Rosie Flores at Exit/In
We were four days into AmericanaFest 2019 on Friday the 13th, and the action hadn't slowed down a bit. With that in mind, three correspondents headed into the field under the light of a full moon.
Deferring to Kitty Wells’ theological wisdom, we’ll concede it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels. But Someone or Something metaphysical must be responsible for Rosie Flores.
There’s no rational explanation for Flores, who at age 69 is still melding styles together in a hearty musical chili: spicy, hot and irresistible. The Austin, Texas icon took the stage at Exit/In in Roy Orbison shades and a shimmering bright red jacket, the Rockabilly Filly commanding the stage like a puckish seraph.
Hindsight being what it is, Flores often gets credit — belated though it may be — for being one of the key progenitors of what we know as alt-country, blending rockabilly, honky-tonk and even jazz with the traditional Mexican music she grew up with. Her latest album Simple Case of the Blues adds old blues tunes to the amalgam.
Like the best of the neo-honky-tonkers she no doubt inspired, Flores’ guitar work is innovative but still evocative of the older styes. Embracing the AmericanaFest structure — artists typically get about 45 minutes — Flores worked a blistering set with precious little chatter. It was an all-killer, no-filler blast through her 30-year catalog, capped off by a tune that grew out of the iconic opening bars of ZZ Top’s “La Grange.”
Chuck Mead
It’s tough to follow a legend in any circumstance but former BR549 frontman Chuck Mead was up to the task. Clad in a maroon suit and glasses so dark it made us wonder if he truly had eyes behind them, he led his Grassy Knoll Boys through songs from his new record Close to Home. Mead doesn’t reinvent the wheel on this LP, but there’s no need to — it rolls along just fine. Primed by Flores and tuned up by Mead, the crowd broke into spontaneous two-stepping, the singleton shufflers backing away and forming the Americana version of the circle pit as dancing pairs rotated around within.
Mead worked his set in the Flores mold, working with the Boys to keep it high-energy and breezy. Mead’s best songs now, as they were with BR549, are the ones where his tongue is firmly in cheek. “Daddy Worked the Pole” is a charming tale of a family doing dang near everything to provide for their children, a universal sentiment told irreverently.
Maybe God isn’t in the honky-tonks, but Whoever dwells there is just as immortal and omnipotent.
It was standing-room only at The Station Inn as Ordinary Elephant took the stage. The group was playing for Americana fans who’d literally traveled from other corners of the globe: One woman explained in between sets that she and her husband had come from New Zealand for the fest.
The married duo of Crystal Harin-Damore and Pete Damore — who have been on the road for the past five years and received rave reviews for their latest record Honest — delighted the faithful with quiet folk tunes about a horse, a grandmother, a Vietnam war veteran and the challenge of not passing on bigotry from generation to generation. Harin-Damore also read a poem from a recently published collection, a nostalgic ode that featured the same subtle grace present in the group’s songs.
The undeniable fact, though, is that Amythyst Kiah completely owned the night at this venue, with a star-making performance and a set she called the favorite of her career. The Johnson City-based folk-rock-blueswoman who represents one-fourth of Our Native Daughters — the group that also features Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell and who opened the Americana Honors and Awards on Sept. 11 — informed the crowd she’s finishing a new record that will be out next year. It’s a good thing too, because judging by the number of people who headed back to buy music from her dad at the merch table, it will be in-demand.
Backed by a two-man band on drums and keyboard, Kiah showed off her dynamic vocal prowess and range as a songwriter, with loud rock tunes and quiet, haunting acoustic folk songs. One standout was the engrossing “Wild Turkey,” from her forthcoming album, a haunting and beautiful story about long-delayed grief and suppressed pain. Toward the set’s end, Kiah brought up Giddens and Russell for two songs, and the assembled group closed with the forceful Our Native Daughters anthem “Black Myself.”
The standing ovation that followed lasted at least a minute, and if Kiah wanted to, the crowd would have let her play another hour.
Champion multi-instrumentalist and Station Inn veteran Mark O’Connor was up next. After an astounding solo instrumental guitar song that was more like an athletic feat, O’Connor brought up his wife, violinist Maggie O’Connor. The duo performed a cover of Jason Isbell’s “Something to Love” before turning back to more instrumental tunes, with Mark swapping out his weapon of choice regularly.
Katie Pruitt at The High Watt
Over at The High Watt, Georgia-born and Nashville-residing songsmith Katie Pruitt and her band charged into their set with a droning, rollicking take on “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” that felt almost like a dare to any precipitation that might be considering coming down. The songs they played ranged from galloping rockers to country-tinged ballads to R&B-schooled slow jams, but that kind of purposeful boldness is a hallmark of Pruitt’s catalog. As her band vamped on the intro to “Loving Her,” she explained that growing up in a conservative family made it extremely difficult to come to terms with her identity as a gay woman. Some of her earliest songs were about girls — but with the pronouns changed to avoid unpleasant conversations. Looking back as an adult, she wasn’t happy with that decision.
“I grew up and I moved away, and I realized I wanted to stop hiding that,” she said, “because it’s doing a disservice to everyone who’s going through the same thing as me — just to make myself more comfortable, or just to make other people more comfortable. This song is called ‘Loving Her,’ and it’s about being proud of being different. At the end of the day, we’re all the fucking same, that’s the funny part about it.”
Even though they were working through hangovers from post-show drinks on the General Jackson the night before, Pruitt & Co. didn’t gloss over the nuances of a single tune. They built the excitement for her forthcoming album Expectations, due in February, to a fever pitch, and their blistering performance of the title track (whose music video hit the web Friday) ended the set with an exclamation point.
Lilly Hiatt at The High Watt
A couple of hours later, Lilly Hiatt took that energy one notch higher with help from a ready-to-rock band composed of MVP guitarist Sean Thompson, bassist Robert Hudson and drummer-engineer Kate Haldrup. At the core of the set were songs from Hiatt’s singular 2017 LP Trinity Lane, seasoned by two years of intense touring. The album features a lot of discussions about coping with change while keeping your own center of gravity. “Records,” a song about the way a personal connection to music can help in that process, is a standout among standouts on the album, and was a highlight of the show, aided by a just-this-side-of-unhinged solo from Thompson.
Change, of course, is a constant. In her introduction to “Trinity Lane,” Hiatt seemed to allude to the development that’s reshaping every corner of Nashville, and not always for the better.
“I’m still living off of Trinity Lane, though my time there may not be long,” she said as she introduced the titular tune. “We’ve seen a lot of shit go down, but we’re just going to keep strong and keep rockin’, and hold it down and not lose faith in this beautiful, beautiful city.”
Hiatt recently told Blount County’s The Daily Times that she’s been recording new material with former Cage the Elephant guitarist Lincoln Parish. As contributor Edd Hurt pointed out, Hiatt has mastered the challenge of evolving without losing what was already great in her work — a useful guidepost for the whole big-tent genre — and that leaves plenty to be excited about.
