When Johnny Mullenax drops his guitar to his side and reaches for the beer at his feet, everybody inside Mercury Lounge knows what’s coming.
“Team drink!” Mullenax shouts into his microphone, raising his glass to the crowd gathered in this dive bar just south of downtown Tulsa. The patrons at Mercury — which would be pushing its capacity if a hundred patrons crammed inside — raise theirs in response and duly oblige Mullenax’s request. Then, Mullenax and his band launch into another jam. It may be country, folk, or blues, and it’s likely electric. If you didn’t know the time of day, you’d swear you were in Tulsa’s hottest nightclub.
But this is Bluegrass Brunch, a two-hour residency that starts just after noon every Sunday, which Mullenax founded four years ago. Today, he plays it backed by a rotating cast of Tulsa’s A-list musicians. On any given Sunday, you can find Mullenax playing a freewheeling set with drummer Jake Lynn (Wyatt Flores), keyboardist Andrew Bair (Paul Cauthen) or pedal steel player Roger Ray (former founding member of Jason Boland and the Stragglers).
“One beautiful thing about the brunch is, we can do whatever the fuck we want there,” Mullenax tells Rolling Stone. “We can try a song and crash-and-burn it, and it’s OK, because it’s our weekly gig.”
The Mercury Lounge was already established as the home of Tulsa’s independent music scene before the Bluegrass Brunch was even an idea. The converted gas station and its tiny stage was a launchpad for the career of Turnpike Troubadours in the late 2000s. Today it’s nothing to see major Red Dirt and Americana artists such as Flores, John Moreland, Ken Pomeroy, or BJ Barham playing a show on its tiny stage — next to a sign laying out the bar’s only rule: “All are welcome here except racists, sexists, homophobes, assholes.”
Brunch has become something of a must-experience for fans in the Tulsa scene. It also served to foster the career of the 30-year-old Mullenax.
“I think it was 2021,” he says. “The first Sunday in January, Ashley Kirkley from Mercury Lounge, God bless her, hit me up: ‘Do you want to play a bluegrass brunch show at the Merc?’ I’d been playing bluegrass around town. She said they’d open the bar early for me. Now, I’d played a thousand fucking weekly gigs before this, so I thought, ‘That’s not gonna work. You’re gonna open the bar early, and no one’s gonna show up.’ Then they showed up, and we realized we needed to get serious about it.”
Kirkley is the general manager of Mercury Lounge and is well-versed in its history and importance to Red Dirt. In the year after the pandemic, she was seeking something unique that could be a local talker, and thought a Sunday residency with the energetic, profanity-prone Mullenax would be perfect. She set up a Bloody Mary bar in one corner, and let Mullenax take care of the rest. Now, on nice days — regardless of the time of year — the Brunch crowd spills out into the venue’s yard and parking lot. Kirkley credits Mullenax for making it a standard.
“From the moment Johnny started his residency, it was a hit,” Kirkley says. “It has exposed so many people to the Mercury Lounge, and seeing people from all walks of life come out and enjoy his music has been incredible. It’s also been amazing to see how the band has changed and grown since its inception, and I think the sky’s the limit for him now. He’s an incredibly driven individual who puts his heart and soul into anything he does.”
That part is equally important to Mullenax. Bluegrass Brunch afforded him the opportunity to build out a fan base beyond his hometown. Oklahoma allows medical marijuana, with relatively lax laws about advertising and sponsorships, so Mullenax approached a handful of dispensaries about sponsoring the event for a few hundred dollars a week. He saved that sponsorship money, bought a secondhand church van, and hit the road. He started booking long runs across the Midwest and Southeast, and he expanded his musical footprint in Texas. Eventually, it went well enough that Mullenax could buy a proper touring van and trailer. “Seems like every few weeks, there’s something new to take care of, and that’ll keep you on your toes,” he says.
Mullenax was born in Tulsa into a musical family. His first paying gig was playing guitar in a Tulsa rock band called Till Metro when he was 14, though it did not mesh with his weed habit. “That was the first band that I got fired from, because I was high as fuck all the time,” he says. “That’s a big lesson as a kid. You’re like, ‘Oh shit. Maybe that’s not acceptable.’”
He kept at it, though. His high school had a jazz band program, and he figured out he could cut class if he went to the jazz room and practiced. He got a fake ID when he was 18 and started writing songs. Over the past decade, he has refined both his music and lyrics. This shows in his most popular streaming number, 2025’s “Couple Extra Hours,” in which he laments his wanton ways through a refrain of “I said, man, what do you need/He said a couple extra hours, same for you and me.”
To this point, Mullenax’s catalog consists of a handful of EPs, both of the studio and live variety, and a series of singles. But he’s been in the studio, with Bair producing, and working on a much more comprehensive EP — This Joint’s for You, Too — which he’s planning to release in the spring . He also signed to the same management as Vandoliers, Taylor Hunnicutt, and Kat Hasty and with the same booking agent as Billy Strings. He’s become a road dog, and these moves are intended to maximize both his potential and his well-being.
“Touring has made me become more professional in my business with people,” Mullenax says. “It’s made me realize that this thing is so fragile. Being a musician, you never know what’s coming the next day. You gotta roll with the punches. I think that’s a valuable lesson that a lot of bands that don’t tour never get to experience.”
Such a pedal-to-the-floor approach means Mullenax is starting 2026 with a bevy of headlining shows in rooms ranging from the Continental Club in Austin to the Heartwood Soundstage in Gainesville, Florida. He was a highlight of Mile 0 Fest in Key West last month and he’ll play Winter Wondergrass in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in early March. Mullenax also recently opened for Turnpike Troubadours at Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth.
This is where Mullenax wants to be. Touring, for him, is the easiest way to avoid complacency.
“I don’t want to sound like a weirdo, but I just want to grow more professionally and make more money, so that I can live comfortably and everybody else can, and we can go around doing what we love, and make a living doing it,” he says. “When we started Bluegrass Brunch four years ago, I never thought that it would lead to us going to fucking France for three weeks. It’s been an absolute whirlwind.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.
