A lifeline for musicians
Whippoorwill fest gives Americana performers grants and community
An outoftheblue phone call that quickly leads to a $25,000 grant for a littleknown musician sounds too good to be true. North Carolina singersongwriter Kamara Thomas wasn’t sure at first whether it was a prank, but her scheduled appearance at the Whippoorwill Arts Festival of Americana Music this weekend is proof that the Bay Area organization is an alltoorare bright spot for Americana performers contending with shuttered venues and a dearth of gigs.
“It’s impossible to find grants for songwriters,” Thomas said. “The fact that Whippoorwill exists is like the heavens opening up. That call couldn’t have come at a better time. For me, it was a bit of a huge miracle.”
Created and run by singersongwriter Nell Robinson and bluegrass guitarist Jim Nunally, who perform together in the Nell & Jim Band, the Whippoorwill Arts Festival has transformed itself since the first intimate 2018 gathering at the California Jazz Conservatory, when guitarist and singer Molly Tuttle and banjo great Keith Little were presented with Whippoorwill’s emerging artist and master artist awards, respectively.
After skipping 2019, Whippoorwill returns SaturdaySunday, Aug. 2930, with an online event featuring virtual workshops, live and recorded music streams, and realtime Q&A sessions. The virtual event is free, but donations are encouraged via the payment app Venmo (@whiparts). People are encouraged to register in advance.
This year’s festival, designed to boost the visibility of rising musicians across the country, features the 2020 Whippoorwill Arts Artist Award winners, including Menlo Parkreared fiddler Brittany Haas of Crooked Still and Hawktail and fiddler Annie Staninec of the Kathy Kallick Band, a graduate of Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts.
Stockton banjo, ukulele and dulcimer player Snap Jackson, who fronts the Snap Jackson & the Knock on Wood Players, and Thomas round out the younger contingent. Tuttle and Little come back to perform as part of Sunday’s program, which concludes with legendary folkie
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, winner of this year’s Whippoorwill master artist award.
While the grants arrived in the midst of the pandemicinduced performance drought, the environment for many musicians was already parched as streaming services have siphoned off revenue. That’s what led Nunally and Robinson to revive Whippoorwill, which they funded by raising money from various deeppocket Americana music lovers.
“The market for live performances was already shrinking, particularly at a time when people are expecting to get music for free,” Robinson said. “It’s harder and harder for stalwart venues to survive as well. Jim and I are deeply appreciative of the music community in the Bay Area, and when we see something that needs to change, our impulse is to ask, ‘What can we do?’ ”
Whippoorwill reflects the tightknit nature of the Bay Area’s blue
grass and Americana music scene. For instance, Haas has known Staninec since they played together in the California Bluegrass Association’s Kids on Bluegrass band.
Thomas is the only player without California ties. She has performed in the Bay Area with the bands Earl Greyhound and the Ghost
Gamblers, but she has never played a gig under her own name.
Part of a wave of African American women who are reimagining the Americana landscape, Thomas is in the midst of recording an ambitious song cycle, “Tularosa: An American Dreamtime,” that was initially inspired by a gas station travel book about a remote town in New Mexico,
“Tularosa: Last Frontier in the West.”
“There were all these amazing stories, and I ended up writing all these songs,” Thomas said. “It’s really about American mythology with these characters traversing a mythic American landscape.”
More than providing a welcome infusion of cash — in addition to the grants, the artists are also being paid for their festival performances — Whippoorwill offers opportunities for musicians to talk about the challenges presented by technology and COVID19.
“One of the panel discussions focuses on how the pandemic has changed how people view their careers,” Nunally said. “We’re looking at the ways that streaming and social media are interacting, and how every musician is impacted.”
With enough funding in place for another four or five years, Robinson and Nunally are looking at ways to make Whippoorwill a permanent part of the philanthropic scene, which would be good news indeed for musicians too accustomed to ill tidings.