Sara and Sean Watkins of Nickel Creek and their band opened the show at the Southern in Charlottesville.  The venue is in the same building as the old Gravity Lounge.  Sara donned 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' Any Old Time and a David Garza song Too Much.   One of the opening numbers was a fiddle tune titled Jefferson that was written by Sara. She picked up her ukulele 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.

 

The Stringdusters opened with their resounding mournful tone. The group -- Andy Hall (dobra), 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 as 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 United States 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 and Fork in the Road.  For the encore, Sara joined The Stringdusters on the stage for a rousing finale -- and an evening none of us will forget.

 

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