After an amazing Friday kicked off the 40th Annual Huck Finn Jubilee Bluegrass Music Festival at Cucamonga-Guasti Regional Park in Ontario, California, I was thrilled to be returning on Saturday morning for a nearly twelve-hour day of bands, workshops, moonshine, dancing, and new and old wonderful friends. Speaking of friends, one of the things I love the most about the festival crowd, especially so many of the lovely Huck Finn folks, is the ever-present idealism of “Strangers stopping strangers, just to shake their hand.” I met and saw a plethora of delightful and impassioned music lovers and stalwart community members all throughout the weekend. I so enjoyed seeing smiling faces sporting shirts with the “Blues for Allah” or “Cats Under the Stars” album covers, along with other groovy bought and/or homemade Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, Fare Thee Well, or Dead & Co. shirts. Looking out at panoply of festival-goers displaying their favorite tie-dye or other iconic Deadhead imagery, it felt like a giant collage of humanity, with this particular tapestry made of beautiful pieces gathered together to spell out, “If you’re here, you’re family.”
I knew going into Day Two of the Huck Finn Jubilee that it was going to be the longest day at the festival by a mile. But I never would have thought it could have flown by so quickly. I spent as much of it as I could covering the Della Mae beat, as this Grammy-nominated group of women are one of my favorite bands to see live, and whenever they come through Southern California I find myself wishing they would do so more often. At the outset of the festival, I enthusiastically put Della Mae alongside The Punch Brothers and Peter Rowan Band as one of the bands I was most looking forward to seeing this past weekend. Even as I was bolting to Riverside County in the early morning to make their 11:30am set, I was nervous the Della Mae set would fall prey to the early morning festival crowd still being in bed or facing the stage as they drank their morning coffee and waited for it to take affect.
On the contrary, no one seemed more surprised than “The Dellas” that the audience was as large and as receptive as they were. At one point during their set, front-woman Celia Woodsmith laughed and said, “I didn’t think anybody would be here. You guys weren’t partying enough last night.”
June 12th 2013 was the first time I saw Della Mae live, at Hotel Café in Los Angeles. While they never play for long enough, their Huck Finn set was an outstanding way to celebrate everything I love about this band, and to have it recognized by such a large and attentive audience. Their set featured material from their Grammy-nominated sophomore album, 2013’s “This World Oft Can Be,” along with a handful of the songs from last year’s self-titled follow-up. If anyone wants to dig deeper, I highly recommend listening to “Letter From Down the Road/And Other Things” which kicked off both their second album and Huck Finn set, and “Boston Town,” which begins their last album and now serves as a highlight for every show. I’m always excited to hear The Dellas to perform a completely different and vast selection of cover songs at every show, and this one included memorable renderings of “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’” by Loretta Lynn, “He’s Gonna Marry Me” by Dolly Parton, “I Wish It Would Rain” by Nanci Griffith, and their beloved version of “Sixteen Tons.” No band made greater use of being at a festival all weekend than Della Mae, and Step One was having the members of Special Consensus onstage for “Highway 40 Blues” which Della Mae recorded with them on their latest album.
Before Della Mae’s encore, mandolinist Jenni Lyn Gardner announced that she and Adam Steffey from the Boxcars and the Dan Tyminski Band were hosting “Mando Mix Boys vs Girls” at the Bessie Jammer Pavilion before The Dellas were doing a livestream event with Special Consensus. I decided the blow off the next main stage set to go to the workshop, as I decided take as much advantage as possible of getting to hear and see so much of The Dellas this weekend.
Steffey and Gardner put on a forty-five minute workshop that included some great mandolin picking and was also informative, engaging, and entertaining. Steffey effectively moderated what he billed as the, “Beauty and the Beast workshop,” mostly by running it as a long-form Q&A. Some of the most memorable insights Steffey shared included, “A lot young people, they want to learn a lot of licks or they want to learn speed… Rhythm is the thing that makes for fun playing,” “I hate the metronome, but I recommend you use one,” and sharing how he had a nerve surgically moved to ensure the quality and longevity of his playing. I asked Gardner how she felt about Della Mae’s music being described as “progressive” when for a generation who was introduced to bluegrass by Nickel Creek, there approach has always felt categorically traditionalist. For a woman who I believe is in her early twenties (I’m not asking), Garnder answered with what might have been the most trenchant and astute statement I heard all festival. In addition to talking about her personal and the band’s collective range of influences, she stated, “I think we’re taken as more progressive than we really are, because of the simple fact that we’re all women.” It’s been almost exactly three days since she said that and I keep mulling it over. I leave it there for now and hope that it gives everybody “Something to think about on the ride home,” as I like to say.
