singer-songwriter

I love how they describe the location for the new Hangout Beach Music & Arts Festival—"on the beach, next to the Hangout restaurant, at the southern end of Alabama Highway 59. If you hit the Gulf of Mexico, you went just a little too far."

Word first came out in December that a new festival was planned was planned for May 14-16. Now the festival is out with its first round of announcements, and it is a pretty impressive start.  The first batch of artists named suggest an edgier outlook than might have been expected. Zac Brown Band, John Legend, and Alison Krauss and Union Station lead the initial slate of acts named.

Other notable names include The Black Crowes, Brett Dennen, Guster, Girl Talk, The Whigs, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Keller Williams, Matisyahu, Jerry Jeff Walker, Ozomatli and the Blind Boys of Alabama. The festival says there will be more than 60 acts. This batch was about one-third of that.

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Photo by rebafallawake

The Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival is the only event this year where Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin and Buddy Miller—all members of the ensemble Three Girls & Their Buddy—will play individual sets at the same festival. 

Since the four artists, each musical stars in their own right, are touring widely this summer under the Three Girls banner, I had made the erroneous assumption that they would be appearing in that configuration at KateFest, which runs June 25-28 in Laytonville CA. However, festival promoter Cloud Moss of Cumulus Presents has confirmed that all four artists will have their own sets over the course of two days. 

"There will not be a Three Girls & Their Buddy set, but all of the performers will be there both days and [will] walk in and out of each others' sets as they choose to do so. It will be an offshoot of the Three Girls theme spread over four different sets with a different focus each time," Moss said.

Reneé Bodie, a Los Angeles music promoter who has organized the Los Angeles Acoustic Music Festival, a big-name folk festival that will take place at the Santa Monica Pier and happens to coincide with the Pier's 100th anniversary, hopes to rectify the fact that L.A. "doesn't have a true folk festival," according to comments given in an interview with the Los Angeles times two days ago. She's pretty much right.

Genre-busting, massively successful singer-songwriter, and Artistic Director of the San Jose Mariachi Festival, Linda Ronstadt has announced the first batch of programming for the 2009 edition of the festival, which will pay special tribute to Cesar Chavez and Chicano film culture.

Let’s first address the elephant in the room. Bob Dylan will not be appearing at George Wein’s Folk Festival 50 in Newport RI this summer. He’ll be touring minor-league baseball stadiums around that time and was not available.

But many other important figures from the festival’s 1960s heyday will be on hand, starting with festival co-founder Pete Seeger, who famously tried to pull the plug when Dylan went electric at the 1965 festival, and including Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, and more.

Nor is it just about the old-timers—not by a long shot. Continuing in the direction the predecessor festival took last season, the Folk festival lineup is brimming with exciting young talent. Some of the names sure to appeal to a younger generation of music fans are The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, Neko Case, Ben Kweller, The Avett Brothers and lots more.