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New traditional
Passing the torch at the Newport Folk Festival
BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Many music fans have a place in their hearts for the Newport Folk Festival, an event that has taken the pulse of the international folk-music scene for 45 years. For Nalini Jones, the festival — which returns this year August 6 through 8 — is in her blood.

Her father, Bob Jones, a former folksinger, is one of the festival’s founding personalities and has been its producer for decades, selecting artists for the bill and pulling many of the crucial strings that remain invisible to concertgoers. Nalini started visiting the festival before she was in her teens. "I remember one year when there was a big storm and the festival was cancelled. Everybody came over to the house we had rented and sat around the living room playing. There was Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton. It was magical."

Nalini and her younger sister, Radhika, ran errands for the festival box office on their bicycles when Nalini was 12. Then she sold T-shirts on the grounds at Fort Adams State Park before graduating to working backstage. More recently, she became the festival’s associate producer — a role she needed to embrace fully this year after her father was stricken with Guillain-Barre syndrome, which attacks the nervous system, and was rendered virtually paralyzed for a time. Putting aside a collection of short stories she has due for Alfred A. Knopf and taking leave from her teaching at Fairfield University, Jones will have most of the festival’s strings in her own hands until her father recovers and returns to his Festival Productions office in New York City.

"It’s really a great challenge working on this festival," she says, "because there’s been an extraordinary legacy. I was born too late to have seen the early years, but Newport has always been a place where the entire continuum of folk music has been represented. In the same year Dylan was going electric, some of the founders of zydeco and blues performed. The festival reflected shifting tastes as folk music became popular, and more recently it embraced the rise of the female singer-songwriter, but there have always been historic performers with deep roots. You can’t let go of that aspect of the festival — that idea of featuring the historic with the new — in its modern incarnation."

To that end, this year’s bill embraces everything from the old-time mountain music of Doc Watson to the sonic experimentalism of Wilco, and from the rock-and-blues-infused style of Lucinda Williams to the tent-revival spirit of Ollabelle and the Old Crow Medicine Show, plus actual tent-revival performers the Dixie Hummingbirds, who have been spiritual singers for more than half a century and will be joined by Levon Helm and Garth Hudson of the Band. Crosby, Stills & Nash are headlining the same day Steve Earle brings his musical activism to the stage. And Rufus Wainwright, a living cross-pollination of folk, rock, and cabaret, and blues explorer Corey Harri, are aboard to widen the berth of tradition.

"When you’re involved in the Newport Folk Festival, you hope you’re helping to make something historic happen," Nalini says. "Maybe in 10 years, people will be talking about Wilco’s performance or what Ollabelle does. I also think we have a discerning audience, so we’re always trying, in some sense, to meet their standards with music that will get them excited and let them make discoveries. For performers, it’s a chance for them to find an audience that they, perhaps, weren’t reaching, in the fans of other performers. If that works for the fans and the musicians, it’s a sign that we’ve done a good job."

Here’s the Apple & Eve Newport Folk Festival line-up. Friday August 6: Ron Sexsmith and Josh Ritter at the Hotel Viking at 8 p.m. Saturday August 7: Laura Cortese & Tenbrooks, the Mammals, Adrienne Young & Little Sadie, Vusi Mahlasela, Mindy Smith, Jim White, Slaid Cleves, Corey Harris & 5x5, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, and Crosby, Stills & Nash at Fort Adams State Park from 11:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Sunday August 8: the Old Crow Medicine Show, Crooked Still, the Mammals, Laura Cantrell, Darden Smith, Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez, Lori McKenna, Ollabelle, the Dixie Hummingbirds with Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, Joan Osborne, Rufus Wainwright, Doc Watson, and Wilco at Fort Adams State Park from 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Call (866) 468-7619.


Issue Date: July 30 - August 5, 2004
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