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Event
TRADITIONS
The bands at this year's Traditions Festival partake of all sorts of influences essential to the founding of rock'n'roll. Whether it's Little Ugly's combination of lyrical songs, acoustic instruments, and rocking vibe, the reinvention of string band music and delta blues by Craig Edwards and the Root Farmers, the original neo-honky-tonk stylings of Joe Fletcher, Ron Gallo, Andrew Combs and the Hang Ten & a Half Band, the masterful folk/rock storytelling art of Dan Blakeslee, or the flat-out blues rock of the Silks, every band tells part of the tale of this vital American music.
One story goes that Sam Phillips, the impresario/producer at Sun Records in Memphis in the nineteen fifties, was searching for "a white man who could sing like a black man," and Elvis Presley filled the bill. Phillips had already recorded what's sometimes called the first rock'nr'oll record, Rocket 88, written by 19-year-old Ike Turner, and also introduced Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison , Charlie Rich, and Johnny Cash to the ears of audiences eager for fresh sounds. Rockabilly took over the airwaves, got mellowed for a while as record labels and radio tried to make it polite, and then the Beatles showed up, Jimi Hendrix reinvented the electric guitar, and all bets were off. Rock and roll was here to stay.
That's the story. But Americans had been in the process of inventing rock'n'roll for a long, long time already at that point. Long before electricity was harnessed and recordings were made, Americans were trading rough, rowdy musical sounds from all over, because the people here came from all over and moved around a lot. In the eighteenth century immigrants from the wild Scottish highlands transferred the driving wail of bagpipes to the more portable and recently redesigned violin (only they called it a fiddle) and Africans introduced banjos and coupled them with this new fiddle music. Unschooled musicians mixed the polite lyric parlor songs of the eighteen twenties and thirties with the savage old English ballads of love, betrayal, revenge, and death and transmuted them into mountain banjo songs played with insistent syncopated rhythms.
Soldiers in the Civil War marching all over the country heard different regional and ethnic music and brought their own to new places. The wide-open river towns along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in the decades following the war gave rise to bad-man ballads and ragtime. Military and community brass bands began to percolate with these new rhythms, creating early jazz. The growing popularity of the newly redesigned and improved guitar and its availability through mail-order catalogs made it a fixture in the blues styles that black musicians created in the early twentieth century.
Every step of the way, the new sounds were "hotter" and raised the objections of polite society. But musicians kept on pushing the envelope, finding dance rhythms that led to "hotter" dance styles. By the time electricity made recording and broadcast possible, a huge catalog of different hot sounds made it onto 78rpm records and into the hands of the listening public. During the nineteen twenties and thirties all sorts of raucous music burst onto the scene blues, Cajun, early country, big band swing, hot string bands, and western swing, as well as various ethnic musics.
The need for war materiel during World War II limited the availability of records, and when recording increased again in the late forties big record labels and broadcasting companies established a mainstream popular taste that relegated the rougher sounds of the first recording era to attics and yard sales. Mainstream popular music lost those sounds during the forties and early fifties, and by the time Sam Phillips recorded Elvis and the other early rockers , they sounded brand new to many people. Not until the folk music boom and the release of the Harry Smith's "American Folk Music' collection on the Folkways label (actually a compilation of commercially released records from the nineteen twenties and thirties) did those sounds become widely heard again- by people like the young Bob Dylan. Meanwhile, in Liverpool, the kids were listening to those same old 78 rpm records sold on the black market in England (still under wartime rationing policies) by American sailors. Those kids would later become the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, and Led Zeppelin.
And that's how rock and roll began, folks.
- Craig Edwards
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Joe Fletcher - "Joe Fletcher proves his versatility on White Lighter. His signature brand of dark and lyrically driven honky tonk is interspersed with a softer side that would make a Hagg or Jones proud." - No Depression
Ron Gallo - "Like the many great artists who presumably influenced - Dylan, Young, Nelson, and many familiar others - Gallo accomplishes the enviable feat of being hilarious and completely earnest at the same time." WXPN
Andrew Combs - "Texas troubadour smirk, bluesy country melodies and a Southern-steeped lyricism that recalls Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark"Marissa Moss, The Nashville Scene
Dan Blakeslee - "There is a feeling of antiquity to the songs, which are written in a poetic language that could have been taken from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" " Boston Globe / Nick Zaino III
Little Ugly - "They are no secret to those "in the know" in the New England. They have been honored by the Hartford Advocate as the Best Rock Band of 2011 and Hartford Magazine awarded them the best Musician/Band in 2012. Listen to "Where the River's Born" and you will know why." -Tamyra Davis, Local Band Review
The Silks - "On barn burning tracks like the aforementioned "Down at the Heel," Kelly plays like a man twice his age and with decades more experience, cycling through the myriad styles of playing that saturate The Silks music with swampy slide guitar, deft and delicately finger-picked country folk and great swaggering waves of English blues and rock 'n roll. Kelly channels dirty delta blues out of what sounds like a rusty tin can on "Mean Old Woman" as easily as the beautiful country blues of "Try All You Want," and along with the incredible dynamics of Parmelee and Donnelly, they bring each fantastic song to barroom stomping grandeur" Eric Smith, Providence Monthly
Craig Edwards - (Host) plays a broad range of American roots music: traditional fiddle styles including Appalachian old-time, blues, bluegrass, Cajun, Cape Breton, Irish, and Swing, old-time 5 string banjo, flatpicking and fingerstyle guitar covering Delta and Piedmont blues, honky-tonk, rockabilly, and swing, Cajun and Zydeco accordion, and solo and group singing. Alone or with other musicians, he plays with the drive and conviction that characterize these musical traditions.
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LocationHygienic Art Park
79 Bank Street
New London, CT 06320
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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