2 days ago
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- Boston Globe
Saturday brings twists of country to the Newport Folk Festival
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There was much more in between, of course, both of folk and allied roots forms.
on 'Exile.'
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Bonny Light Horseman performs at the Fort Stage on Saturday at the Newport Folk Festival.
Heather Diehl/For The Boston Globe
Their performance Saturday concentrated on songs from their latest record, 'Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free,' along with a couple of older favorites. All of it served to display the band's singular sensibility as well as the marvelous twining harmonies produced by Johnson and the third Horseman, Anaïs Mitchell.
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With his recent debut solo release, 'American Romance,' Lukas Nelson is touring under his own name, and so he came back to Newport in a new guise, without his long-running band Promise of the Real. That new guise leaned country, from the short back-and-sides and the cowboy hat Nelson sported, to the songs he played, and it brought a lot of looking back.
He started with the first song he ever wrote, at age 11, the fiddle and steel-filled 'You Were It.' He prefaced 'Just Outside Of Austin' by saying 'let's go home,' and he sounded like he was channeling dad Willie Nelson's voice and guitar as he sang and played it. Later, he tacked a run-though of Willie's classic 'Bloody Mary Morning' onto his own 'Ladder of Love.' He ended with the title song from his new album, a song inspired by the life he lived coming of age on the road with his father.
Katie Crutchfield, in the guise of her Waxahatchee project, has also been doing something new of late, exploring country-folk territory with her elliptical lyrics and her remarkable, off-kilter vocal style on her latest LP, 'Tigers Blood.' The bulk of what she played Saturday came from that record, along with one ('Problem With It') from
Given that several of the songs on the new record are also evocative of Bob Dylan, it seemed apropos to be hearing them at Newport in the wake of last year's Dylan biopic,
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Waxahatchee performs at the Fort stage in Fort Adams State Park on the second day of the Newport Folk Festival.
Heather Diehl/For The Boston Globe
What was new about
He sang seated for most of the set; his band was more acoustic, and more dialed back (until he brought it home by going electric) and he featured songs from the understated acoustic 'Fathers & Sons' project that he released last year (one of them, 'Whoever You Turn Out to Be,' written about and for his sons, caused the heart-on-his-sleeve Combs to choke up mid-song).
Fans enjoy Waxahatchee's performance during the second day of the Newport Folk Festival.
Heather Diehl/For The Boston Globe
He added a couple of covers, too: Darrell Scott's deep-holler lament 'You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive,' and, yes, 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' (his version following Keb' Mo's, Combs noted).
If at the end of the day, much of what we heard still sounded a lot like the mainstream country world from which it came, Combs attempted to fit what he did to where he was, and he largely succeeded.
NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL
At Fort Adams State Park, Newport, R.I., Saturday
Stuart Munro can be reached at
