St. Patrick’s Day evening, East Rock’s mActivity saw another installment of Fernando Pinto’s wide-ranging and ever acoustically minded East Rock Concert Series, this evening featuring a double billing of New Haven’s Goodnight Blue Moon and Ithaca, N.Y.‘s Richie and Rosie, that is, Richie Stearns and Rosie Newton.
The crowd was small but warm, excited for a show that demonstrated the range of Americana. First up was Goodnight Blue Moon, in a different configuration than normal — featuring Nancy Matlack on cello and banjo, Erik Elligers on vocal and guitar, Mat Crowley on vocals and mandolin, and Dan Liparini on guitar and lap steel — but to first-time listeners there was not any indication this wasn’t the natural state of the band, which usually includes a rhythm section and fiddler as well.
Playing the sort of music ideally sorted to road trips, either to or from somewhere depending on the song, the group wove harmonies with their instruments, creating a shimmery effect not unlike the sun’s last rays that functioned as a second spotlight on the group. Playing primarily original material with a Dylan cover (Elligers is remarkably suited to add even more vocal assurance to Dylan) and a rousing singalong rendition of traditional Irish tune “The Wild Rover,” the group alternated between older material — written while the founding members lived above Christopher Martin’s on State Street — and newer material from their latest release.
The configuration of the foursome added a quieter element to their sound, showcasing not only the vocal strength of the ensemble, but the easy rapport between all the instruments. Many Americana groups find themselves pigeonholed in how they are expected to sound within the genre; Goodnight Blue Moon shifted from a Devil Makes Three-esque sound to a more bluegrass-adjacent aesthetic and then back again. In the breadth of the sound, they found depth.
The population of the stage decreased by half as Richie and Rosie came on, but the sound did nothing but grow. With a crisp wall of sound that felt like what it is to bite into a mid-October apple, or perhaps a gust of mountain air as it makes the trees of the valley sing, Richie and Rosie started a wide-ranging set with a traditional song, “Say Darling Say.” Covering everything from Texas Gladden, a traditional ballad singer from the mountains of Virginia, to Townes van Zandt, Texan folksinger and songwriter, the group showcased themselves as a duo that was anything but simply traditional old-time music.
Playing Appalachian tunes like “Glory in the Meetinghouse” and “Fall on my Knees,” Richie and Rosie showcased their grounding in traditional music, but in the same turn Stearns told a story of music from Rajasthan that changed his life, before breaking into a raga of his own. After that, they wandered back to the mountains before finishing up the set with Stearns’s own “Ribbons and Bows.” The duo’s gorgeous vocal harmony blended as well as their instruments — primarily fiddle and banjo, though taking brief journeys into the world of the parlor guitar. The rapport on stage was of old friends, with Stearns taking ample effort to showcase Newton’s powerfully clear vocals, and Newton’s fiddle working wonders to add a mellowing length to the rapid fire staccato of Stearns’s unique up-the-neck banjo playing. By the end of their set, the entire room was smiling as warmly as the music they were witnessing.
One cannot help but meditate on this, part of the legacy of the Irish: though probably far from intentional, one of the nice things about this Americana billing was a deep meditation on American roots music, and one of the strongest roots for traditional fiddle tunes in America, particularly Appalachia, is the Scots-Irish ballad and traditional canon. The appreciation for the sheer depth of cultural heritage — brought to America to percolate and turn into an altogether different traditional music — is something worth noting. Double stops and all, it’s the luck of the Scots-Irish, as it were.