This Saturday, my travels took me to the tiny hamlet of Alpine, Arizona. Basically, Alpine barely qualifies as a “wide spot in the road,” since the road it’s on isn’t that busy, either. You pretty much have to go there intentionally, because it’s too far out of the way for anyone to find it accidentally. It’s located just across the state line from New Mexico at 8,050 feet, which does make for some interesting weather. More about that later.
Obviously, I must have had a very good reason to visit such a place, right? As it turns out, Alpine has a country and blues music festival every June, and this year, one of the headliners was the Ally Venable Band. Ally Venable, playing two and a half hours away? I’m there!
Like its larger cousin in Flagstaff, the Alpine Country Blues Festival is in its seventh year. It’s a much more casual event, though. No VIP section, and certainly no catering. In fact, they don’t even have a parking lot. Attendees just find a spot to park on the side of the road. They do have plenty of vendors, though, so at least nobody was going to starve (and the beer was only $4, rather than the $8 in Flagstaff, so there’s that).
I arrived about noon local time, just as things were getting started. I staked out a piece of grass, unfolded my camping chair, and settled in for a day of music (and a few of those $4 beers, I must confess).
The weather was good. It was about 75, with a breeze blowing toward the stage. Although it was partly cloudy most of the day, the lack of shade took its toll. Sunscreen was a hot commodity (along with cold drinks—did I mention beer?).
There were a total of seven acts on the bill, weighted more toward “country” than “blues.” The first was an acoustic country/bluegrass band out of Colorado called Thunder and Rain, which included a stand-up bass, mandolin, and dobro. I know most of you probably never heard of the dobro before I mentioned it last week as one of the instruments Megan Lovell plays, but it’s a real thing. I have a picture to prove it.
Not being much of a country music fan, I have to admit that most of the afternoon’s performers sort of ran together for me. One that was memorable, though, was a South African musician by the name of Riann Smit. He’s more of a blues player than country, but what makes him stand out is the fact that he’s a solo artist in the true sense of the word—he plays all by himself. Using the miracle of modern electronics, he creates loops of himself playing various instruments and then uses them to accompany himself while he sings. All of this is done on the fly, rather than being pre-recorded. Sort of a high-tech one-mane band. Here’s an example.
One interesting thing about the set up at Alpine is the fact that the “green room” in an open-sided tent next to the road, which makes it easy to spot the upcoming artists as they arrive. Ally Venable turned up around 3:00, although she wasn’t scheduled to go on until 5:20. Dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, she looked very much the teenaged “girl next door” that she is. She stopped to talk to a couple of young girls in the audience before making her way to wherever she went for the next couple of hours. Hopefully, someplace with air conditioning.
At about 5:00, after the fifth band finished their set, Ally’s band began setting up. Her usual trio of Bobby Wallace on bass and Elijah Owings on drums was augmented by a keyboard player whose name I missed, and can’t seem to find anywhere online. It must have been an experiment, because I’ve never seen them play with one, although it did bring an interesting dynamic to the sound.
When Ally appeared a few minutes later to do a sound check, she had been completely transformed, Disney princess-style. Instead of jeans and a t-shirt, she was dressed in a clingy long-sleeved mini-dress and thigh-high boots, looking more like she should be taking the stage in a nightclub in NYC or L.A. than a field in rural Arizona. Listening to some of the people around me in the audience, I got the impression that many of them had never heard of her, and had no idea what they were in for. They were about to be surprised!
The band launched into a nearly 10 minute cover of Bill Withers’ soul classic “Use Me,” making good use of their newly-acquired keyboards. By the time they were through, and the audience had a chance to pick their jaws up off the floor—err, grass—there was definitely no question that the “little girl” had every right to be up on stage!
Although Ally just turned 20 in April, and could easily pass for 16, she’s already an accomplished musician, singer and songwriter with numerous awards under her belt. Recently signing with blues powerhouse Ruf Records, her third album, Texas Honey, debuted at number two on the Billboard Blues charts. A native of the east Texas oil town of Kilgore, Ally has been playing professionally since she was just 14, balancing performing on the weekends with attending high school during the week. A protégé of east Texas blues guitarist Lance Lopez, she’s also worked closely with Gary Hooey and Mike Zito, who produced Texas Honey.
After finishing “Use Me,” the band played a couple of songs from the new album, including the title track and “Broken,” both originals. Next, she reached back to her second album, Puppet Show, for her cover of Bessie Smith’s iconic “Backwater Blues,” which is a perfect showcase for both her vocals and her fiery guitar work. A song about the 1927 Mississippi River flood that stands as one of the nation’s worst natural disasters even today, the chorus includes the line:
Backwater blues done called me to pack my things and go
Backwater blues done called me to pack my things and go
‘Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more
And then it came true. The wind picked up to about 25 mph, the skies opened up, and we were suddenly in the middle of a rain storm. To make things worse, the wind was blowing directly toward the stage, drenching everything with wind-driven rain. It doesn’t take an electrical engineer to know what that means, of course. Electric guitars, amps, lights and water are a bad mix, so the show came to a crashing halt. Everyone ran for the hills—or their cars—and that was that. The 2019 Alpine Country Blues Festival came to a premature end.
No time for autographs or pictures this time, unfortunately.
So that’s what a dobro looks like!
The view from the stage
Getting set up
“Do you want to hear some blues?”
Moments before the rain struck
