WESTERN SKIES - June 25, 2005

*** TELLURIDE BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL ***

ERIC WHITNEY: The third weekend in June can mean a lot of things: the summer solstice, Father's Day, the beginning of wildfire season. But in southwestern Colorado, for over three decades, it's meant one thing and one thing only: time for the Telluride Bluegrass Festival

MUSIC: The Badly Bent, live on stage

WHITNEY: The festival started with the so-called "newgrass" revival in the mid-1970s, and has always been about stretching the boundaries of American traditional music. While many of the biggest names in traditional Bluegrass have played Telluride (Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs and Ralph Stanley among them) the festival has also played host to acts as diverse as Cake, Joan Armatrading and Ani DiFranco. This year pop star Jewel was a headliner, along with alternative rockers Wilco and the hard to classify band Calexico.
But the Telluride Bluegrass Festival is about more than just showcasing big name bands and established acts: it also holds band and troubador contests every year. And this year, a Colorado band took top honors in the band contest.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Thank you so much. We're the Badly Bent from Durango, Colorado. We're trying to collect ourselves and absorb this moment. It's a dream for us, but thank you so much for coming out to hear us.

MUSIC: The Badly Bent, live on stage

WHITNEY: The five piece string ensemble won seven hundred and fifty dollars and a pile of new strings for their instruments, but the biggest prize is an invitation to come back next year and play a full set of music on the main Telluride Bluegrass Festival stage. That means increased credibility and visibility in the bluegrass world. Past contest winners, including the Dixie Chicks, have gone on to win recording contracts and invitations to play other prominent festivals. For guitarist Pat Dressen, this year's victory was a long time coming.

PAT DRESSEN: I've been playing Bluegrass in Durango for years, and this is my ninth time in the contest, eight of them in the finals. But I'd never won before and never been in a band like this before, though. So, I'm really ecstatic.

WHITNEY: Just making the finals year after year is a pretty major accomplishment. Every year, hundreds of bands mail CDs to Telluride's band contest, and only about a dozen are picked to play live for judges at the festival. Those twelve are winnowed down to four finalists, before just one is crowned the winner.

This year, the Badly Bent, all guys over forty years old, decided to augment their picking talents with matching outfits, Pat Dressen and banjo player Mark Epstein joked that that's what gave them the edge.

DRESSEN: We were counting on the cute geezer factor. We're the oldest band here.

MARK EPSTEIN: We were hoping all the judges were over forty so we could relate to them.

WHITNEY: While bands from all over the country enter the contest, by the time the finals rolled around it wasn't too surprising that a band from Durango won, since Broke Mountain, another Durango bluegrass band, was another of the four finalists. Durango's own bluegrass festival, called the Meltdown and held every spring, has been growing its reputation and audience every year. And, Dobro player Bill Adams says that, these days, the fifteen thousand people who live in Durango support a lively bluegrass scene year round.

BILL ADAMS: We have about five or six bands right in the region, right in the area, so it's a hot spot, a bluegrass hotspot.

WHITNEY: While the band contest winners at Telluride this year were from just over the mountain, the festival also featured musicians from as far away as Canada, France, and Australia. But the line up also included a few local and regional acts poised for greater things. Uncle Earl, for instance, is actually an all-female string band from Lyons, Colorado, that's just been signed to record for Americana label Rounder Records. There were also two bands from Kansas City. Split Lip Rayfield includes a bass player who built his own instrument from the gas tank from a 1978 Ford LTD. The other band from KC calls itself The Wilders. They're an eclectic foursome that play honky tonk and old time string music.

MUSIC: The Wilders live on stage.

IKE SHELDON: My name's Ike Sheldon, and I play guitar and do the yellin'.

BETSY ELLIS: My name is Betsy Ellis and I fiddle around a whole lot and I guess I do some of the yelling too, on and off stage.

PHIL WADE: Phil Wade, mandolin, banjo, dobro.

NATE G: Nate G., prison inmate number four-two-three-five-six-seven, on the bass.

WHITNEY: Ike and Betsy say that Kansas City has a surprisingly diverse music scene, and that The Wilders are far from typical.

SHELDON: Here's how we sound like Kansas City, is that we don't really care. And that's what Kansas City sounds like. We just do what we want. We play the music that we like to play, and it's lucky it turned out other people like it. We just have a good time and that's Kansas City. Have a good time, play whatever you want.

ELLIS: I think a lot of people in Kansas City have that attitude, really. Because there are some acoustic bands there, but there's whole lot of rock and roll bands and heavy metal bands and, of course, Kansas City is known, and it still has tons of great blues and jazz bands. I think everybody kind of plays what they want to play. And if you had talked to our friends, though, and you'd ask us about our friends, our friends all play a lot crazier stuff than we do. We're the normal ones in our gang.

MUSIC: The Wilders singing "Your Cheating Heart"

WHITNEY: The Wilders' repertoire include country standards by Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, as well as re-workings of old time music born on the front porches of Appalachia. The band clusters around a pair of microphones in suit coats and cowboy hats and it would be easy to believe they grew up playing this kind of music. But the musicians in The Wilders took very diverse routes before eventually settling on their distinctively country sound. Lead singer and guitarist Ike Sheldon, for instance, studied opera in college.

SHELDON: I kinda got into it because I grew up a total hillbilly, southern Missouri. And I was like, "I'm going to, whatever, go to the city and find whatever." [laughs] Try to do something, you know, fancy. So I went there and learned something fancy. And then after I was done with it, I was like "I'm just a hillbilly and this is the stuff I like." You know, I like other stuff too, but I'm glad I learned do it, it's pretty fun, it's cool to know how to be able to be that loud, when you need to be. It's good for calling people across parking lots and stuff [imitating opera singer] "Hey John!"

WHITNEY: Betsy Ellis, grew up in Arkansas, playing the violin, which she didn't even know was referred to as a fiddle until she was in her late teens.

ELLIS: I know dude, it's weird. See, in my household, we didn't have any kind of country music in the household, we listened to, my brother and I both played violin when we were growing up, and my parents loved classical music and Broadway music, and opera. So, we had a lot of that going on at home, and then we also had rock and roll. So, you know, it's ironic, because there were a lot of fiddlers not very far from where I lived, I just didn't know about them.

WADE: Unlike Betsy, I had country music rammed down my throat every minute of every day when I was growing up. And I ran screaming from it for about ten years.

WHITNEY: Phil Wade plays banjo, mandolin and resophonic guitar for the Wilders.

WADE: I didn't like kinda whiny, slick country music. Because, that was what was really, I heard a lot of seventies country in my house. It's been twenty years ago, that I started to really like bluegrass. And then so, I got kind of done doing the rock and roll thing and started more acoustic kind of stuff with Betsy and then fell really hard for the whiny country stuff that I had hated so much.

WHITNEY: The Wilders expect to release a new CD this fall. The Badly Bent's latest release came out in February. You can learn more about both bands on the internet, at WildersCountry.com and TheBadlyBent.com, check our website for links. That's KRCC.org.