Last week, the Newport Folk Festival added Nashville instrumental duo Steelism (Jeremy Fetzer & Spencer Cullum Jr.) to its lineup and announced that Ruby Amanfu and Nicole Atkins would join their set.
Steelism’s country twang/vintage surfer/James Bond sound represents some of the very best new Nashville instrumentation. Everyone wants this band to play on their album and will want them to sit in with them at Newport.
I’m a huge fan of their instrumentals (check out “Marfa Lights” at the bottom of this post) and hope they have plenty of those before Amanfu, Atkins and others join them, but I came across this great cover of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” where Steelism backs Amanfu, Langhorne Slim, Carl Broemel and others at a show in Nashville last December. Prine is headlining the same day Steelism and American Acoustic (Punch Brothers, Aoife O’Donovan, Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Julian Lage) perform at Newport, which has me anticipating some killer collaborations.
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