Hip Deep is Afropop's media project dedicated to the idea that music is a key to understanding everything. Get hip deep into programs on how the music formed and informed cultures in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, plus companion interviews, features, discographies and more.
At New York’s 2008 GlobalFEST showcase in January, Brooklyn-based Nation Beat closed out the night with a joyous, driving set that blended styles from Brazil’s rural northeast and America’s rural south.A roomful of sweaty world music mavens found themselves boogieing hard to Nation Beat’s take on Hank Williams’s “So Lonesome I Could Cry,” reinvented as maracatu.It was obvious this band of Brazilians and Americans was onto something, so when their new CD Legends of the Preacher came out a few months later, I reviewed it for NPR’s All Things Considered.The review ran on August 1, and among those who heard it was Willie Nelson’s manager.A few days later, Nation Beat got a call inviting them to join Nelson for Farm Aid, where they would join a lineup that included Nelson, Jakob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Kenny Chesney, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Mellencamp, The Pretenders, Dave Matthews, and Neil Young.When you cover African and African Diaspora music, you always hope for something that will lift the music out of its niche and breach the mainstream.
It rarely works this well.
Farm Aid was held on September 20 at the Comcast Center, south of Boston.Nation Beat went on at 4PM.Arlo Guthrie had recently left the stage, and Jakob Dylan would follow.The 19,000 people who would eventually pack the venue’s expansive seating and upper lawn to capacity were still assembling, but those present responded immediately to a sound that was like nothing else they would hear all night.The heavy rhythms and soaring Portuguese vocals filling that vast amphitheatre were certainly foreign, but immediately welcome.Eyes raised.Feet tapped.Bodies moved.This is a band that believes in deep connections between American and Brazilian roots music.With no context or explanation needed, Farm Aid fans were feeling those connections in their bones.
Nation Beat’s 18-minute set was the first to be broadcast on Farm Aid’s Direct TV live feed.Nelson not only introduced the band personally, but remained on stage, delighted and bemused, strumming on his guitar through early songs that pumped out full-force Brazilian rhythm.He sang the last two numbers with lead vocalist Liliana Araujo, first a sultry “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”—the only breather in an otherwise breathless set—and the closer, “So Lonesome I Could Cry.”Nation Beat had seized its moment in the sun and literally exploded onto the stage, and no one seemed happier about it than Nelson himself.
A lot of great music followed, including a devastating set from Neil Young that spanned his electric and acoustic personas and culminated in a full-blown cover of The Beatles’ “A Day in The Life.”Oh boy, indeed!By the time Nelson took the stage to close the show with his own band sometime after 11 PM, fans had been given a lot to chew on, but I’m betting that more than a few will return to the memory of Nelson being repeatedly hugged by an overjoyed Araujo.“That Brazilian band out of Brooklyn really kicked it.What were they called again?”
