![Image](https://cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/system/images/photo_albums/newport-recap-photos/large/elvis-costello-with-larkin-poe-dsc-4513.jpg?1384968217)
Photo by Eric Tsurumoto
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/ ... hotos.html
By Geoffrey Himes
July 26, 2016
(extract)
Glen Hansard had started his song “Lowly Deserter,” when he stopped and asked someone to come from backstage and play tambourine. Out popped
Elvis Costello with a circular rattle in hand. Three songs later Costello returned to sing two verses on the old Brendan Behan folk song about prison, “The Auld Triangle” (aka “The Banks of the Royal Canal”). In between, Hansard and his unusual accompanist, jazz trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, played a version of Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man” that seamlessly incorporated a certain presidential candidate into its tale of reactionary thuggery.
Costello began his own set as a trio: himself on acoustic guitar with the folk-rock duo Larkin Poe backing him up on mandolin and electric dobro. After four songs like that, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band came marching out on stage, the clarinet trilling and the tuba bleating. Costello introduced “Sulphur to Sugarcane” as “a song for the campaign season” and went on to impersonate a loathsome lothario who leers, “I wouldn’t cheat you, honey. When can I see you again?” Still later Costello joined the Dawes spin-off group Middle Brother to do a rousing version of “Everyday I Write the Book.”
Amid all these entrances and exits, Costello sat down alone at the piano and previewed a song from his work-in-progress, a stage musical based on the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd about an amoral show-biz star who becomes a right-wing populist. “In this song,” Costello said, “he makes an appeal to your worst instincts. Not that it should remind you of anyone you know.”
Or maybe it should. Perhaps the best way to respond to this summer of blood and bluster is to take the sharpened weapon of humor and place it in the hand of the social-justice tradition that has been a part of American folk music as long as there’s been a Newport Festival to celebrate it.