We’re halfway between Americanafest 2024 and 2025 - the Roots Music Equinox if you will. And we bring that up because we’ve recently posted the last in a long string of performance videos from last Fall’s famous WMOT Day Stage. It’s our carefully curated showcase at East Side Bowl, with lineups so good that many folks bring a chair and post up for entire days or even the entire three days of the annual festival-within-a-festival. And we’re hoping that this collection of performances takes you back - or brings to your attention - to the superb music we’ve been sharing this winter.
Progressive folk and country singer (and sometime harpist) Lizzie No introduced her acclaimed 2024 album Halfsies as “an immersive experience of empathy.” By the time she rolled into Americanafest, it had secured a place on many year-end lists of the best singer-songwriter albums that year. Here is “Lagunita,” the first single and the symbolic sentinel of the record - an impressionistic look at unacknowledged or undiagnosed trauma, plus the embrace of love that can keep the monsters at bay. It rocks hard. Visit the original performance page for a mellower tune, “The Heartbreak Store.”
Our most recent and final Day Stage videos came from country rocker Sam Morrow, who earned his sound and scars in Houston and Los Angeles. The funky grit of Waylon Jennings is alive behind Morrow’s mirrored shades in his Day Stage performance, as you’ll see in the banging “On My Way” from his fifth album On The Ride Here. See why No Depression called him “too frisky to be tied down” when reviewing the opus when it dropped one year ago. We’ve also got Sam looking back on a stretch of self-made trouble in “Medicine Man.”
Cris Jacobs, Baltimore’s favorite roots rocker of the past couple of decades took a bluegrass turn on his superb album One Of These Days, enlisting the backing of most of the Infamous Stringdusters for a set of bracing, truth-telling songs. In the spirit of Billy Strings, who guested on the album track, Jacobs kicks out some fine flatpicked guitar on his burning, churning murder ballad “Poor Davey.” Over on the performance page, he sits down to tear it up on the cigar box lap steel, the sound that got Jerry Douglas interested in producing last year’s album.
Last year’s winner of the Album We Wish Were Longer Award was the amazing EP by the supergroup Wonder Women of Country. Kelly Willis, Brennen Leigh and Melissa Carper hitting the road together was one of the big stories of 2024, so we were determined to feature them during AmFest. Kelly’s sweet and legendary Texas voice takes the lead on “Another Broken Heart” here, while you can click through to hear Brennen’s deft flatpicking and Melissa’s clean country voice on the original twist on the old folk song “Won’t Be Worried Long.”
If you see only one video from this series, for the sake of mighty twang and music history, make it Dave Alvin leading a six-minute jam on “Johnny Ace Is Dead.” His partner in crime Jimmie Dale Gilmore, with whom he made the mighty and brilliant TexiCali last year, was unable to perform. But Alvin, fresh off being granted an Americana Lifetime Achievement Award, owned the stage with his Guilty Ones band and showed why he’s truly a legend in our time. They also kicked it on his career-changing LA country rocker “Long White Cadillac.”
For an even more complete showcase of the Day Stage magic, visit the official playlist at our YouTube channel, and let it roll. You’ll hear and see Shemkia Copeland, Uncle Lucius, Paul Thorn, Amy Helm, The Cactus Blossoms, Leyla McCalla, Oliver Wood, and Alissa Amidor.