Bourbon’s doesn’t feature chicken wire around the stage or peanut hulls on the floor, but the new venue felt like a Southern roadhouse on Friday night when Girls, Guns, and Glory and the Can Kickers rocked the joint, roots style.

The five-man, Boston-based Girls Guns and Glory served up country-fried rock, heavy on the yodel and twang. Lead singer and songwriter Ward Hayden, sporting a plaid-yoked vintage western shirt, wailed like a ’50s cowboy singer corrupted with just an edge of Elvis sneer and Johnny Cash darkness and danger. Those influences flavored the band’s originals. Hayden’s voice floated in falsetto and dropped down sultry and low, inviting comparisons to Chris Isaak. But his direct, honest lyrics paired the classic country tone of heartbreak and hard times with modern themes of frustrated dreams and workaday life.

The band, just a year old this month, sprinkled the set with covers like the Stones’ “Dead Flowers,” Cash’s “Big River,” and Woody Guthrie’s “California Stars.” Searing electric guitar and never-resting, attention-getting bass lines filled out a wide-as-the-plains sound. Low-down, dirty country drums, washboard, tambourine and even conga percussion kept the laid-back audience of mostly local music fans hooting and stomping like rodeo spectators. Closing with “Folsom Prison Blues,” centered on a screaming vocal that nailed down the song’s desperation, the band left the stage confidently, having branded their name onto the Seacoast music map.

The Can Kickers took control of this warmed-up crowd soon after, thrashing out a 90-minute set of their gripping roots-punk sound. The New London, Conn., based trio dishes up a bewitching brew of Appalachian old-time music on fiddle, guitar and banjo, funkified by the madly driven, mixed tempo beats of drummer Doug Schaefer. Traditional tunes like “Darling Cory” or “Good Old Cider” ambled along patiently and then spastically exploded, double time, with Schaefer pushing the rhythm along on kit, cowbell and washboard.

The Can Kickers revive everything that’s great about old-time music—rough, raw and spooky tunes played with intense focus—but they add frenetic energy and unpretentious DIY style, putting it all over with humor and grit. There’s something about this band that possesses an audience. Midway through the first song, most of the crowd had already stepped from the tables and moved in close enough to see the dust fly from Dan Thompson’s sawing fiddle bow and catch the grin on singer, guitarist and banjo man Dan Spurr’s face as he hollered out the vocals. A sight rarely seen in Seacoast venues is that of Northern New Englanders feeling the mysterious call to buckdance, but toward the second half of the set some listeners had mastered the hyper, loose-limbed pogo-clogging that the Can Kickers seem to inspire.

For the last song in the set, Thompson warned the audience, “We’re gonna play without mikes now, so you have to get closer.”  Down on the dance floor the hoedown got fiercer, the trio surrounded three deep by a mesmerized ring of clapping, bouncing dancers. Spurr and Thompson channeled a wild mountain spirit into their strings while Schaefer writhed on the floor with the washboard scratch never slowing. At crowd demand, the Can Kickers offered one encore to settle the room back down, then released their otherworldly grip on the audience and let a night of visceral, vital roots music come to an end.