Booker T Jones & Bettye Lavette at Sage Gateshead.

This past weekend has seen the Sage Gateshead host the annual SummerTyne Americana Festival featuring headline appearances from The Jayhawks and Chuck Prophet among others. As usual there were also a couple of afternoons of free music at an outdoor stage all of which I missed this year. The reason for that was because my eldest son had been thoughtless enough to arrange his stag do over the same weekend. Consequently instead of seeing some fine Americana music on Saturday, I found myself scrambling through muddy Northumbrian woodland dodging paintballs coming at me at almost 200 miles an hour.

It was my first experience of paintballing and I have to say that despite the pain and the bruises I am nursing, it was a lot of fun. 

Thankfully I had recovered sufficiently by Sunday evening to attend a concert by soul legend Booker T Jones and Bettye Lavette, courtesy of a free ticket I obtained from a friend.

As I arrived at the venue the Americana free music on the outdoor stage was drawing to a close but I was fortunate enough to catch the final twenty minutes of Davina and The Vagabonds as they whipped up the crowd with sensational versions of 'I'd Rather Go Blind', 'St James Infirmary' and 'Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey?'. I only wish I could have seen more and would even have been prepared to put up with the ever so slightly irritating compere, Mr (Steve) Drayton.

Inside the venue we headed for Hall One and soon after taking our seats, Bettye Lavette and her four piece band took to the stage. I have to confess that as a great fan of Free, I was won over as soon as they launched into their opener, 'The Stealer'. As Ms Lavette demonstrated with her fine 'Interpretations' album, she is happy to mix up the musical genres, yet still retain that soulful feel. Consequently we witnessed her perform songs by Bob Dylan ('Everything is Broken'), The Beatles ('Blackbird'). Lucinda Williams ('Joy') and The Who ('Love Reign Over Me'), but for me the highlights came at the end of her set when she invited onto the stage the forty piece SummerTyne Choir to back her on 'Let Me Down Easy' followed by a reworking of the Stones' 'Salt of the Earth'.

They were absolutely magnificent!

I did not envy Booker T Jones and his band having to follow that, but as anticipated, they made a great job of doing so. Switching between his trademark organ and guitar, Booker T accompanied by a fine three piece band gave us a fine mixture of soul and blues classics. These included, 'Born Under a Bad Sign', 'Take Me To The River', 'Hey Joe', 'Hoochie Coochie Man' and of course 'Green Onions'. Not that everything was rooted in the 60's or 70's as we also got a very nice version of Lauryn Hill's 'Everything is Everything'.




All in all it was a fitting end to what I understand was a very successful Americana Festival, an event that quite rightly appears to grow in popularity with each passing year. 

Roll on 2015.