And The Bands Played On: Big State Festival Day Two

Kelly Willis and The Wrights were on the brink of starting their 12:30 sets when we arrived at the festival grounds on Sunday. Writing the Saturday wrap-up kept us from showing up earlier to watch Colin Gilmore and Ashley Ray. Our famished stomachs led us straight to the nearest food while we half-heartedly listened to Willis sing one of her husband’s tunes, “Wrapped”. After satiating our stomach’s desire we headed to the Bud Light stage to catch Craig Morgan doing his thing.

We stuck around long enough to catch a couple of his tunes hoping he’d break into his latest single, “International Harvester”, if only to see how Big State sponsor John Deere, who had a few machines and staff sitting in the vicinity, would react. Unfortunately if it did happen, it wasn’t while we were around since we scurried off to see whether or not Kevin Fowler would turn down the usually present sexual overtones in his cranked up show. He didn’t.

Fowler seemingly thrives on audience reaction and he has no reservations about getting those reactions by any means possible, whether it’s referring to the ladies’ tails during “Speak of the Devil”, performing pelvic thrusts on “Feels Good Don’t It”, or his off-color stage banter. People love it, though. Once again, we only stayed for a few songs before bouncing off to the BMI stage to catch a dude by the name of Jerrod Niemann. You might not have heard of him, but you’ve surely heard his work. Does the Garth Brooks performed Chris LeDoux tribute “Good Ride Cowboy” ring a bell?

He possessed a bold, charismatic stage presence and was witty to boot, quipping that he and his band don’t normally drink on stage, but he was hoping that if he drank enough it’d double his audience. If so, he would have been seeing thirty-six onlookers. He put on a great, low-key show, covering the George Jones song penned by James Taylor, “Bartender Blues”, and singing a new song he wrote with the John Anderson. Afterwards he performed an impressive, carbon copy impersonation of Anderson singing the same ditty. For the final song, a guy from the crowd got up in front of the stage to put on the single most creative air guitar performance I have ever witnessed. He serenaded a female onlooker during the solo before briefly climbing on stage and jumping off, an incident that brought security out of the shadows. To their credit, they realized he was harmless and let him finish the rousing performance on his knees.

Willis Alan Ramsey had already started his mostly acoustic set when we arrived at the John Deere stage. The crowd was small and the performance intimate, but the muted sound of Heartland’s instruments drifted across the field creating somewhat of an annoyance. Ramsey took it in stride, commenting that his next song would be in the same key as “those guys.” Jim made the spot-on observation that Ramsey has a distinct Kenny Rogers quality to his voice. Knowing that we have a lot of Sunny Sweeney fans, and being fans ourselves, we scurried over to the discreet BMI stage halfway through Ramsey’s show.

As she shamelessly pointed out, her country band featured a steel guitar and it was put to good use as she performed a doctored version of “Folsom Prison Blues” and other songs from her album Heartbreaker’s Hall of Fame. She’d only been playing for thirty minutes when we realized Gary Allan and Jack Ingram were taking their respective stages.

Allan had perhaps the most stage props of any show during the weekend and after realizing that he wouldn’t be deviating from his non-festival performances we moseyed on over to catch our first live Ingram spectacle…and what an experience it was. His stage presence was awesome, the energy high, and he possessed the confidence of a seasoned performer. Like so many times before, we left a little early to go stake out a spot at brothers Bruce and Charlie Robison’s scaffold.

Charlie rocked out on the electric guitar for his up tempo numbers while Bruce, accompanied by his trusty acoustic, soared on his ballads–taking the audience through an emotional gamut of highs and lows. By the time they reached “My Brother and Me” the audience was eating out of their hands. It was the first time all day that I forgot my feet were sore and blistered. Kelly Willis joined The Brothers Robison on “Angry All the Time”, a hit made popular by the festival’s headliner Tim McGraw, and later graced the audience for a second time on “Travelin’ Soldier”. Closing with “What Would Willie Do” would have been ironic, considering the artist who made that particular song famous preceded Bruce Robison’s performance, and the artist whom the song was written about followed him.

Willie Nelson was Willie Nelson, there’s not much more you can say. He opened with the Johnny Bush penned “Whiskey River” and played a few of his hits while letting sister Bobbie Nelson take a solo on the piano in between. From the back, his sound was slightly overlapped by Trace Adkins, who was quite enjoyable when he was singing some of his earlier hits. He did a little doctoring himself on “I Left Something Turned On At Home” by singing “and it ain’t halfway through my favorite Willie Nelson song” as his homage to the man across the field. While camping out yet again in front of the Verizon stage before The Flatlanders, Adkins introduced “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk”. The older couple next to us groaned as he reached the chorus. Fortunately for them, it wasn’t much longer before Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore erased any lingering thoughts of badonkadonks. The trio of mini-legends kept the onlookers dancing and toes tapping throughout the entire set. Jimmie Dale Gilmore blew me away with his crisp vocals. Joe Ely, sporting a slightly exposed t-shirt with George Bush and the caption “Wanker,” closed the set with the humorous “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy”.

And finally, the moment we had all been waiting for…well, a lot of us at least–Tim Mcgraw and The Dancehall Doctors. Rain had begun to fall by this time, but there was a sizeable crowd willing to sacrifice a few drops of water to catch one of today’s biggest country music stars. McGraw opened the headlining set of a country music festival with a Steve Miller classic (that I have admittedly never heard), “The Joker”, before rattling off some of his own hits. He introduced a song from a new album he’s working on, “Southern Voice”, which will go down as one of the biggest name checking songs in the history of name checking songs. Feeling a little underwhelmed and wanting to beat the traffic we decided to split forty-five minutes before the set was scheduled to end. Fortunately for us, we missed the worst of the rain and a show that reportedly ended earlier than it was supposed to.

Years from now when I reminisce on the inaugural Big State Festival I’ll tell about Charlie and Bruce Robison serenading those willing to lend an ear, The Flatlanders with smiles plastered to their faces as they enjoyed the adoring fans, watching Billy Joe Shaver excite witnesses with his acrobatics, seeing Charlie Louvin live in person, and watching Drew Kennedy’s inspired performance back before he became famous. I’ll be a little sad that I missed my chance to see Lyle Lovett and his Large Band and undoubtedly mention the giant cloud of black smoke that lingered in the sky on Saturday, but most of my memories will be good ones…and that, my friends, will keep me going back for years to come.

Read our wrap-up of the festivities from Big State Festival 2007: Day 1.