Experiencing 'Small Town Heaven' in Oak Ridge

Under an absolutely stunning blue sky on the third Saturday of June, Oak Ridge experienced an exhilarating rite of passage.

From 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., the 22nd edition of Barbara Ferrell’s Lavender Festival turned Jackson Square into the most enjoyably mobbed arts and crafts fair anyone can imagine. I have no idea what the official attendance estimate was, but over the Festival's eight-hour span, I bet at least 25,000 people came through the Square. Maybe more.

And two hours later, the ORNL-FCU’s Summer Sessions concert series officially inaugurated Summer 2022 with a show by Bill & The Belles and the Hogslop String Band at Bissell Park’s outdoor stage, exceeding all expectations by several orders of magnitude because, frankly, no one had any expectations for two bands they’d never heard of before.

I think it's safe to say that this celebration of Bluegrass Americana has truly come into its own. Now it’s hard to remember when these concerts were just a dream, and harder still to imagine not going to the next one on the schedule.

The Credit Union and production assistants at WDVX-FM have struck gold by creating a civic gem with this humble, unassuming community music fair which has brought to Oak Ridge the richest parade of stellar talent since the Manhattan Project.

To be in Oak Ridge on June 18, 2022 was to be in Small Town Heaven.

I’ll let you in on a little secret…  I wish ORNL-FCU and WDVX would think about Fall, Winter, and Spring Sessions at the Oak Ridge High School Performing Arts Center. Get the City Council to OK beer and wine sales at the PAC during rental events, and then let’s have monthly concerts that will draw an audience from an area with a radius of 50 miles. Shoot fire, they’ll even drive here from Farragut!

Bill & The Belles were unqualified crowd-pleasers. They felt like family members you never realized were as talented as they are. Know what I mean? It was like seeing your siblings, who had never been on stage before, step up to the mikes and knock your socks off with their performance savvy and unexpected depth of talent.

Their songs were mostly original. Their singing and instrumental talents were also mostly original, but vested in a tradition longer than the memories of most of the audience. They were the epitome of bluegrass, without being the least bit bluegrassy. They were something indelibly unique, which might be why they’re still trying to find their niche.

I loved Bill & The Belles’ courage, because being unique is as challenging as it gets for musical artists. It’s hard to aspire to being unique, even harder to be unique, and hardest of all to get people to accept and enjoy your uniqueness. They accomplished all three.

Then came Hogslop. Good Lord, what a band. Funny, irreverent, and too stinking talented to be constrained, the Hogslop String Band educated the unsuspecting Summer Sessions audience in subjects they had no idea they were deficient in. Mixing their original songs with out-take breaks, double entendre jokes, out-right outrageous drug references, and silliness beyond description, these five guys from Nashville demonstrated why they should but may never headline at the Grand Ole Opry.

Then there were the covers. I wrote about this last week. The Hogslops put on the irreverent act, but deep down they are as respectful as every musician worthy of the name has to be of those who have paved their way. The songs this String Band played by The Beatles, Bob Dylan, John Prine, the Grateful Dead, and The Band were a crash course in Americana music by five Ph.D.’s in Musical Connectedness. Even crazy Pickle on the stand-up bass, who spent most of the band’s time on stage acting like a guy you wouldn’t get near if you saw him in New York City on the subway, even Pickle was straight when it came time to do justice to John Prine.

These guys packed more historical insight into their 90-minute set than most bands can manage in several weeks of performances. It was absolutely amazing. And most of the audience had no idea they were being bathed in this richness.

Then for the coup de grâce, the Hogslop boys ended their show with The Band’s “Rag Mama Rag.” It’s not just that this is one of my favorite tunes of all time. What’s significant about this choice is that it speaks to so many aspects of this band’s approach to being on stage in the first place.

It’s 2022, more than 50 years since “Rag Mama Rag” was released on the 1969 album The Band, and this enigmatic song still has the power to lift an audience out of their beach chairs and boogie like they might cause a real ruckus if you don’t keep your eyes on ‘em.

This song has been in the public consciousness for half a century. And Hogslop performed it like they wrote it last week. There’s a revelation here. Let’s call it the “Hundred Proof Effect.”

Hailstones beatin’ on the roof/The bourbon is a hundred proof/It’s you and me and the telephone/Our destiny is quite well known./We don’t need to sit and brag/All we gotta do is/Rag Mama Rag.

