Texas singer/songwriter/sage Ray Wylie Hubbard once said that he’d been learning to play the mandolin and was asked to play a bluegrass festival. He said, Well, you know, we’re not bluegrass. Still, he took the gig and merely played his regular set twice as fast. Apparently the crowd was so angry they rushed the stage. “Luckily,” Ray Wiley said, “we had plenty of time to finish the song.” The insinuation, of course, is that bluegrass festival attendees are elderly folks tripping over their lawn chairs in a rage when they don’t hear enough “I’ll Fly Away” (said to be the “Freebird” of bluegrass). With the new generation of artists like Sir Billy of Strings, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull, that version of a bluegrass crowd is a rare speckled bird. The Infamous Stringdusters, OGs of jamgrass, play fairly traditional bluegrass until a couple of verses in, when they jump the tracks into tangents of full-blown, improvisational inventiveness that end who-knows-where and who-knows-when. The mix supplies enough for everybody to get dusted, lawn chair crowd included. And, I might add, they do slip in “I’ll Fly Away” from time to time. The Last Revel opens.
7:30 p.m. July 14 at the Ryman
116 Rep. John Lewis Way N.
