Fest to Take Place Sept. 12-14 and Includes Cut Worms, River Whyless, Sunflower Bean, Haley Heynderickx, Etc.
Meadowlark Festival — the music festival that benefits farmers set to take place at Stone Ridge Orchard September 12-14 — has added two more highlights to a lineup that already features Cut Worms, River Whyless, Sunflower Bean, Haley Heynderickx, and more. Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, last of the Bentonia bluesmen and part of a lineage stretching back to Skip James, will make a rare appearance outside of the south at the festival September 14. Joining him that day will be folksinger and Newport Folk Fest alum Willi Carlisle, who album was named the best of 2024 by Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Bernstein.
Public stream of Willi Carlisle’s Winged Victory
Public stream of Jimmy “Duck” Holmes’ Bentonia Blues / Right Now.
By the time Holmes hits the Meadowlark stage, he will be 78 years old. He first recorded at the age of 59. Holmes learned the Bentonia blues while running the Blue Front Cafe, the “oldest surviving juke joint in Mississippi,” according to Smithsonian Magazine. It’s a place Skip James used to frequet. Rolling Stone has called him “one of the genre’s unsung heroes,” terming his music “greasy grit and minor-key menace.” An NEA National Heritage Fellowship recipient, Holmes performed on the 2021 GRAMMY Awards live-stream and has played the Ryman Auditorium. CBS News says, “Holmes never plays the same song the same way twice.” His new album, recorded in Bentonia, MS, is entitled Bentonia Blues / Right Now.
Stereogum raved about Willi Carlisle’s “raucous live show,” calling him an “artist to watch,” continuing, “Carlisle’s songs are penetrating, sharply observed, and unflinchingly specific. They’re also built on sounds that have been handed down for generations… Carlisle sings out an ad-hoc guide for surviving a society that wants its most vulnerable dead.”
Paste Magazine said that Carlisle’s music is “vibrant, heartbreaking and necessary… Willi Carlisle is unlike any musician I’ve come across in my lifetime as a journalist.”
Folksinger Willi Carlisle holds tight the conviction that love is bigger than hate, and no-one is expendable. Carlisle’s music has always been a dance between absurdity, spectacle, and philosophy. On his fourth studio album, Winged Victory, Carlisle returns with his signature blend of traditionally-rooted folk music and kaleidoscope of oddball characters to confer with his core tenets in more overt and provocative ways.
Carlisle delivers Winged Victory as the next chapter in his long-running direct address to the hope that by understanding our collective suffering we might be free of it. He’s intent on creating art and a well-rounded life in a broken world. The idea began with 2022’s Peculiar, Missouri when Carlisle proclaimed “your heart’s a big tent, everybody gets in.” After gathering together all the world’s weirdos and misfits under the big tent, with 2024’s Critterland, Carlisle let them loose into the world. Now, on Winged Victory, they speak for themselves, unencumbered by social expectations.
Victory, Carlisle’s first self-produced album, was released June 27 via Signature Sounds. It both indulges a few of his wildest dreams (including a version of Richard Thompson’s “Beeswing,” among several traditional folk song covers), and feels like the inevitable sequel to Critterland’s charismatic menagerie of chaos. Though occasionally raunchy, and routinely provocative, Victory is not afraid to make a spectacle for the sake of a point. Victory should be understood as a reflection. It revels in the beauty of tiny, monetarily-worthless moments and things, offering with them a consideration of our innate humanity.
In describing the Bentonia, MS blues style of Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, Smithsonian Magazine said, “Bentonia is a strange, more ominous idiom. Its unsettling sound hinges partly on a guitar player’s spidery fingerpicking, which frequently requires the use of all ten fingers. Perhaps most important, the Bentonia style is played in a minor-key tuning, making it sound tense and dark, with repeating motifs and ringing open strings plucked without a hand on the fretboard. The result is a droning, hypnotic character… Bentonia blues has a loose structure. There is no chorus.”
The fest is set for September 12-14 and the main stage will be The Ramblin’ Rose, a one-of-a-kind 1940’s travel trailer that doubles as a stage, under its centuries-old “mother” oak tree in a heritage apple orchard. There will also be a second stage, the Cider Room. The lineup also includes:
* “Dynamic” (Stereogum) indie rock band Sunflower Bean, who deliver a “masterclass in rock” (Paste);
* Songwriter Haley Heynderickx, who has 1.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify;
* The “expressive songwriter” (Pitchfork) Cut Worms’ “pop essentialism” (NPR Music);
* NPR Tiny Desk Concert, Newport Folk Fest, and Bonnaroo alums River Whyless;
* Daptone Records’ The Mystery Lights, who are “as good as it gets” (NME UK);
* the Hudson Valley’s Camp Saint Helene, who have had a song covered by Angel Olsen and who have been a KEXP Song of the Day;
* Daughter of the Vine, new project by Margaret Garrett of Mr. Airplane Man;
* favorites of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, macabre duo Charming Disaster, whose “woozy folk-pop plays around the edges of the Gothic” (Paste Magazine);
* Ryan Lee Crosby, who “brings influences from Africa and India to the Bentonia [Mississippi] sound” (Smithsonian Magazine);
* Driftwood Soldier, whose music brings to mind “a bluesy version of Nick Cave with a nod to Tom Waits” (WXPN);
* NYC singer-storyteller and trained Shakespearean actress Emily Jeanne Brown;
* Hudson Valley folk-rock group Ongoing;
* And Kendra McKinley, who paints on her clothes and makes music for smoking weed with your bra off.
Playlist of Meadowlark Festival performers
Photos of Meadowlark Festival performers, venue, and logos
Meadowlark supports organizations that advocate for farmers in the Hudson Valley and nationally, and who are aligned with our values of promoting food security and advocacy for local farms. These organizations include Rondout Valley Growers Association (RVGA), and Hudson Valley Center For Food, Culture & Agriculture. The festival takes place at Stone Ridge Orchard & Farmers Market, a 200-year-old working farm on 115 acres.
About Stone Ridge Orchard
The land that is now Stone Ridge Orchard has been a productive, diversified farm for nearly two hundred years. Tucked away in the Roundout River Valley between the Shawangunk Ridge and Catskill Mountains, they raise a wide variety of sustainably-grown gourmet fruits and vegetables on 115 scenic rolling acres.
The performance site will be under the shade of the farm’s iconic nearly 400-year-old oak tree, the jewel of Stone Ridge, next to a stand of some of the oldest apple trees in the region: McIntosh, Cortland, Golden Delicious, and Stayman.
In 2008, Elizabeth Ryan of Breezy Hill Orchard took over management of the orchard at Stone Ridge. Since then, Elizabeth has taken great care to give trees the care they need to produce flavorful, high-quality fruit. Breezy Hill Orchard sells fruit from Stone Ridge Orchard, as well as a large line of artisan baked goods and cider, at more than 20 farmers’ markets in New York.
