INDIO, Calif. _ A fast-forwarding of what defines "oldies but goodies" was on display multiple times during Friday's opening of the three-day Stagecoach festival at the Empire Polo Field in Indio.
Increasingly, the good-old days referenced at Stagecoach are not songs and artists from the '40s, '50s and '60s but from the '70s, '80s and '90s, as Jason Aldean, Sunday's headliner, once celebrated in his rear-view-mirror-focused hit "1994," which name checks '90s country star Joe Diffie in its sing-along chorus.
In fact, Oklahoma-bred singer Diffie, at 60, was one of the grand old figures at Stagecoach 2019. During his debut appearance Friday in the Palomino tent, he cherry-picked through the hits he racked up in the '90s and early 2000s.
Across the fest grounds on the Mane Stage, 25-year-old Scotty McCreery gave a nod to George Strait with his rendition of Strait's "Check Yes or No," a hit in 1995 when McCreery was 2.
Later, former Poison frontman Bret Michaels tipped his signature headband to Loggins & Messina with their 1972 lightweight rock hit "Your Mama Don't Dance."
Then he took a left turn saluting Southern California ska-punk band Sublime, offering up "What I Got," the 1996 song that became the group's biggest hit in the months after lead singer Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose.
Headliner Luke Bryan, now moving into the position of contemporary country elder statesman, chose Alabama's "Mountain Music" from 1982 for one of the de rigueur look-back moments of his party-on closing set.
He followed that with Florida Georgia Line's "This Is How We Roll," just before serving up his own "Roller Coaster," a couple of 2014 hits that, if tradition holds, might just be trotted out as country classics around Stagecoach 2039.
A MUSICAL SALUTE TO THOSE FALLEN FANS
For sheer emotional impact, it was hard for any of the superstar acts to top what transpired Saturday, well away from the stages hosting the genre's biggest names.
The L.A.-based trio Honey County rolled out a new song commissioned for this year's gathering. "Country Strong," an upbeat dance-floor number, was written to commemorate the lives lost at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas in 2017 and last year in another mass shooting, at the Borderline country bar in Thousand Oaks.
The group performed it Saturday afternoon in Stagecoach's Honky Tonk Dance Hall, with considerable help from nearly 100 dancers, who stepped, slid, turned and fist-pumped along to the music.
The choreography was created for the occasion by Stagecoach dance captain Anne-Marie Dunn and Borderline dance teacher Kristal Lynn Konzen, herself a survivor of the shooting in November in which 13 people died, including the shooter.
The group's members, Dani Rose, Katie Stump and Devon Jane, said they were contacted by Goldenvoice representatives about two months ago with the idea of writing a song on the topic and collaborated with Nashville, Tenn.-based DJ Hish on a dance-club remix.
"We said, 'Oh, my God _ you're calling us?'" singer Rose said backstage after their performance. "But yes, we would absolutely love to write the song."
It's been released to streaming platforms, and Rose said early response had been enthusiastic.
A portion of proceeds from revenues generated by the single will be donated to the Academy of Country Music's Lifting Lives programs aimed at using music therapy to help the ongoing process of healing for those affected by those tragedies.
"The country dance community is very strong, very united," Dunn said. "When anything hurts one member of that community, it hurts everyone. So the theme we want to put across is 'peace and unity.'"
WILLIAM PRINCE _ REMEMBER THE NAME
Emerging artists who score a booking at Stagecoach surely experience that "good news/bad news" moment when reality sinks in: They get to play the world's largest gathering of country music fans but usually do so early in the day, long before the masses show up for the superstar headliners.
That's what lower-tier acts are up against when they perform on the festival's recently introduced SiriusXM Spotlight Stage, a smaller space placed a hundred yards or so in front of the Mane Stage where the most popular contemporary country acts perform beginning in the late afternoons.
On Saturday, Canadian singer-songwriter William Prince overcame the blazing midday heat on his way to delivering one of the most captivating performances of the weekend. Armed with just an acoustic guitar for accompaniment, the 33-year-old artist served up several compelling songs from his 2015 album "Earthly Days," which won contemporary roots album of the year at the 2017 Juno Awards, Canada's answer to the Grammys.
Prince's songs transcend the conventions and tropes of commercial country, demonstrating more in common with the folk-country tradition of literate songwriting exemplified by Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Kris Kristofferson.
In fact, Prince cited Kristofferson among his key influences shortly after finishing his set, relaxing backstage in Stagecoach's artist compound.
"I've written songs, and poetry, since I was a kid," he said, noting that his father also wrote songs and recorded three albums of his own. "I was at church every Sunday playing this old country-western-gospel stuff and listening to Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson."
Prince is wrapping up work on a new album to follow "Earthly Days" and still is regularly on the road, building a following piece by piece, playing for a few fans at a time, as he did Saturday.
"I love the atmosphere" at Stagecoach, he said. "You're put in the realm of entertainers who are really pushing the boundaries of performance, and then I come in here low and lazy with just a guitar and the songs kind of carry and bring people in and it just became any other show. That's the best part of it all."
