LEWISTON — The duo Day for Night will bring three decades of acoustic country music to 22 Park St. Friday, May 4, as part of the BatesDowntown series.

Doug Hubley and Gretchen Schaefer, who support their singing with guitar and mandolin, will perform at 5 p.m. Their inspirations include the Stanley Brothers, the Louvin Brothers, Merle Haggard, Webb Pierce, Gene Clark and the pairing of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.

“What really gets us about this music is its honesty,” Schaefer said. “It’s just naked. It’s about real emotions, emotions everyone has felt, and which cut to the bone.”

Hubley and Schaefer combine a bedrock reverence for musical tradition with wry humor and a keen sense of context.

“We’re looking at about a 30-year chunk of music,” Hubley said. “We start around World War II, lean hard on the 1950s and people like Webb Pierce and the Louvins and stop with the 1970s — which is when it all started to go wrong.”

Day for Night has performed at the annual Cornish Apple Festival, the Portland nightspot Blue, the Frog and Turtle Gastropub in Westbrook and at Bates College. The duo played at a concert, produced by Bates radio station WRBC-FM, featuring the nationally acclaimed Powder Kegs.

For more information, call 786-6135 or email olinarts@bates.edu.