What in the world does that mean? Who cares? All you gotta do is ... play it like you own it!

That they did, and then to top it off, they unplugged their instruments, jumped down from the stage and made their merry way to the center of the lawn, where they were immediately surrounded and embraced by new fans who were about to discover what “audience” means.

For several delirious minutes, the band played their hearts out, everyone was hootin’, hollerin’ and dancin’ like crazy, smiles blossomed like sunflowers, and Pickle’s (musician Casey McBride) stand-up bass went crowd surfing. Just like that, we had an Americana mosh pit.

Like Sierra Hull’s impromptu unamplified performance in the middle of the audience last summer, Hogslop’s leap into the crowd was a sure sign the band was hitting on all cylinders. From the stage, they had just thanked everyone for making them feel at home. And when the band raced out into the midst of their new friends, they proved they meant it.

You can bet that doesn’t happen very often. Like I said at the outset, the Summer Sessions concert series has definitely established itself as a destination. And in July when Hogslop plays in Whitefish, Montana at the Under the Big Sky Festival, they’ll run into Trampled by Turtles, Margo Price, and the Black Pumas, and they’ll tell them, “Dude, we were in Oak Ridge, Tennessee last month for the Summer Sessions, and it was freakin’ awesome! WDVX. ORNL-FCU. Those folks were amazing. So laid back. The hills in the distance were unbelievable. And we tore, it, up!”

I love the Black Pumas. Maybe next year.

And then Sunday

It was a Saturday to remember. But then Sunday brought one of the most amazing musical happenings I have ever seen. And anyone lucky enough to have been there will tell you the same.

It was Jim Hynes, Jon Hamar, Keith Brown, and Mark Boling performing on the sidewalk for free in front of the coffee shop called Bud’s Farmhouse, presenting two hours of stage tunes through the prism of jazz for an audience of a couple hundred people sitting in folding chairs arrayed in the parking lot at Manhattan Place Shopping Center.

You might want to reread that paragraph to get the picture.

This wasn’t Joni Mitchell’s “one man band/by the quick lunch stand/who was playing real good for free.” It was a superstar jazz quartet, serving up amazing treasures from the richest motherlode of America’s musical heritage, the place called Broadway. And it was a display of everything that makes jazz one of this country’s greatest gifts to mankind: class, subtlety, verve, reflection, nuance, invention, surprise, improvisation, memory, and a power that could be heard blocks away in the neighborhoods across the Oak Ridge Turnpike.

Jim Hynes is a musician’s musician, an artist on the trumpet and flugelhorn whose talent is recognized first and foremost by other musicians. And he teamed up for “Bud’s on Broadway” with Trio Life, the great Knoxville guitarist Mark Boling, bassist Jon Hamar, and drummer Keith Brown, three supremely talented jazz pros who have made the University of Tennessee Jazz Program one of the most highly regarded improve labs in the entire country.

Rather than putting together a hum-along program of all-too-familiar show tunes that everyone would know, Jim curated a tour de force set list that gave the quartet room to move, time to savor, and freedom to really, really play. And between tunes, he brought his three and a half decades of Broadway experience to bear, giving the songs, their composers, and the shows they came from historical, cultural, and artistic context. I was kicking myself for not recording every word.

Then the music began. "Put On a Happy Face" from Bye Bye Birdie. "Surrey With the Fringe On Top" from Oklahoma! "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (Ok, they weren't all Broadway songs.) "Night and Day" from Gay Divorcee. "If I Were a Bell" from Guys and Dolls. Kurt Weill's hauntingly beautiful "My Ship" from Lady in Dark. "Till There Was You" from The Music Man, sung with amazing authority by Jim's wife, Playhouse alumna Anne Holland. And to end the nearly two-hour concert, an extended and somehow definitive rendition of "Mack the Knife" from Three Penny Opera that surely would have made Raul Julia smile.

From first note to last, it was an enthralling concert, like an evening at Iridium or Joe's Pub or Minton's in NYC, but this was on the sidewalk in front of Bud's Farmhouse.

Only in Oak Ridge. I know every weekend in this oddball town isn't as eye-opening as this Father's Day/Dawn of Summer weekend was, but this one sure was fun.

John Job is a longtime Oak Ridge resident and frequent contributor to The Oak Ridger.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Experiencing 'Small Town Heaven' last weekend in OR