Mavis Staples and a whole bunch of other talented folk

In December, 2008 she recorded a fabulous live set at the famous Hideout bar in Chicago, celebrating the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.

She still gets a kick out of these highlights in an intensely crowded life, as you can hear from her performance at the 50th anniversary Newport Folk Festival, now called the George Wein Festival after the now 85-year-old founder of this stellar event that was held this year over the first two days of August at the Fort Adams State Park overlooking the ocean.

I’ve been listening to the Newport Folk Festival for most of the last week which makes me say one more time, you have got to love the internet. National Public Radio in Washington DC broadcast the festival all day Saturday and Sunday on August 1 and 2 and then podcast the countless hours of music.

As well as an hour and a quarter of Mavis Staples - highlighted by a jaw-dropping version of Robbie Robertson’s The Weight - there have been other hour long performances by the Dave Rawlings Machine, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, Neke Case, Iron and Wine, the Fleet Foxes, Billy Bragg and the incomparable Gillian Welch, and others.

There’s also a day closer which has Wein introducing the 90-years-plus Pete Seeger, the surviving father of American folk, who, despite a fragile and failing vocal, leads singalong which starts with Turn, Turn, Turn goes through If I Had A Hammer and reaches a crescendo with Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land - which he duets with the great man’s son, accompanied by his daughter Norma.

That song was written in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America, an upbeat piece of nationalism that Guthrie believed to be too saccharine and, despite never being sold as a record on its own, This Land Is Your Land remains the most popular and inspiring American folk tune.

There’s even a new discovery in the podcasts (for me, at least): a North Carolina band called the Avett Brothers, built around two siblings who manage to sound like a jam between the Mountain Goats and the Old Crow Medicine Show. Their records are hard to find around here but that has to be rectified soon. They are a revelation.

There’s so much in these concerts that makes you want to rush to the record and CD shelves, pick up some music and play it and crawl along your book shelves to find references and delve into musical history.

There’s two standouts - Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Gillian Welch.

Welch is a honey-soaked vocalist first noticed by most on the soundtrack of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime and then stopped audiences in their tracks when she toured with Dave Rawlings, performing with voice and acoustic guitars, mandolins and banjos, none of it more than miked into the sound system.

She starts with the counter intuitive I Want To Play That Rock And Roll before picking through Elvis Presley Blues which is the greatest tune about the King ever written.

The majesty of Welch live is that she and Rawlings are perfectionists who reproduce their recorded sound with reverence and clarity - heard here best on the surprisingly raunchy song My First Lover and the spell-binding Time (The Revelator).

On the second day of the festival Rawlings peforms with his own band/creation the Dave Rawlings Machine, delivering a ranging collection of favourite songs which reaches its apotheosis with a 10-minute, genius version of Bob Dylan’s Queen Jane Approximately.

Ramblin’ Jack’s rambling appearance is something else. The78-year-old singer has had a renaissance after his two recent ANTI records - the first was the 1996 I Stand Alone which featured some of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in his back-up line-up and the second was the best collection of hard times songs heard this side of the 1930s, A Stranger Here.

Elliott, who toured Australia about half a dozen years ago playing in places like a restaurant in the bush outside Canberra, tells a great yarn about being snowed in while traveling through Pennsylvania in the late 1960s. He and his compadres had “lots of venison, a bottle of Cutty Sark whisky and the latest Bob Dylan record”. This kept them going for three days and by the end of it, Elliott had learned a new song by The Bobster.

A week later he was in New York and dropped by the Gaslight club for their open mike night. He said the usual crowd was there, including Dylan, so he thought he’d sing the new song he’d learned, Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright).

As he started, Dylan stood up and said: “Iaa leeguish zit taya”. Elliott said the only thing possible: “What, Bob?”

Through a slightly more comprehensible statement, Elliott could hear this: “I relinquish it to you.”

It’s a great story in the middle of a stunning collection of concerts. Track down the NPR website and find these podcasts. You’ll lose two days and love yourself for it.