Sara & Sean Watkins of Nickel Creek and their band opened the show Thursday night Nov.19 at the Southern in Charlottesville at the old Gravity Lounge location. Sara in a bright red dress and with her grace, charm and virtuosity on the fiddle essentially took and kept the limelight for the evening. Swing was the prevailing style of the performance, the pace set with Jimmie Rodgers’s “Any Old Time” and a David Garza song “Too Much.” One of the opening numbers was a fiddle tune titled “Jefferson” that she had written. She picked up her ukelele for the Tom Waits song “I Hope My Pony Knows the Way Home” and segued into the romantic yearning of Jon Brion’s “Same Mistakes” David Garza’s “Too Much” and “All This Time.” Ending the set with the John Hartford classic “A Long Hot Summer’s Day” she put the final touches on a performance that could be followed by very few.
At the break I got in line and asked her for the titles of some of the songs in her set. I told her that she was turning from the “girl prodigy” into “one helluva lady,” which seemed quite agreeable to her.
The Stringdusters opened with their resounding mournful tone. The group — Andy Hall (Dobro), Andy Falco (guitar), Chris Pandolfi (banjo), Jeremy Garrett (fiddle), Jesse Cobb (mandolin), and Travis Book (upright bass) comprise some of Nashville’s most wanted session musicians. They come from backgrounds as diverse a jazz, rock, and country and when they combine their influences they push into a new frontier of acoustic music. During their three years together, much of it on the road all over the U.S. and Europe, they have become a seasoned group with a distinctive, lonesome sound. They reached into their reserve of tunes for ones like “Poor Boy’s Delight,” “Fork In The Road,” “Won’t Be Coming Back” & “No More To Leave You Behind.” For encores Sara joined them on the stage for a rousing finale — and an evening none of us will forget.