After wrapping up the workshop by performing a dual mandolin version of “Cluck Old Hen,” Gardner went to her livestream event with the Dellas across the way and Steffey headed to the main-stage for his set with the Dan Tyminski Band. The Dan Tyminski Band was the afternoon favorite for the bluegrass traditionalists. The set was exactly what everybody expected from it, in that it was seventy-five minutes of straight-ahead, old-school bluegrass being headed up by one of our nation’s most beloved figures in the genre. It’s always heartwarming to hear Dan Tyminski perform. I could rattle off a list of accolades and sales records he achieved as the singing voice of George Clooney in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” But, in a way that resonates more deeply than any figure or fact, Tyminski has spent his career doing meaningful work preserving and furthering the cause of traditional bluegrass. I’m not saying I want to listen to traditional bluegrass all the time. But I sleep easier at night knowing that Tyminski and the previous night’s headliner David Grisman are making sure it will always be there. Case in point, the set’s highlights included “Dark Hallow” and the day’s first of three versions (I’m not kidding) of “Man of Constant Sorrow.”
I spent the next set doing interviews with two of the ladies from Della Mae (look for them here in the coming days). Hence while The Cleverlys were on I wasn’t able to give their set the attention it may have deserved. What I heard were mostly ironic bluegrass versions of “All the Single Ladies,” “Gangnam Style,” and “I Kissed a Girl,” mixed in with what might best be described as “hillbilly standup,” essentially taking Jeff Foxworthy’s shtick and replacing rednecks with hillbillies. While I enjoyed their version of “Walk Like An Egyptian,” the whole act wore thin for me and I wasn’t sure if it could sustain its ninety-minute run-time. As my attention was in and out, I kept looking around to read the audience’s reaction. They seemed split between people who loved it and people who were struggling to make sense of what was going on.
The hour-and-forty-five minute Leftover Salmon set wins the prize for the most fun I had at the entire festival. As much as I hate to even whisper this out loud, let alone put it in writing, I hadn’t seen them live before this past Saturday. Though I can now say in all certainty that they can count me among the newly converted. The exhalant burst of musical experimentation and energy included Della Mae’s fiddle player Kimber Ludiker sitting in on “Squirrelheads and Gravy” and Bonnie Paine from Elephant Revival on washboard and Jay Starling from Love Canon on dobro for “Keep On Truckin’.” Singer/guitarist Vince Herman said, “Festivals are all about picking tunes and hanging with your friends.” By the time the band got to “Gulf of Mexico” from their 2012 album, “Aquatic Hitchhiker,” so many of those friends were coming on and off stage that it was becoming hard to keep track. At one point, all of these lovely friends had been playing so much elated, experimental, and exuberant jamband music, I said to one of my friends that this must have been what the Grateful Dead meant by “A band Beyond Description.” Toward to the end of the set, Herman looked out at the gestalt of the Jubilee and mused, “I think it’s more like it used to be now than it ever has been.” That should be the motto for Huck Finn 2017.
The headlining set for the night with The Soggy Bottom Boys, playing songs from ““O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and similar traditional bluegrass material for two hours. The set opened with “In the Jailhouse Now,” which got the entire field (as far as I could tell) up, dancing, and as close to the stage as possible. Though the set was also pretty straightforward, the energy both onstage and in the audience was absolutely terrific. Tyminski fronting a Soggy Bottom Boys set featuring Jerry Douglas was supposed to be a remarkable life experience, and this one lived up to and exceeded all expectations. I couldn’t take my eyes off of Douglas for almost the entire set. His smile was so beaming and his joy so palpable, I kept thinking to myself, “I don’t think I’ve seen anyone have more fun making music. In my entire life. Ever.” What Douglas was feeling clearly influenced his playing, and his dobro was providing a rhythmic drive that kept the energy as high as possible throughout the set. They played “Man of Constant Sorrow” twice, but Douglas and the band made sure that energy stayed up for a set that somehow managed to run the length of a marathon with the energy of a sprint. Excellent work, boys.
After The Soggy Bottom Boys wrapped up, festival figurehead Joe Craven announced that Ludiker and some of the members from Elephant Revival would be jamming a bit before the “Late Night Square Dance featuring Hogslop String Band.” As lovely as all of that sounded, we just wrapped up and epic day of remarkable festival-going, and the next day promised another jam-packed (pun intended) itinerary. Although it was my first Huck Finn Jubilee, here’s to “One More Saturday Night” of live music. It’s been said that there’s a fine line between Saturday night and Sunday morning. Check back here tomorrow to see how this particular Sunday morning unfolded. And as Jerry would say, “I’ll meet you at the Jubilee.”
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