Sunday
So far today has been a blues free zone so far today.
That's all about to change as Betty Lavette steps up to the Main
stage.
Betty's story is almost blues cliché. Started singing young, but just
failed to break through. Almost vanished off the face of the earth only to be
rediscovered to become a multi-award winning success.
She's brought a lot to
the music, taking songs from outside the blues/soul genre and bringing them into
the family.
On stage she's as bold as brass, one of her band gives her the
big pitch and she more than lives up to it.
Betty mentions that it was
England that was largely responsible for the revival of her career, something
she will always be grateful for.
She makes good use of the stage, pausing
often in the middle as she stalks her way up and down.
Her facial expressions
seem to indicate the soul she's putting into her performance. I find that I
really enjoy it up until about two thirds of the way through.
It might be
that I'm becoming jaded, but it also seems like it's lost the verve of earlier
or a combination of the two.
Just in case it's the former I head off and get
an iced coffee from Cambridge's newest and most welcome stall. It's well loaded
and it's a short wait for the caffeine to kick in.
Next to come is one of the
most influential women in roots music, Emmylou Harris. The rumour is that she's
taken over six vans outback and moved an entourage in. It's also rumoured that a
certain Mark Knopfler will be joining her on stage. Unless he's had a breast
transplant and seriously reworked his hair, that rumour proves to be a
dud.
It's a very crowded press pit and the Beeb are there from the word go.
It's more or less a case of fix a position and takes aim.
Emmylou has
performed with the likes of Gram Parsons and Neil Young, Dolly Parton and Bob
Dylan.
During the course of her well crafted set, that drew as much from
sing/songwriter as it did country, she referenced many of the artists that she
has performed with.
Emmylou is getting on a bit, I heard her described as
blue rinse country, we maybe, but she's really looked after her voice.
She's
going down a storm inside the tent. Suddenly the Radio Two stage comes back to
life. I find myself on the part of the site where the sound from the two big
stages converges. Emmylou and the Latin rhythms of Rodrigo Y Gabriela, it's a
strange combination, but somehow it works. It works particularly well when
Emmylou does an unexpected cover version of the Teddybears, “To Know Him Is To
Love Him”. She also does a cover of “After The Gold Rush”. One thing her
set did lack was a gravely voiced bloke to perform her exceptional duets with,
the only negative in an otherwise splendid choice of songs