Bishop: Slippery Sneakers, The Hoolios & The Return of Rhythm & Roots – the Other RI Festival

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Thursday, August 31, 2017

Brian Bishop, GoLocalProv Guest MINDSETTER™

Brian Bishop who normally writes about Rhode Island politics and culture is off this week replaced by his evil twin bsquared whose decadent philosophy is: we can’t be bothered saving the world we just have to enjoy it.

Growing up, music festival meant one thing, the Newport Jazz Festival. Like most Rhode Islanders, I never attended. It had begun as a high society affair and was seemingly out of my reach both musically, monetarily but perhaps, most obviously, as a matter of maturity. Yet despite not going, I’ll never forget the festival in my 13th year (it’s 16th). George Wein did something unheard of, that branded the festival both innovative and more pedestrian. He added rock and roll to the mix.

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Is there some mistake? Are we talking about the sister Newport Folk Festival? No. They didn’t think Rock and Roll belonged either – the perhaps overhyped booing of Dylan backed by electric instruments at the 1965 Folk Festival actually presaged its fading relevance in the late 60s, while the Jazz Festival was the innovator, aware of its setting in a world where counter-culture was the culture.

It is impossible to forget both the fear and yet exhilaration that saw this 1969 Jazz Festival balloon to 85,000 people with gates crashed and audiences rushing forward to the stage while Sly and the Family Stone performed. Wein said it was the nadir of his career and a mistake, but those of us who didn’t go knew we had missed something. Many realized the same thing a month and a half later when Woodstock did the same thing times 5.

Even with the crowd control problems, maybe because of them, the festival was a feather in Rhode Island’s cap, a last gasp atop society’s heap before our ignominious slide into economic, and thus, cultural irrelevance. Robber barons are the worst, until ya ain’t got any.

But who even knows that, as the Newport Festivals transitioned into followers rather than leaders, a more important festival was being born at an obscure venue in Escoheag, RI, the Stepping Stone Ranch. The Cajun Bluegrass Festival that began in the late 70s was actually derivative of a seldom noted innovation of the Newport Folk Festival which was the first major national festival to host Cajun music for secular audiences. Unlike the seemingly aloof Newport Festival, this mystery of bayou and mountain music largely unknown to audiences in the northeast was close enough to my exurban compound that I could occasionally hear the music drifting over the pines. Coming as it did in an age of questioning ourselves as much as authority, it was a three-day respite for aging hippies looking for something in music that connected to their maturing tastes.

And unlike the mad dancing of the 70s, like moths in the light, of folks so wrapped in individualistic interpretation they only touched their partner by accident, Cajuns like Dewey Balfa, who came to Rhode Island for this last gasp of summer fest, brought with them an arcane habit: the quiet close traveling two-steps and waltzes of the bayous. And before long, the mixed habits of Creoles fusing blues with Cajun accordion started to make the trip to New England brought zydeco music and zydeco dance.

The black and white worlds hold separate entertainments in Louisiana, yet this oxymoronically sultry but energetic dance that merges swing with two step is riven with the extent of subconscious respect that translates between communities that remain married by geography if disenfranchised by tradition.

To those of us infected by these imports, one weekend a year simply wasn’t enough. And a cadre of ‘back-door’ Cajun and Creole projects cast local musicians to play Louisiana year round. One of the longest standing of these bands, Slippery Sneakers, a bunch of talented crackers who played black music with the best of ‘em, fusing the New England appreciation for rhythm and blues with zydeco’s particular syncopation is taking a hiatus after 20 years making this a bittersweet Labor Day indeed.

But, in the meantime, producer Chuck Wentworth found another state or two, Texas and Tennessee to name a few. And the festival outgrew being pigeonholed as just Louisiana music, and it outgrew both its name and the ranch. So this also marks the 20th anniversary of the Rhythm and Roots festival in Charleston which is more or less descended from that original Cajun Bluegrass outing. But with headliners like the Mavericks and Roseanne Cash, this ain’t your granddaddies Cajun or Creole music. Of course there is plenty of that to be had with Steve Riley, the Revelers, Creole Cowboys and beyond.

For those who are used to R&R meaning Rock and Roll, it is a very legitimate question: since when are R&R Rhythm and Roots? The Rhythm part obviously invokes Rhythm and Blues, a longstanding tradition inspiring Rhode Island’s music scene if also the debate over whether us white guys took the black music – a question I always enjoy rehashing with my friend, foil and Chitlin Circuit veteran Ed Coates, founder of the Rhode Island Rhythm and Blues Preservation Society.

But roots? Self evidently it refers to the derivative character of music, that what is written and played now builds on styles and traditions forged over the course of our national experience. Not all of roots music is originally American, but it all has been made American by being adopted and used as the basis for newer American musical traditions.

It is a complicated definition in which the requirement is not just to have been played in earlier American settings but to have served as the basis for contemporary American music. Just as roots grow, so too does roots music, as you never know what of our earlier music will be rediscovered and made new again – witness the reemergence of marching band motif in cutting edge clubs as epitomized by Saturday Night festival headliner MarchFourth.

It is easier to explain roots music by playing some of it, and no band in our area, or perhaps in America, has better or more widely explored American traditions with their own contemporary compositions than the Hoolios who for a dozen years have made the Gulf of Connecticut sound more like the Gulf of Mexico: Texas Dance Hall style, Covering New Orlean’s Iguanas, Bakersfield Country, Southern Rock, Two Step, Key West’s Cuban barrios sounds, Irreverant Gospel, Zydeco Inspired, Contemporary Waltz.

The dark brooding sentiment of writer Jim Carpenter is offset with a stunning, playful musical lightness. This is Americana at its best and you will find it threaded through the Rhythm and Roots festival this weekend, although you won’t find the Hoolios because their ironic sin is to be from around here and you don’t sell big tickets for shows that we can see every day. I often suggested they simply bill themselves as “the Badlands Boys: North Dakotas’ answer to Americana” and the offers would come rolling in. And like Slippery Sneakers, the advent of this year’s festival is also a bittersweet pause in the history of this unparalleled American experiment with the Hoolios last slated performance on Sunday at Captain Scotts Dock in New London where the music will float over a monument to governmental failure, the empty land seized from Suzette Kelo so that weeds could replace her wonderful house – since government always knows what’s best.

There is a happy exception to the no locals rule at Rhythm and Roots, as Sarah Potenza returns to the Rhythm and Roots stage this year, and favorite son Johnny Nicholas will be on hand as if he were an import from Texas. Well, he is these days!

The first tastes of a weekend full of music at Ninigret Park ring out at the Knickerbocker Café tonight. At least in this niche, Rhode Island is still on the cutting edge and this is a weekend to enjoy the state we want to save.

Conflict warning: the author is the third triangle player for the Hoolios whose praises are sung above.

Brian Bishop is on the board of OSTPA and has spent 20 years of activism protecting property rights, fighting over regulation and perverse incentives in tax policy.

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Bishop: Slippery Sneakers, The Hoolios & The Return of Rhythm & Roots – the Other RI Festival