BUCHTEL, OHIO – It was Southern Ohio’s own Country Music Hall of Famer Bobby Bare that once song spouted accurately “ ‘bout the time you think you got it all locked in, things change, then they change again.”
And thus, after safely but nervously hibernating through Covid, then having to reinvent itself somewhat and rebuild at a new venue, the Nelsonville Music Fest has changed … but in what feels like – an even better place and light and a more robust future forward. It did the soul good to make our way back last weekend to check in on what is one of the Tri-State region’s longest running and most eclectic camp-out music festivals.
Now in its 17th year, Nelsonville Music Festival, curated by Stuart’s Opera House (and benefiting Stuart’s long-running after-school arts programs in southern Ohio, had to – after a solid decade at Hocking College – pick up stakes and head to a new venue last year.
NMF is now located (with room to be, to breathe and grow) at the expansive, fields and woods of the Snow Fork Event Center, located on the aptly named Happy Hollow Road, just a stone’s throw outside Nelsonville downtown (where it first started and home to the world-famous Rocky Boots).
For our WV peeps, NMF vibes like someone holding a weekend-long Mountain Stage (with 50 acts) at a kindler-gentler woods and fields farm version of that original All Good location outside Masontown, WV. We’ve long called NMF the “Goldilocks of Festivals.” It is big enough to see mind-blowing acts from around the world, a short, no-hassle drive to make it an easy weekend festival, and small – and chill enough – to not need a cell phone or a worry. As it has been from day one, NMF comes naturally-wrapped in that Athens area DIY, community feel with local food and craft vendors, art everywhere by the wonderful and inclusive Passion Works Studios and of course, Zero Waste Productions, which recycles and composts more than 90 percent of the fest’s waste. Even now with four locations and running all the fest beer operations, Art Oestrike, the owner and founder of Jackie O’s is there, and by golly still has time to just stop and chat (with a random Dave) on a Sunday morning golf cart drive.
Here’s a tiny, tiny sliver of the magic that went down up the gravel road and out in the Snow Fork woods…
A Sierra Surprise and Then Some
Typically as an adult I don’t care for surprises, but when NMF announced a surprise set Friday for their Creekside Session, I had a gut feeling it was going to be our talent-laden, traipisin’ West Virginia wildcat (Charleston native Sierra Ferrell) who had canceled a string of six July shows (including 4848 in the home state) due to exhaustion. Sure enough. As if the woods were calling her home and easing her back on stage, Ferrell and her ace string band unit – surrounded by a healthy grove of trees and hammocks upon them – tore into their Grand Ol’ Opry-approved high, lonesome and original sound that Ferrell’s been carving out on her climb up.
While only a few hundred savvy folk got to catch the secret show, you don’t have to hate us – as the hot set will be part of The Sycamore Sessions that will come out in early September. Those sessions are recorded and produced by students and staff of the Ohio University School of Media Arts and Studies and will be released in the weeks following the festival by WOUB. You can view last year’s sessions here and be ready when this year’s shows drop in the next month or so. https://woub.org/tag/sycamore-sessions/
Tanned, rested and ready, Ferrell and the boys then put a hurting on the main stage later that evening sharing a feisty set that included a couple new tunes that are already favorites, “Coal River Bend,” and ”I Can Drive You Crazy (Yes I Can),” both with twin fiddles blazing and samplings from a new album that’s on the way. “This is an awesome festival,” Ferrell said. “There’s a creek down there and some old trees. Go put your hand on your heart and on one of those trees. It might make you feel good.” Indeed.
“Be good to yourself and be good to your neighbors. Life is too hard, otherwise,” Ferrell said before closing with a near Janis Joplin-level vocal send-up of The Beatles “Don’t Let Me Down.” It was much needed festival therapy indeed to see Sierra back in the saddle. Lord knows, WV doesn’t often send a songbird to Nashville but as Connie Smith and Kathy Mattea as our witnesses, watch out when they do.
Crawdaddying Just A Little Closer
One of my favorite parts of festivals is discovering someone that really knocks you out. So much you physically can’t stay away but get sucked up to the front of the stage by their energy. We were walking over to casually sit up on the hill and mind our own business to hear Nick Shoulders and Okay Crawdad on their first night of a 45-day summer run.
When they broke into one of his quirky originals, “Sing It in G for Jesus,” it was a bit like alien tractor beams as we just kept getting drawn closer and closer to the stage.
Shoulders is a twenty-something rat-tailed, Ozarks-raised, Hazel Dickens-influenced OG country singer who naturally weaves in owl hoots, whippoorwill whistling, hella good mouthbow playing and flows out some of the best damn yodeling I’ve heard this side of Riders in the Sky. His wryly-penned originals both socially charged and humorous.
Check out the yodeling supreme song “Whooped If You Will,” the first video and single off of the band’s upcoming album, “All Bad.” And “Never Too Old to Dream: and “They Fenced Us In,” a twist on the old cowboy song, “Don’t Fence Me In.”
Beachcombing Bay Area Clams On the East Side
A rare San Francisco treat was a Friday evening set from Shannon and The Clams. Bassist and grade A badass vocalist Shannon Shaw and her band The Clams (who’ve been making music together since 2009 and sound like it), rarely roll this way. They’ve got all of one more festival gig in July, one in August, four in September but almost exclusively stick to their Bay Area home where Shaw and guitarist Cody Blachard met back in the day at the California College of the Arts.
Blending up pysch-garage, 80s R&B and throwback but freshly-twisted and campy doo-wop rockabilly like they just rolled out of John Waters’ “Hairspray,” the Clams have in recent years chalked up two albums with The Black Keys Dan Auerbach producing including 2022’s “Year of the Spider,” whose infectious ear-worm title cut and Shaw’s smoke-filled R&B vocal chops sound like Amy Winehouse took over a beach movie roller rink.
Turkish Porch Funk Guns Blazing
One consistent vibe through the years of Nelsonville has been its ability to reel in some of the ground-breaking international indie artists creating their own musical gumbos with little worry about following trends. After having to nearly crawl away after an hour of non-stop dancing Friday night to the Porch Stage session with Lido Pimiienta, the Colombian-born Toronto resident who tours with her husband and broke out with a home recording of her blending electronica with Cumbia, hip hop and bursts of Screamo, we knew we couldn’t miss the Saturday night Porch session following the main stage act.
Meaning Golden Day in Turkish, Altin Gun, based out of Amsterdam, burst forth with a folk disco mix of electronica and funk stirring it up an intoxicating blend of Turkish folk and psychedelic rock covers of those folks songs. Adding even more synth-pop to their sound on their last record, Altin Gun’s dynamic Turkish native vocalists, Merve Daşdemir and Erdinç Ecevit Yıldız, create an Abba on Turkish holiday vibe that breaks open the night with the packed crowd shaken and stirred. Altin Gun, which became the first Turkish language band to become nominated for a Grammy in 2019, released its last album Ask in March and was also just featured in the soundtrack of the video game Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (2023).
In a proud dad moment, we told our kids about “discovering” this band, and Altin Gun is No. 3 in his most played bands. OK, well, that’s cool, and ok to be better late than never to the golden days of Turkish disco night fever.
Still Beating With A Rock and Roll Heart
Through the years NMF has hosted a who’s who of America’s most influential artists from Willie Nelson, George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic and John Prine to Loretta Lynn, Mavis Staples and Emmylou Harris. This year, it was prime time for giving a salute to the life’s work, and the kick-ass recovery and new killer album (“Stories From a Rock and Roll Heart”) of Lucinda Gayl Williams. The lil gal from Lake Charles is one hell of tough cookie. Few songwriters knife through my heart like Lucinda – since discovering “Sweet Old World,” back in 1992 thanks to the Hot Burrito show that came after my bluegrass show on WRFL in Lexington. So this one was personal.
The winner of three Grammys during her career (one in folk, one in rock and one in country), Williams’ 15th album, “… Rock and Roll Heart,” has been called “the best rock and roll album of the year,” by No Depression. It is hard to argue with them after hearing Williams and the Buick 6 take a drive on many of those songs (*including some of the six co-written by Belle, WV native and Williams’ tour manager Travis Stephens and her husband Tom Overby).
If rock and roll is anything it’s getting up after a punch, wiping off the blood and the mud and giving it back full fury. If you think you had a tough year in 2020, know that Williams had a year like the Biblical Job. She was trying to write her memoir (which just came out) when her house in East Nashville was hit by a tornado that spring and then after she completed the book, she had a stroke in November of 2020. And all in the middle of the anxiety of the pandemic.
No doubt about it, the set started SHAKY. During the first song, Williams visibly was worried about her voice. You could see and feel this could go bad quick. We set to praying not wanting to feel pity for one of my musical heroes, and she set to spraying. The glory of the throat spray took hold and like a mountain climber, Williams bore down and began clicking in for the climb. Sharing songs to fallen friends, “Stolen Moments,” a new tune she wrote for Tom Petty (who covered her song “Change the Locks”) and “Drunken Angel” for her buddy – the late, great Blaze Foley. Then with Buick 6 getting funky and loose sliding through the swamps on Williams’ trademark Louisiana blues, “Can’t Let Go,” they bore down to reveal that freshly-beating rock and roll heart with Margo Price (who also turned in a killer set later with the Price Tags) coming out to burn the stage down for “Rock and Roll Heart,” “Let’s Get the Band Back Together,” a post-Covid nod to getting back to play, followed by a set-closing Margo and Lucinda cutting loose, laughing, hamming it up and going out guns blazing and crowd singing on Neil Young’s Rockin’ In the Free World.” Strokes and slow-starting engines be damned, now that is rock and roll.
Foraging Before the Crack of Noon
I don’t often get up before the crack of noon at a music festival, but if I do I hope that it’s to go rambling through the woods with Alexis Nikole Nelson.
Nelson, known as “The Black Forager,” and with a tote-sack of some 4.3 million followers on TikTok, led nature walks for “free snacks” during Saturday and Sunday at the fest. It was a nice respite to ramble through the woods with a real “rockstar.” OK, more like a rockweed star (free algae dad joke).
Part nature professor and part self-effacing, confessional comedy, Nelson is the real McCoy, helping people connect to their surroundings through food. “Foraging is a great way to tune into the minor mechanisms of the world,” Nelson said before eyeballing a black cherry sapling. “This is a baby black cherry tree. It’s got that Frito-like bark that’s black like if you left it in the oven for too long.”
I’ve now been in Appalachia long enough to have foraged in Southern Ohio woods with both the late, great (and I guess first generation of media-star forager influencers) Clarence Gray, the Glenwood WV native known as Catfish Man of the Woods and now The Black Forager. And it’s refreshing to see the next generation of foragers and youth hungry to know the old ways and the wealth in the understories of these ancient woods.
With a behemoth crowd meandering through the Creekside Stage paths, Nelson pointed out edible plants a plenty from Wood Sorrel, and Golden Rod, to River Grape tendrils and Curly Dock. Sweet Ms. Nelson left us all with a lot of smiles, plenty of additional foraging knowledge, and one of my favorite quotes from the weekend “If you’re not losing your voice a little in the end, were you ever even excited?”
