Sierra Ferrell astounds Nashville's Ryman with headlining set

For consecutive evenings, Sierra Ferrell transformed the Ryman Auditorium into a rollicking bordello and juke joint inhabiting a timeless location on your local astral plane.

The work required to achieve such a fantastical notion did not occur overnight.

Thus, it's best to regard four of the past 48 hours that Charleston, West Virginia native Ferrell spent onstage at country music's Mother Church as indicative of the best of what she's lived and learned in the better part of the past two decades of her life.

These two decades have notably seen her see much of the world as a train-hopping street busker or Americana Music Association award-winning and critically acclaimed musician.

Thus, in just over two hours, her set traversed a through line defined by sounds existent in the cracks and seams that have consistently torn commerce from art and creative freedom from industry expectations.

Throwback inspirations

A governing notion says America's musical evolutions peaked when folk, blues, country, jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll commercially reigned supreme. Don't tell that to Ferrell or her Vaden Landers, her East Tennessee-based opener.

One thousand miles separate the place where George Jones was born and the street corner in Bristol, Tennessee, where Hank Williams, Sr. died. In that symbolic space, sounds like bluegrass, boogie-woogie, electric blues, jump blues, and Western swing exist. At various points in the evening, both artists' work thrived best in those sounds that birthed others.

A night defined by rarefied grooves started before Ferrell hit the stage as Landers and his trio offered takes on George Jones' 1959 almost doo-wopping boogie-woogie swinger of a country tune, "White Lightning," plus the previously-mentioned Williams' "Moanin' The Blues," released nine years prior.

"Yodels and flashes of trailing falsetto smoothly rock and roll" could be either a description of "Moanin' The Blues" from WIlliams' 2004 biography or an apt description of Landers' opening performance.

'Trail of Flowers'

Sierra Ferrell's headlining set ended just as "Trail of Flowers," her fourth studio album in a decade, was released.

The album arrives at a point in her career where she receives a standing ovation whenever her band stops playing music and she stops singing.

Walking onstage with her hair braided and adorned with red roses and wearing a long black dress, she appeared to be the best and most unprecedented mix of legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and pioneering country matriarch Maybelle Carter that the world didn't know it needed to see and hear.

Like both those inspirations, she is a revolutionary artist inspired by nature who aims to keep a circle unbroken.

She's long been a youthful and carefree-seeming artist adept at taking poetic license with love and heartbreak as tent posts where she can judge whether she has achieved resolution with love by another as her life's chief goal. However, on "Trail of Flowers'" songs like "Dollar Bill Bar," she's accepted that is no longer possible.

Now, she's more attuned to pushing for social justice in a manner greater than herself.

Ferrell reflected near the end of her set as she sang, "Wake up again in an old motel. Is it somewhere different? I can't tell. Every set of curtains opens to the open road," from her new track, "American Dreaming."

It's apparent that she's evolved past hopping trains, waking up in trailer parks and playing a seemingly neverending string of dive bars, truck stops and street corners.

In doing so with the added layers of maturity, self-awareness and success by her hand and iconoclastic vision, her vision for America is one less impeded by what she described onstage as "a tug and pull between controversy and evil" and instead governed by, perhaps, spirits borne of moth goddesses fluttering from the clouds (akin to what Ferrell dressed as during the second half of her Wednesday night set.

Local and legendary special guests earn praise

A night showcasing unprecedented creative maturity would be enough for the average artist.

However, Sierra Ferrell is emerging as an above-average artist.

Her inspirations and desires for a future birthed within her past yielded an incredible array of gobsmacking performances.

She emerged for the second half of her set dressed in a rhinestone-laden circus costume reminiscent of her 2022 New Year's Eve set. It was an outfit commensurate to the celebration level of the Ryman crowd in attendance.

Artists like Nashville honky-tonk and small club favorites Tim Bolo and Cole Ritter have aided Ferrell's ability to achieve a creative community while simultaneously allowing her best and most diverse artistic self to take shape. Moreover, artists like pioneering bluegrass and folk musician Tim O'Brien have been constant champions of rootsy, genre-free meanderings for five decades.

Onstage at The Ryman, Bolo joined Ferrell for a scintillating take on George Jones and Tammy Wynette's classic "Golden Ring." O'Brien also made a duet appearance not just for a soulful, funky take on soon-to-be Country Music Hall of Fame inductee John Anderson's "Years" but also played his own 2008 recording, "The Garden."

Watching Ferrell dance a perfect waltz step in time to O'Brien strumming the bridge to "The Garden" was one of many joyful "easter egg" moments of the evening.

Rock influences appear

In June 2024, Sierra Ferrell will play 20,000-to-50,000-seat buildings as Grammy-winning mainstream country chart-topper Zach Bryan's opening act.

Thus, the Ryman feeling wracked by thunderclaps as a trio of fiddles launched into the "Trail of Flowers" track "Fox Hunt" felt apropos. The European folk roots of Ferrell's work felt front and center with the arrangement and should roust crowds potentially baking in the sun at Denver's Empower Field at Mile High.

Also, Ferrell's breakout single "In Dreams," which was arranged with an extended intro and subtle, countrypolitan-style chord changes and progressions, allowed the song to change from a folk-country stomper to a classic Southern groove.

Ferrell's intensely gifted and perhaps talented in a manner that some could feel she's not an ideal fit for a National Basketball Association arena or National Football League stadium.

She's now shown herself capable of having a body of work and presentation to prove critics wrong.

Heart-wrenching performances

"If a song makes me cry, I'm going to learn it," offered Ferrell before launching into Charlie Poole & The North Carolina Ramblers' "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down Blues." She learned the almost century-old old-time string band song while busking at Seattle's Pike Place Market, earning upwards of $300 daily.

It's one of many heart-wrenchingly sad songs that grounded her set in two notions: First, the wrong person's heart to break is someone who believes that sad songs and waltzes will always be for sale. Second, while many women in present-day Americana, country, and pop make songs for sad girls, very few women can sing songs that resurrect sad girls' souls as Ferrell does with awe-inspiring routine ease.

Covers of Dolly Parton's "Old Flames Can't Hold a Candle to You" and an encore of Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee," plus reimaginings of Canadian folk icon Gordon Lightfoot's "Redwood Hill" and Ferrell's original "Little Bird" featuring the reversed chords of blues and folk legend Elizabeth Cotten's foundational song "Freight Train" showcased the breadth of Ferrell's catalog of emotive anthems.

Yet still, as always throughout the evening, she didn't stop there. Her song "Whispering Waltz" benefitted from Oliver Bates Craven's steady work on the electric guitar and Jeff Saunders' thunderous work on the upright bass to add gravitas to Ferrell's ragged rasping of a story song soaked in heartbreak.

After many inspirations were inimitably strung together into an entertaining live set and encore, Ferrell invited a dozen acoustic musicians onstage, removed her in-ear monitors and stepped away from the microphone.

Ferrell sweetly sang "Goodnight Irene" while the musicians softly played behind her.

Transfixed by the moment, the crowd rose for what seemed to be the twentieth time in two hours as Frrell jumped down from the Ryman stage and sang while walking through the crowd.

Sierra Ferrell's Ryman performances were not of the star-making variety. Instead, they were of the rare "star-reassuring" one. Cognizant of the power of the moment she's arrived, she feels a more assured bet than ever before to surpass more remarkable pinnacles of success.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Sierra Ferrell astounds Nashville's Ryman with headlining set