Now in its 20th year, the Celtic-North American folk summit has been characterised as the biggest back porch in the world. In truth, it’s probably our closest equivalent to country music’s most hallowed, and rather cosy institution, the Grand Ole Opry, in which visiting stars perform rotating slots backed by an elite house band.
The concerts are most remarkable for the onstage green room, where musicians visibly enjoy proceedings while waiting their turn. Warming the couch this year are country grandees Patty Griffin and Rodney Crowell, fiddler Sara Watkins and as a token representative of the deep south – of England, that is – Devonian singer-songwriter John Smith, whose intricate finger-picking is heavily indebted to bluesman Mississippi John Hurt.
Notable contributions from the American side included Griffin’s version of Lefty Frizzell’s Mom and Dad’s Waltz, which gave the hall the intimacy of a blue-collar Texan fireside. One of Crowell’s most-recorded numbers, Till I Gain Control Again, segued so seamlessly from a gentle waltz that Scots fiddler John McCusker had composed for his baby daughter it seemed as if the two had been conceived as a complementary pair.
It has to be said that the format can become a burden as much as a liberation: there are long stretches during which a large, amorphous group of musicians – not all of them audible – begin to cancel one another out. But the shining moment of spontaneity was delivered by Tim O’Brien, an unsung hero of these sessions and of American roots music in general, who led an a capella spiritual that he claimed to have taught the company during the interval. As the Shetland fiddler Aly Bain dryly observed: “If it had been like that every Sunday I’d have visited the kirk more often”.
• At Symphony Hall Birmingham tonight; At the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool (0151-709 3789, tomorrow; Royal Festival Hall, London (020-7960 4200), 6 February.
