Fest digs back to traditional roots
Even rockers recast their songs to bluegrass beat
After four days of nonstop concerts and allnight jams, thousands of festivalgoers packed their tents on Monday and headed out of this box canyon.
Many took home mudstained, sunburned skin, hangovers for the ages, and memories of the best music festival in years.
The 35th Telluride Bluegrass Festival sold out, with 10,000 tickets sold for each day, Thursday through Sunday, maintaining Telluride's title as the most popular regular musical event in the Rockies.
This year's festival may be remembered for its uncharacteristic emphasis on traditional bluegrass. After all, Telluride has built its reputation as the vanguard of the bluegrass movement, over the years featuring such nonbluegrass headliners as Jewel, James Taylor and Counting Crows.
This year's lineup relied on the country's top pickers, fiddlers and high-lonesome harmonizers - Del McCoury, Yonder Mountain String Band, Ricky Skaggs' Kentucky Thunder, Spring Creek and Hot Rize, among others.
Even some nontraditional songsters reinvented themselves as bluegrassers. The most surprising?
John (where has he been for 30 years?) Oates of Hall and Oates fame. The 1970s pop star joined the Sam Bush Band for a set mixed with old bluegrass tunes and transformed Hall and Oates hits. (Among the most fun was "Man Eater," done in a bluegrass/reggae style that had the audience alternately cheering, singing along and laughing.)
Bruce Hornsby also joined the parade of reinvented pop stars, playing and singing with Skaggs and crew. It's amazing how fresh "The Way It Is" sounds as a bluegrass tune.
Other highlights of the fest included:
• Two amazing festival discoveries: North Carolina singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, who charmed the crowd with her sweet voice and introspective lyrics; and the duo of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who, belting "Falling Slowly" into one mike, re-created the romantic scene that earned them an Oscar for the movie "Once."
• Leftover Salmon's energetic rendition of its early hit "Euphoria."
• The all-girl old-time- music group Uncle Earl (providing gender balance to an always testosterone-dominated festival) underscored a tune with a complicated game of patty cake. (Banjo wizard Béla Fleck sat next to me in the audience. I asked him if a boy group could get away with that. He shook his head.)
• Both the Sam Bush Band and The Duhks, on separate nights, performed lively cover versions of Led Zeppelin's "A Whole Lotta Love."
