Even more than most holidays, St. Patrick’s Day comes with whopping doses of clichés, so when you think of SPDs past, you’re likely to remember loud people in loud outfits with shamrock necklaces drinking green beer or leprechauns hawking furniture sales on TV. Before last night I’m not even sure I could have told you what a meaningful, soulful St. Pat’s Day would have been like. But now I know. You’d get together a huge barn full of music lovers and let Maura O’Connell sing for them and have Shannon Quinn fiddle.

If loving heathens is wrong, I don’t want to be right. One rarely hears such a powerful, gimmick-free rock and roll band with such evenly distributed talent as the Band of Heathens, who played Music City Roots last night.

From an interview I did with Maura O’Connell in 2002:

“A song from any time should feel comfortable in any time. A song is a song is a song, if it has potential to live past its own time. It’s a folk song, no matter where it comes from. I do like to sing songs like ‘Down In The Sally Gardens.’ It’s such a strong song it sits right next to a Patty Griffin song. They’re equally present in our day as poetry.”

Musical innovation is a slippery, ill-defined concept. Does it live in novel melodies, or mash-ups of styles? Is it something made by fingers on frets or in the minds of the audience? I suppose it falls in the I-know-it-when-I-hear-it category. Or I could just point you to a Cadillac Sky show. Ostensibly a “bluegrass” band, the five C-Sky guys are an ever-changing ensemble of artists who absorb top flight influences but who make sure that what comes out the other end of their creative black box is always searching and never derivative. 

Wait, what’s that sound? That yearning, blue, soul-satisfying twang? Oh yeah, COUNTRY music! For a show that’s on WSM, the greatest station in the history of country and a show dedicated to Americana, the new home for traditional country, we haven’t had a whole lot of the old-school, honky-tonkin’, boot-and-hat-wearing country on the Loveless Barn stage in our two seasons. For that reason, David Ball, kicking off last night with his 1993 smash “Thinkin’ Problem” was like cracking a cold longneck of Shiner Bock on a hot summer day.

 “You really can’t go wrong when there’s biscuits and music in the room,” said Ashley Cleveland from the stage of the Loveless Barn, summing up the situation elegantly and giving me my lead. Thanks also, Ashley, for the performance, which did not pussyfoot around. I asked her on stage to talk about the category where she’s won three Grammy Awards – Rock Gospel – and yeah, it was a dumb question. Nashville’s very own Ashley is the very definition of rock gospel, about which I’ll have more to say.

When a show opens with one of the most energetic, skilled bands in the world roaring through “El Cumbanchero” at full tilt, it’s a pretty good sign that some special other somethings are waiting in the wings. And while show closer Darrell Scott didn’t have the strength of numbers, he has his fingers and his voice, and that was enough to assure everyone in the Loveless Barn that they were in the hands of a master. I was surprised actually that our fearless and always astute producers lined the show up that way, but it turned out having energy at the top was a great idea.

He had me at THIS. And by THIS I mean that CD that Will Kimbrough released in 2000 that told the world he was more than a mere sideman or band member. THIS was a superb debut album by a seasoned artist with a vision and the first of a string of striking statements that would have encompassed confessional folk music, sharp pop rock and alt-country twang. In the meantime, Kimbrough has become one of Nashville’s musical MVPs and recipient of an Americana Music Association instrumentalist of the year award.

Just when you think you’ve heard every way there is to play a guitar, every possible groove on the drums, you need to head to Mississippi. Or more conveniently, get Mississippi to come to you, which we managed last night when a contingent of musicians from that state’s Hill Country visited the Music City Roots stage. Sure enough, there were revelations, not to mention incantations and excitations.