Photos by Jeff Kaliss
Abigail Washburn could have been the poster girl for San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, where she helped jump-start two of this past weekend’s mornings, guesting with The Wronglers on Saturday and doing her own set on Sunday. Washburn, you see, plays banjo, and sings with the high, lonesome, girlish tones of some of bluegrass’s best female vocalists from the seven decades of that musical genre’s popularity. But despite her voice and instrument, she’s hardly strictly traditional in her lyrics or arrangements, importing a variety of ingredients from across cultural and geographical borders to help tell her alluring stories.
By the same token, the title song from Washburn’s popular Rounder Records release, City of Refuge, which she showcased at the Banjo Stage, could well serve as the free festival’s theme. For three days, some three-quarters of a million fans, many traveling many miles and several hours to get there and find parking, sought musical refuge along Speedway and Lindley Meadows in the city’s Golden Gate Park, swarming between the 90-plus acts on six stages, without any apparent major disruption to the environment or each other.
I forewent the first night and its star attraction, Chris Isaak, but got to the park early enough on Saturday to catch The Wronglers, the opening act on the Rooster Stage and the best chance to see and hear the festival’s founder and funder, Warren Hellman, singing and playing banjo. Hellman displayed a homey voice and demeanor well-suited to the band’s repertoire from its Heirloom Music album, more old-timey than bluegrass, released earlier this year by Neanderthal Records. The other band members, performing with zest and polish, included alt-country singer/songwriter/guitarist Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and visitor Washburn added a second banjo to several numbers. The song list included a Hellman original, O, Isaias, a tribute to his great-grandfather, an activist financier essential to the development of California and its banks.
Laurie, Kristofferson, and Haggard in the House
The impressive user-friendly setup of the festival featured a delectable variety of comestibles within a short walk of every stage, suitable to midday and evening meals, as well as huge arrays of portable toilets and garbage and recycling stations. While consuming Saturday lunch, our family settled in near the Towers of Gold Stage to witness Hugh Laurie, familiar to us as the imperious title star of the Fox TV series House, in a thoroughly likeable transformation as a soulful, British-accented pop performer. We moved on to the Star Stage in time for veterans Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard, the latter of whom offered a shout-out to “The Marijuana Capital of the World” before launching into his beloved (and fondly ridiculed) Okie From Muskogee. Haggard, who’s been battling health issues, actually sounded in better voice than the somewhat ragged Kristofferson, but the C&W hits offered by both were gratefully accepted by the crowd.
The pair was followed on that same stage by Irma Thomas, at 70 a more convincing beneficiary of the rejuvenating power of music, her voice strong and sensuous as she delivered soulful ballads from her hometown of New Orleans. The cool of early evening on the Arrow Stage was ushered in by a return of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, joining the other two members of The Flatlanders, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, in performing all three’s songs, with instrumentation and melodies familiar from country music but lyrics outstanding in their wit and poetry.
Abigail Washburn was well-positioned as the Sunday morning herald on the Towers of Gold Stage, her vulnerable angelic voice accompanied by both her own banjo and the brilliantly articulated banjo of her husband, Bela Fleck, the celebrity guest on her set. Washburn’s original material also bore a rather otherworldly but attractive affect. Fleck’s later effort on the Banjo Stage shared virtuosity with bassist Edgar Meyer and tabla player Zakir Hussain, but the result seemed, to my ears, more showy and less emotionally compelling than his collaboration with his spouse, as well as perhaps the festival’s furthest deviation from the bluegrass on which it had been founded in 2000.
Those remaining at the Banjo Stage, the festival’s biggest, for the remainder of the day, got their serving of Sunday gospel with the Blind Boys of Alabama, whose close vocal harmony, secured by many decades of collaboration, was thrilling. Close harmony took on a different tone and color with Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys, the 84-year-old Stanley representing one of the few surviving founding fathers of bluegrass. His solo a cappella rendition of O, Death, familiar to many from the film soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, was a crowd favorite, as was Stanley’s charmingly old-fashioned manner of promoting both his CDs and his grandson, a member of the band. Pure-voiced country diva Emmylou Harris brought the evening to a close, as she has done before, doing some hits and a new song about her departed mentor and companion, country rock pioneer Gram Parsons. He’d have grasped the uniqueness of this festival intuitively.