I was something of an anomaly at the end of my high school career. Country music wasn’t exactly taking New Jersey high schools by storm back in the early- to mid-’90s.
Those were the days, in my main social circle, of Gin Blossoms, Pearl Jam, Green Day, Dr. Dre, U2 and The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love.” But then came summer “down the Shore,” and a whole different circle of friends, mostly coworkers and bosses at my various jobs on the Ocean City boardwalk, where the bosses wisely monitored the music that teenagers were pumping throughout their place of business. That’s where Jimmy Buffett and, yes, country music entered my life and stayed.
My too-cool teen protests against country music didn’t last long as I learned the lyrics to popular country songs and realized the genre was getting a bad rap from the snide stereotypes about prison and pickup trucks. The songs I was hearing were about real people. Yes, there were pickups and breakups, whiskey and rodeos. But there was humanity in the music. Real people. Kids leaving home for the first time; dads watching their sons repeat their mistakes; young love and aging dreams.
These were lyrics that made sense to me, unlike some of the nonsense words strung together by The Cure and Phish. (I‘ll deny I ever typed those words, by the way, given some of my best friends’ continuing devotion to the latter.)
Fortunately, in 1994, I headed to college in North Carolina and was no longer forced to be a closeted country music fan. It was everywhere.
And it was certainly a part of Key West’s live music scene by the time I moved here in July 1998.
The Key West Songwriters Festival, which Charlie Bauer had launched in 1995, had become a big deal. A really big deal.
In 1996, BMI, the Nashville-based music licensing company, signed on as a partner and sponsor of the Key West Songwriters Festival, which is now the largest festival of its kind.
My first Songwriters Festival was in 1999 and I’ve attended at least three shows during every festival since.
The festival revolves around five days and nights of more than 30 free shows in some of the island’s most popular watering holes and hot spots, where live music introduces crowds to the faces, voices and stories behind the songs.
“Part concert series, part ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at the stories behind the hits, the festival has built a reputation for spotlighting artists on the brink of stardom,” states a press release about the event. “Before they were household names, Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen, Kane Brown, Thomas Rhett and Walker Hayes all took the stage here.”
And this year’s 30th anniversary festival brings back some of those veterans and, as always, introduces us to the next big names playing the songs we’ll all soon recognize. And as usual, Duval Street in front of Sloppy Joe’s will be packed on Saturday, May 2 for the free concert featuring the rising star Ashley Cooke and headlined by Ernest.
Hosted by the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association and Rams Head Presents, the festival brings more than 200 BMI songwriters to stages across the island, transforming bars, beaches and historic venues into casual listening rooms and unforgettable, up-close experiences.
This year’s lineup continues that tradition, featuring Ashley Cooke, Hardy, Jack Ingram, Robert Earl Keen, Lori McKenna, Liz Rose, Brian Kelley, Chuck Mead, Rissi Palmer, Bruce Robison, Robert Randolph, and hundreds more.
Songwriters are the storytellers. They put words to music and create the songs that become the soundtracks to our lives — the summer anthems and break-up ballads we played on repeat amid adolescent angst. Songs take us back. To summer loves and sad goodbyes, late nights and good times.
Every year during the Key West Songwriters Festival, I find myself in awe of these writers as I watch them perch unassumingly on a stool in a waterfront bar and straighten out the guitar strap around their neck. They’ll pluck lightly on a few strings, twist a tuning knob, sip a beer and then plunge into a song as familiar as an old friend.
And these are the people who gave us these songs. Sure, they send their creations out into the world to be recorded by others. But it all starts with them — and it all comes back to them each year at the Key West Songwriters Festival, which reminds me, yet again, that I ended up in the right place when I picked Key West in 1998 and came out of the country music closet.
I’ll see you downtown this week. In the meantime, check out keywestsongwritersfestival.com for the full schedule, the free shows and the huge concert on Duval Street.
