycle Sessions” video, we clamped a GoPro camera onto the handlebars of a bicycle and rode down Royal Street looking for street performers.

We found Katie Weller and Neil Dean, a pair of New England natives who split their time between two passions: farming and playing music.

As Weller explains, the duo recently found their way down to New Orleans at the end of the harvest season in Vermont, and they set up shop on Royal Street.

With Weller on guitar and lead vocals and Dean harmonizing as he provides accompaniment on his fiddle, the pair brought a little Appalachian music to the French Quarter with a song called “Blue Ridge Mountains,” which they followed up with Weller’s version of an old standard called “Cindy.”

Check out Weller and Dean in action, and be sure to stop and listen to them play the next time you’re on Royal Street.