The three days of peace, love, and music that is the Newport Folk Festival were graced by beautiful summer weather and another strong lineup, anchored by its Saturday and Sunday headliners, punk rock legend Patti Smith and blues rock stirrers Alabama Shakes. Those still laboring under the notion that Newport Folk is, well, predominantly filled with folk acts might be surprised to see how this venerable music fest -- the oldest in the country -- has reinvented itself in recent years. Festival organizer Jay Sweet’s definition of "folk" seems to have been expanded to cover just about anyone who plays really good music. If you happen to use an acoustic guitar to do so, all the better -- but that clearly is no longer a requirement. Let’s not let a silly thing like genre stand in the way of putting together a stellar festival, shall we.
Here are the 10 best things we saw at this year’s festival. They may or may not be the 10 best sets of the weekend, for there were some very good moments we weren’t able to catch in a very busy three days, but they were the 10 best we saw and they were pretty damn good.
Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats
I first heard this band in the car on the way to last year’s Newport Folk Fest, and on the strength of one song (“S.O.B.”) made a point to check out their set. This was just before their self-titled debut album had come out, but word of the band had clearly started to circulate among the kind of folks who tend to frequent Newport, and the crowd was standing-room-only by the time Rateliff and the Night Sweats hit the stage. Their performance last year had the feel of a breakout set, and an even larger crowd awaited the band’s return to Newport’s main stage on Saturday. From set opener “I Need Never Get Old” to the closing medley of “S.O.B.>The Shape I’m In>S.O.B.”, this was a band determined to put an exclamation point at the end of a triumphant 12-month stretch. Although S.O.B. remains the crowd-pleaser — with its shouted refrain of “son of a bitch, give me a drink” — Rateliff is anything but a one-hit wonder. Songs like “Howling at Nothing,” “Wasting Time,” “Shake” and “Trying So Hard Not to Know” stand up to repeated listens, and are even better in live performance. Rateliff seemed genuinely humbled by the wild cheering that greeted the close of their set, but to anyone who’s followed this band’s rise over the last year the fan reaction was no surprise at all.