This week we’re working on an assortment of
related music here at Now Playing World Headquarters. It just so happens in
the next 10 days Springfield plays host to a collection of top-notch,
world-class entertainers from the traditional singer-songwriter and
bluegrass genres.
Maybe I dwell on this style of music too much for
some folks’ taste, but I feel a significant attraction to roots
music. As a songwriter, I find the basis for forming ideas so relevant and
so evident in how songs are conceived and perceived, transformed and
performed that origins are of the utmost importance. I just had a rather
odd and possibly insightful idea about explaining this notion by comparing
the writing of a song with growing a plant.
Let’s say some songwriters come from a
hydroponics place, where manufactured nutrients are piped in while other
tunesmiths get nourishment from more organic sources. The plant grown in
artificially constructed circumstances may appear healthy and robust, but
in reality is lacking in substance and vitality. Then again, the one grown
in a more natural way, feeding on well-composted earth, fortified with a
strong foundation from years of absorbing what has come before, grows with
less outward perfection, but from within is sound and vigorous.
That may sound like a bunch of crap (which when
decomposed makes wonderful humus), but helps explain why I feel writers
based in tradition produce songs that nourish our imaginations, providing
good food for thought, shall we say.
In the third month of the fledgling Sangamon
Songwriters Series, organizer Lucas Westcott booked a fine specimen of an
organically produced singer-songwriter in Jonathan Byrd. The highly
respected and thoroughly righteous guy with a guitar fed himself on the
Appalachian sounds of his home state of North Carolina in the late 1990s,
then started traveling and playing full time in 2000. Winner of the
prestigious Kerrville New Folk songwriting award in 2003, Byrd released his
fifth recording, The Law and the Lonesome, in 2008, describing it as “Hank Williams and
Townes Van Zandt meet on the high plains and tell ghost stories,”
which certainly sounds like an interesting get together. When talking about
Byrd and his music, Tom Paxton, one of the great and lasting masters of the
’60s folk scene put it this way: “What a treat to hear someone
so deeply rooted in tradition, yet growing in his own beautiful way.”
Byrd performs 7 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 6, at the Trout Lily Café.
Chris Knight, another singer-songwriter guy raised on
traditional ways, plays the Bedrock 66 Live! concert series on Nov. 15 at
the Hoogland Center for the Arts. Knight, now 10 years and five albums into
telling hard-boiled stories from his homeland in eastern Kentucky, sounds
like a decent cross between Steve Earle’s edginess and John
Mellencamp’s sense of song. Knight headed to Nashville early in his
career, landed a nice record deal, and scored a few decent cuts by big-name
artists, yet always stayed true to his vision of telling stories of down
and out folks picking themselves up and dealing with what life dealt them.
His latest offering, Heart of Stone
(Drifter’s Church), came out on
Sept. 2.
Our last artists in the naturally produced section of
the music store fill this whole weekend performing during the Greater
Downstate Indoor Bluegrass Festival at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The
long-running event always hosts some of the biggest names in bluegrass, and
this year features the 2008 International Bluegrass Music
Association’s Entertainer of the Year, Dailey & Vincent. The high
velocity, up-to-date bluegrass group features Jamie Dailey, recently of
Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, and Darrin Vincent, formerly of Ricky Skaggs
and Kentucky Thunder. Other main acts include Rhonda Vincent and the Rage,
the Grascals, Bobby Osborne, and Kenny and Amanda Smith. The Festival runs
Friday through Sunday and as always, there is much more to it than the
outstanding headliners. Many audience members are also pickers and players
who stay the weekend at the hotel and create a whole other festival with
spontaneous picking parties throughout the place.
And so ends our feast of finely grown, home-style,
unprocessed music.
Contact Tom Irwin at tirwin@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2008.
