Newport Folk Festival 2024: The Best Things We Saw

The Black roots supergroup New Dangerfield has only existed as a band for about a year and played a handful of gigs, but that was hardly evident from the band’s Sunday-morning mainstage performance, which blended fiddle-tune traditionals (“Half Irish”) with original songs (“Put No Walls Around Your Garden”). Named after one of John Brown’s raiders, the band — Jake Blount, Kaïa Kater, Tray Wellington, and Nelson Williams — foregrounded the long legacy of Black string band music during their thrilling set, but it was hardly academic: “No history,” as Blount put it, “just tunes.” The full-circle moment came when they invited a foremost inspiration, Rhiannon Giddens (“our banjo auntie”) for a dueling fiddle take on the standard “Rolling River.”

“Katie had to make solo music because we said no to too many of her songs,” Muna’s Naomi McPherson explained during the band’s thrilling set on Friday evening. The next day, Katie Gavin made her world debut as a solo artist during a brief solo acoustic set in the afternoon, premiering songs from her forthcoming solo debut, What a Relief. “I’ve done maybe one set like this since I was in high school,” she said. Gavin’s set harkened back to a different, less mythologized era of Newport’s history, when Lilith Fair artists like Natalie Merchant, Indigo Girls, and Sarah McLachlan helped define the festival’s sound. Gavin channeled that era on songs like “Inconsolable” and “As Good As It Gets,” which were received rapturously. Muna fans need not fear: The day before, the band let slip during their set that they’re already at work on album number four. 

It was hard to treat Sierra Ferrell’s Sunday-afternoon mainstage debut as anything but her star-making turn at Newport, and that’s not because luminaries like Jack White and Gillian Welch were watching from side-stage. Welch joined Ferrell for a rousing duet of the folk standard “Handsome Molly” a few songs after Ferrell dueted with John C. Reilly on Ray Price’s country classic “Heartaches by the Number.” But those were outliers: Ferrell’s set was, above all, a stunning showcase for her new LP, Trail of Flowers, from the rousing opener “I Could Drive You Crazy” to her band’s blistering rock rendition of the 1930s tune “Chitlin Cookin’ Time in Cheatham County” to Ferrell’s fiddle-stomp closer “Fox Hunt.” It all amounted to a triumphant display from a singer being christened — in real time — as a next-gen torchbearer. 

The undisputed highest-energy set of the weekend belonged to De La Soul, who performed a career-spanning, fast-paced sequence of hits (“Potholes in My Lawn” and “A Roller Skating Rink Named ‘Saturdays’”) that got the folk festival crowd jumping and paid tribute to founding member Trugoy the Dove, who died last year. 2024 marked the first time that Newport has seen multiple high-profile rap bookings (Killer Mike performed the day before), and the set from Maseo and Posdnuos further cemented the demand for the genre at the festival at a time when hip-hop is a much older American genre than bluegrass was during the festival’s Sixties heyday. Joining the surviving two-thirds of the group was Pharoahe Monch, who ran through several blistering raps that culminated in a thrilling finale with his own “Simon Says” before letting De La Soul have the final word with “Me, Myself and I.” 

To close out Saturday night, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings eschewed all of the special guest spectacle and theatrics that a headlining Newport set usually entails. Instead, the two singers presented a career-spanning set that leaned heavily on never-before-heard material from the duo’s forthcoming album Woodland. On some songs, they were accompanied only by bassist Paul Kowert. However daring a decision it was to debut this hushed new material during a headlining festival set, Rawlings and Welch earned it many times over, offering spellbinding versions of “Revelator,” feel-good sing-alongs on “Look at Miss Ohio,” and the tear-jerking debut of their new song “Hashtag” (which Welch dedicated to the late Guy Clark). By the time Rawlings played his signature medley of “I Hear Them All” and “This Land Is Your Land,” the duo was receiving the type of rapturous response they deserved.

Fresh from singing at a Bernie Sanders rally in New Hampshire the day before, Billy Bragg littered his performance with pump-up speeches about the upcoming American election, British economic policy, and the importance of strategic voting. The 66-year-old singer’s set included rousing set of solidarity songs (“There is Power in a Union,” “Rich Men Earning North of a Million”), Woody Guthrie lyrics (“All You Fascists,” “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key”), and endearing Britishisms. “I’d love to play all them songs,” Bragg responded to a fan shouting a song request, “but I gotta hit all me bullet points.” When introducing his set closer, the Eighties anthem “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards,” Bragg gave the Newport Folk crowd a a reality check: Music does “not have the power to change the world,” he maintained, but it does have “the power to make you believe that the world can be changed.” 

Rhiannon Giddens’ set began with a litany of sound issues: She sang a few songs with no functioning microphone, then bought time by leading the crowd through an a cappella version of Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz.” Once everything was (mostly) resolved, Giddens thrilled with a set of string band tunes, Cajun jams, and highlights from her solo catalog, including “We Could Fly” and “Another Wasted Life.” But the highlight of the set, and of all of Saturday, was when one of Giddens’ heroes, Taj Mahal, came out to perform the banjo instrumental “Roscoe’s Mule Down in Roscoe’s Barn.” Halfway through the song, out came Joan Baez, who, at 83, spent the rest of the song in a hoedown dance-off with Giddens. Baez, Giddens, and Taj Mahal then capped off the set with a tear-jerking cover of the spiritual “I Shall Not Be Moved.”

“I’m so surprised they asked us to play,” Karly Hartzman confessed halfway through her band’s smoldering Friday-afternoon set, where the band previewed new material and ran through highlights like “Formula One,” “Quarry,” and “Bath County.” from their acclaimed 2023 album Rat Saw God. The band had no intention of toning down their feedback-filled shredding for the surroundings, and that was for the better. Wednesday’s set was not only one of the loudest all weekend, it was also one of the most talked-about. Most exciting was a particularly heavy, brand-new song that found Hartzman rhyming “ass” with “cast” and screaming the song’s refrain: “They’ll meet you outside!”

Allison Russell’s mainstage performance marked the singer’s return to Newport after curating 2021’s legendary gathering of Black Women in roots music that culminated with Chaka Khan’s surprise appearance. Her solo set of what Russell described as her songs of survivor’s joy was a display of emotional dynamism: The singer professed happiness (“The Returner,” “Nightflyer”), communicated deep sorrow when she demanded “ceasefire yesterday,” and started sobbing towards the end of her prayer for peace “Superlover.” Later, she brought out a local children’s choir for a cathartic sing-along to “Demons,” and dedicated her teenage love affair “Persphone” to the memory of Sonya Massey. “Hope is a practice,” as Russell preached from the stage, “and love is an action.” Nowhere was that more clear during her own set. 

It’s no easy task showing up to a blistering hot festival and keeping a crowd’s attention for an hour playing mostly unreleased material by yourself. But that’s exactly what Adrianne Lenker did during her solo set, which was mostly a preview of unreleased material — what Lenker described as “some Big Thief songs I’m testing out.” Lenker invited her Big Thief bandmate Buck Meek out for a couple songs towards the end, but the majority of her solo-acoustic set felt like an anointing of sorts, a feeling that may have been accentuated when Joan Baez was spotted watching a few songs from the side of the stage. That feeling crystallized the moment Lenker finished her stunning unreleased song called “Incomprehensible,” a gorgeous reflection on Canadian road trips and aging with chords that conjured Neil Young’s “Helpless.” The crowd stood up and gave Lenker one of the longer standing ovations in the festival’s recent memory.