Hot August Music Festival celebrated its Forever 27 this year, inviting a wide-ranging cast of artists, honoring the festival’s blues history, its emphasis on local musicians, and offering the multigenerational crowd a taste of music spanning genres and decades.  From the rising stars of Billy Strings and Vanessa Collier to the scene stalwarts Melvin Seals and the JGB and Larry McCray; from the local flavors of Pigeons Playing Ping Pong and the Dirty Grass Players to the southern appreciation of Cedric Burnside and Travers Brothership, Hot August Music Festival more than delivered on its annual promise of great music in summer’s sweltering heart.  

Below find some of out favorite (non-comprehensive) things at this year’s festival.  

Local Flavor

The rest of the world seems to characterize Baltimore using just a handful of ill-understood assumptions: crabs, shootings, heroin, and Old Bay. And sure, our town has its share of challenges, but this little Charm City is beyond such reductive terms and ideas.  A long history of music defines the city, dating back hundreds of years; a heavy heritage of ragtime, gospel, jazz, doo-wop, soul, and bluegrass percolates through the city streets and bounces like living ghosts from the brick of Federal Hill to the once-lively and innovative streets of The Avenue.  Hot August – 27 years into its reign – emphasized some of that local history, bringing out the bluegrass of The Dirty Grass Players to open the day and the feral jams of Pigeons Playing Ping Pong closing out the night (along with their special guest, Cris Jacobs), reinforcing the notion that community is everything.  And that moment when Pigeons Playing Ping Pong introduced a song as a Baltimore classic and then broke into “Super Funk Regulator Robot Step Squad and Double Dutch Team” by The Bridge (Jacobs’ legendary Baltimore band that recently got back together for the Charm City Bluegrass Festival)?  Kinda magic. 

The Guitars

I never thought I’d use such a ridiculously ambiguous heading like “The Guitars”, but here we are.  

Everywhere you go in the music world, the instruments matter. But for the Hot August Festival, the guitars were everything, from the blistering Muscle Shoals solos of Kyle Travers (of Travers Brothership), the hill country blues stomp of Cedric Burnside, the sky-high licks of Samantha Fish, the Detroit explosions of Larry McCray, the colorful eruptions of Craig Brodhead (Turkuaz), the pitch-perfect and nostalgic tones of John Kadlecik (with Melvin Seals and the JGB), and finally to the onstage dueling of Jeremy Schon (Pigeons Playing Ping Pong) and Cris Jacobs, the guitar took center stage in a way not seen in ages, hearkening back to another festival some 50 years or so ago when the “Purple Haze” king all but cemented his status as the creator of psychedelia.  Hot August more than treated the audience to a sonic feast at the same time as paying homage to its history as a blues festival.  

The Blues

So let’s talk about those blues for a moment.  The aforementioned Cedric Burnside riveted the crowd with his brand of hill country blues, but on that same stage, Vanessa Collier delivered the kind of set that sets fire to the stars and builds constellations.  Wearing pale-rose pink heels her grandmother bought her  for prom a lifetime ago, Vanessa stepped down from the stage and walked through the crowd like a blues pied piper, dancing shoes exploding from the bell of her saxophone with every sustained breath.  She worked her way back to the stage, the audience trailing her with their cellphones in the air, their feet tapping, and as the song finished, a sparkling smile of accomplishment lit Vanessa’s face.  Without a doubt, she delivered the kind of moment music fans everywhere hope to keep in the chambers of their hearts.  

Billy Strings

Billy Strings and his band are the real deal. Full stop.  So let’s name them all: Billy Failing on banjo, Jarrod Walker on mandolin, Royal Masat on upright bass, and Billy Strings on guitar.  They played at 3:00, but we may as well call them a high-sun headliner, walking onstage to raucous applause and met with a sea of eager fans.  Star ascendant for a few years now, he and the band have put in the work, knowing the how’s and when’s of their shows, what little nuggets of joy to suffuse into their setlist, and what covers to pull out of their back pockets like some kind of hidden gift.  On this day, they treated the audience to a version of Cher’s “Believe”, the band all stepping to the mic for the refrain with bright smiles, a little vocal reverb, and their trademark instrumental banter (taking turns soloing) punctuating the middle of the song to roars of appreciation.  

Billy and the band gifted the audience some songs off the upcoming album, including a few already shaping into personal favorite, “Watch It Fall” and “Away from the Mire”, though playing plenty of their now-classics, like “Dust in a Baggie”, “Dealing Despair”, and the endlessly untamed “Turmoil and Tinfoil”.  

Watching them play cements their status as one of the premier live acts, all of them alternating between frenetic fretboard runs or turns at melody and rhythm.  As I write this, sitting on my back porch in Maryland’s hot August sunlight, a hummingbird throttles by my ear to feed at a trumpet vine, and I find myself wondering if Billy might just be a hummingbird.  Always in motion, stopping just to sleep, iridescent.  

Here are some more photos from the fiery and joyful Hot August Music Festival 2019. All photos copyright and courtesy of Matthew Ruppert.