#chuck prophet

I'd walk a thousand miles

Oh, baby, just to see you smile

This is a story about the hopelessness and desperation experienced during the Great Depression's dance marathons. These events were competitions where couples danced for hours, days, or even weeks, often enduring extreme physical and emotional strain in hopes of winning cash prizes. The song captures the exhaustion and determination of the participants, reflecting on the lengths people would go to for a chance at a better life.

Stephanie Finch and Chuck Prophet.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Day No. 3, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, Oct. 1, 2023

Not only are they fascinating to watch, hummingbirds have fantastic taste in music.

How else to explain the little avian hovering about Sierra Hull’s soundcheck and late-morning set at the Banjo stage on Day Three of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass?

Little birdie picked a good place to flutter around as Hull and her band played an energetic bluegrass-with-drums set, which Mr. and Mrs. Sound Bites took in in full after catching a few songs of Jon Langford & the Bright Shiners’ Scottish protest music at the Rooster.

Peeling off to catch parts of sets would be the theme for a first day of October stacked with outstanding performers who put the Hardly Strictly in the formerly Bluegrass-only fest inside San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

But first, a full set by Eilen Jewell - playing a guitar borrowed from Chuck Prophet - on Rooster, which found the singer and her band playing tracks from Gypsy and Get Behind the Wheel and simply slaying with a note-perfect rendition of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Green River.” Guitarist Jerry Miller is nearly as important as Jewell to the band’s success, adding twangy, country-rock spice to Jewell’s songs of love and adventure.

Then, back to the Banjo stage where musical chameleon Gabby Moreno served up slices of cumbia and American rock ‘n’ roll back-to-back and sung them in Spanish and English.

After a quick visit to Prophet and the Mission Express on Rooster, the Sound Biteses floated over to Swan for Valerie June. Wearing a loud orange outfit and backed with pedal steel, organ and rhythm section, June spun an impossible-to-categorize web of funk, soul and Americana while playing banjo and acoustic guitar and meting out songs such as “Call Me a Fool.”

Peeling off once again, the Sound Biteses were back at Banjo in time for the Travelin’ McCourys, with Punch Brothers/Might Poplar (whom we missed in favor of Emmylou Harris) banjo man Noam Pikelny filling in for Rob McCoury, and a blistering set of pure bluegrass that included “The Shaker” and “Scarlet Begonias,” with a triple-time back end, filling the park the Grateful Dead played so many times.

“Seems appropriate,” Ronnie McCoury said as your diarists peeled off yet again to the tiny Horseshoe Hill stage, for a packed 100th-anniversary tribute to Doc Watson by Mitch Greenhill, playing one of Watson’s guitars, Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman with guest slots from Andrew Marlin, June and Langford.

“Summertime,” June’s rendition of “Handsome Molly,” Langford getting the lyrics to “Tom Dooley” from a piece of paper and “Southbound” were all on offer. And it all ended with the glorious experience of a couple hundred people singing “Keep on the Sunny Side” under the foggy skies and tall trees of Golden Gate Park.

After this life-affirming interlude, the Jerry Douglas Band was pushing blues-rock and jazz flecked with bluegrass on the Swan stage. Another peel and back to the Banjo where Rufus Wainwright played solo-acoustic and his singular voice wafted across the large expanse to the Arrow stage where Tommy Emmanuel dealt the festival’s penultimate set to a relatively small, but appreciative, hard-listening audience.

Gasps filled the air as Emmanuel played inhuman runs on his acoustic guitar on such songs as “Sixteen Tons,” “Deep River Blues” and “Blue Moon.” He introduced a phantom band as he played a bassline, then percussion and rhythm before adding lead and left the audience agog as he played them simultaneously. He wrapped up his portion with the instrumentals “Imagine” and “Beatles Medley” as Harris began her closing set back where the day began on Banjo.

With a four-piece band of multi-instrumentalists behind her, Harris concluded HSB in grand style. “Miss the Mississippi and You,” “Pancho and Lefty,” “Hickory Wind,” “Evangeline” and “The Boxer” all filled the cool, early-evening air and added a extra layer of wistfulness to the end of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2023.

Read Sound Bites’ Day One review here

Read Sound Bites’ Day Two review here