Saturday, June 26
2:30 PM Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel
The must-see of the festival: Myles’s Highways & Honky Tonks (Rounder) was the finest slice of straight-up Bakersfield-style honky-tonk I heard last year. The California native had issued a few passable albums earlier in the decade, but she arrived with this one, singing in an effortless, soul-fueled twang in front of a crack band. Her songs take on familiar themes without ever sounding formulaic, from the working life (“Playin’ Every Honky Tonk in Town”) to cheatin’ (“Who Did You Call Darlin’”) to carpe diem romance (her smooth duet with Merle Haggard, “No One Is Gonna Love You Better”). If nothing else, her “Mr. Lonesome” ought to become an anthem for unaccompanied women sick of being hassled by creeps at bars: “Mr. Lonesome, go cheer up somebody else / Ain’t got nobody / But I can do it better by myself.”
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Competent, entertaining retrobillies BR5-49 were originally slated here, but they opted to open for current tourmate Brian Setzer at Taste of Chicago on July 5 instead. In their place the city’s booked US99 automaton Susan Ashton. The former Christian pop singer’s current single, “Faith of the Heart,” written by Titanic hit factory Diane Warren, is a bombastic slice of suburban soft rock that straddles the secular/spiritual divide for greater marketability–and I for one would rather be in one of those Porta Pottis than in front of the speakers when it’s blaring across Grant Park.
12:30 PM Easy Louise
Fronted by brothers Travis and Scott Kellett, this band has been performing top-40 country hits and country oldies for 15 years.
