Sturgill Simpson
Sturgill Simpson
Oran Mor, Glasgow
Rob Adams
Glasgow Americana's predecessor, Big Big Country, attracted some leg-pulling its organiser's way when he billed it as an "international festival of Americana".
As if America's musical influence couldn't stretch to encompassing an Australian Nashville star or a soul queen from Birmingham, England, as opposed to Birmingham, Alabama.
Well, the one man wearing a cowboy hat onstage for this hot serving of honky tonky country, bluegrass and southern soul is Estonian and his mastery of guitar techniques that define certain strands of American music all but upstaged the man who hired him, and that man, Sturgill Simpson, is no mug as a singer and picker himself.
Laur Joamets has certainly put Tallinn on the twang map.
His stinging, fluent cadenzas, sometimes fusing fast-as-fury fingering with deep, moaning slide work in the same extended phrase, marked him out as a poet of the Telecaster, a marvellous companion to Simpson's soulful, manly without being macho, country balladeering and sincere evocations of the eternal verities that make grown men cry, beer glasses as receptacles being optional.
This was Simpson's fourth visit to Scotland this year and the word is well and truly out about this inheritor of the Waylon Jennings, Lefty Frizzell mantle, a singer who appeals across the generations - there was much youthful, high-pitched approval of his singing, his genuinely matey asides and his tight, dynamic band - and is revitalising honky tonk with equal parts energy and awareness of the tradition.
What's more, as he and Joamets trade guitar choruses - Simpson on acoustic - and crank up the involvement, the tantalising thought occurs that this astutely observational songwriter and equally astute interpreter and his team are just getting started.
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