Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

One of the unique aspects of Newport Folk Festival, which this year celebrated its 60th anniversary, is the interconnected community of the artists who perform each year; there is a sense of musical camaraderie there among both the artists and the fans.

A good percentage of performers in any given year are returning alumni, and many artists pop up unannounced on each other’s sets throughout the weekend. Emerging artists making their Newport debut are embraced by the curious and attentive Newport audience, who make the trek to Fort Adams to catch the earliest sets of the day. Whereas summer festival headliners typically blot out the attention paid to smaller bands, at Newport, an artist like Yola, who played the 11:30 a.m. set on Friday, also performed as a guest singer on Saturday’s closing set, curated by Brandi Carlile, that also featured Dolly Parton.

We sought out some of this year’s performers to get a sense of the familial atmosphere at Newport Folk Festival.

On their just-released second album, By & By, the Ohio trio Caamp shifts effortlessly between charming lo-fi rock ditties to heart-on-sleeve, banjo-driven anthems.

Cedric Burnside, the grandson of Mississippi blues musician R.L. Burnside, takes the DNA of his electric blues heritage and slightly transforms it into hypnotic, minimalist grooves. 

Liz Cooper propels her soulful voice, swaying melodies, and advanced guitar fingerpicking into psych/prog territory as the leader of her trio, Liz Cooper & the Stampede. 

Rayland Baxter is a songwriter who successfully rides the line between sincere and subversive. Following his 2018 release of the polished Wide Awake, he released Good Mmorning, an EP of covers of songs by the late Mac Miller. 

I’m With Her is the collaborative trio of accomplished, progressive folk singer-songwriters and instrumentalists Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan.

Our Native Daughters is another high-profile collaborative project, featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla, and Amythyst Kiah, who together righteously reclaim and recontextualize the African roots of American folk music.

Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent (who we profiled earlier this year for On The Road) returned to Newport with his layered, abstract music.

Billy Strings returned to bluegrass with a slightly psychedelic perspective to virtuosic bluegrass guitar music and songwriting. Billy performed at Newport with Molly Tuttle, another gifted bluegrass guitarist and songwriter. Both have albums due this fall. 

Bonny Light Horseman—a new project comprising songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, who also composed the Tony-award winning music for Hadestown; Eric D. Johnson of indie rock band Fruit Bats, and producer/guitarist Josh Kaufman—explores the spacious and atmospheric territories of British folk music. 

Over the course of many years busking in Texas and Louisiana, Charley Crockett has whittled an approach to blues, honky-tonk country, and hillbilly music down to an unvarnished, convergent nub, writing original songs that pair well with Jimmy Reed and Hank Williams. 

Singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews delivered soaring, churchy ballads on her 2018 release, May Your Kindness Remain, which held its own against breakout albums from heavy-hitters like Brandi Carlile and Kacey Musgraves. 

Illiterate Light—Jeff Gorman (nephew of Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman) and Jake Cochran—makes sweet, high-energy rock music that elicits both wide smiles and headbanging. They release their debut album on Atlantic Records in October. 

Incredibly sensitive and receptive to the world around him, Lonnie Holley describes himself as a “universal artist.” He is renowned for sculptures made from the detritus of unseen America and creates improvisatory music around the incantations of his poem-songs.

The young British singer and musician Nilüfer Yanya skirts around genre categorization with an idiosyncratic, home-brewed mix of crunchy, handcrafted beats, pop-punk guitar hooks, and intimate sing-speak vocals. She released her first full-length album, Miss Universe, earlier this year.

Tennessee native Erin Rae coaxes cinematic drama from within the intimate spaces of her finely crafted songs.  Her second album, Putting on Airs, was released last year and has added to her growing reputation as an artist of consequence among her Nashville peers. 

After several years lending her powerful vocals to pop projects, British vocalist and songwriter Yola Carter dropped her last name, and she confidently proclaimed herself the “Queen of Country Soul” as Yola with her debut solo album Walk Through Fire, produced in Nashville by Dan Auerbach. The Queen was in high demand as a guest singer at this year’s festival, performing with the Highwomen, Dawes, and Brandi Carlile’s headlining set billed at the Collaboration, which also featured Dolly Parton.

This photo essay is part of On the Road, a series of visual essays that explores the creative lives of notable musicians, onstage and off.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate