Exactly 50 years ago Aug. 30, Bob Dylan released one of his masterpieces, "Highway 61 Revisited." It chronicles an important juncture in Dylan's career. Just more than a month before the landmark album dropped, Dylan received a chorus of boos when he opted for an electric backing band at the Newport Folk Festival. Many folk musicians and other critics chastised their beloved political poet for abandoning his folk beginnings.
"Highway 61" only reinforced Dylan's desire to shift away from acoustic-first folk music. It features the angry snarls of "Like a Rolling Stone," the fast-paced talking allegory of "Tombstone Blues" and the piano and electric guitar washes of "Queen Jane Approximately."
Exactly 50 years later, on Aug. 30, concertgoers at the Fayetteville Roots Festival heard the reverberations of Dylan's decisions. Some arrived more directly, as main stage performer Jimmy LaFave offered "Queen Jane Approximately" and the Watkins Family Hour just a few hours later ripped through "Tombstone Blues" with Fiona Apple on vocals. The latter, in particular, was a spectacle to the degree I got chills while listening.
Dylan changed music when he went electric, but perhaps not in the ways his critics bemoaned at the time. Dylan didn't leave folk behind entirely in 1965. He just decorated it in new ways, a theme present in nearly all the acts of the Fayetteville Roots Festival. Few played traditional folk or bluegrass music, and even fewer lugged out only a guitar and their best melody. Smartly, the Roots Festival does not bill itself as a folk fest or a bluegrass festival or anything but a Roots Festival. The bands themselves generally describe themselves as producers of Americana, a hard-to-define but easier-to-discern variety of music. And we are lucky for it.
The spirit of adventure certainly permeated the Roots Festival weekend, with musicians doing strange things in wonderful ways. Like Fiona Apple, whose performance I will remember for quite some time. She came to support the collaborative act known as the Watkins Family Hour, a project led by siblings Sara and Sean Watkins. The word "manic" gets thrown around with some frequency to describe performances, but it is rarely more appropriate than for Apple's participation in Sunday night's closing show. When not singing, she slinked down to her knees and waited. She would spring up again to belt out her turns at the microphone on songs such as "Tombstone Blues" and Dolly Parton's "Jolene," another stunner.
Other acts during the festival joined in the creative spirit. Punch Brothers, for instance, covered classical composer Claude Debussy's piano movement "Passepied" without the benefit of any piano -- just five bluegrass instruments. John Fullbright might be the most Dylan-esque of any of the acts. A young prodigy who plays guitar, piano and harmonica -- sound familiar? -- Fullbright delivered a pair of wonderful sets, one Aug. 27 at the festival VIP party the Garner farm in Fayetteville and another Aug. 28 on the main stage in the Fayetteville Town Center. He has songs with sass, songs with meaning, songs with regret and sometimes all those emotions in the same tune. The friends of the festival night/VIP party has to be one of the coolest nights in Fayetteville, with its focus on chef-made food and fantastic music. How good was this year's event? When Fullbright launched into the song "Happy," a bright meteor streaked across the sky in full view of those watching the stage. You can't plan for that kind of magic. You can only hope to be around when it happens.
Fayetteville, meanwhile, can thank Bernice Hembree, Bryan Hembree and Jerrmy Gawthrop, the festival's founders, for putting us all in position to see great moments. I can nitpick the festival, too -- the food lines are uncomfortable and complicated in the cramped Town Center lobby, and some sound and scheduling issues stole some of the thunder from J.D. McPherson's set on Aug. 28.
But I don't expect to remember the festival for those reasons. Festivals, I'm reminded, are not easy propositions. Just this week, we learned the Phases of the Moon Festival, scheduled for mid-October on Mulberry Mountain, would be canceled.
We're lucky to have Roots Festival, which draws fans from more than 20 states. And we're lucky to get a yearly lesson in Americana, a genre that remains fresh and new. Who could have guessed folk would be the center of musical innovation 50 years running?
NAN What's Up on 09/04/2015