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Music

The Savannah Stopover Festival's Southern Hospitality Is More Than Just an Open Container Law

But that law is pretty sweet, too.

The lovely Caitlin Rose performs

How much beer would you drink if you knew you could not fail? That’s the existential crisis that faced me this past weekend as I made my way to Savannah, Georgia for the city’s SXSW spinoff festival Savannah Stopover. The city boasts a highly flexible open container law that allows patrons to walk around openly with alcohol pretty much anywhere a anytime as long as it’s not in a glass container. That legislation combined with a lineup that boasted over 100 acts spread over the course of three days was a no-brainer when I got the invite.

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Clearly, Savannah’s festival doesn’t alienate the local community but rather draws them into the mix. One of my favorite moments of the whole weekend was watching a guy in a ten gallon white cowboy hat and a black, sleeveless motorcycle t-shirt—probably in his late 40s—slow dancing with his wife/girlfriend at the Los Colognes outdoor set. At one point, the song slipped into a little bluesy grunge and the two switched effortlessly to grinding, all while sipping their beers. That’s the image I’ll carry with me of Savannah Stopover: it’s a working class festival that moves from the romantic to the bawdy without skipping a beat—and it all goes down while drunk in public. But it’s like drunk without the pressure of being drunk, you know? There’s no urge to hurry and chug a beer, or even any real reason to drink one, but there’s absolutely no reason not to either. Next to the couple, a trio of high school girls began dancing in front of the cement stage and were joined by a woman who was easily in her 60s—and to the teenager’s credit, they let her belong with them, even for just one song.

That seemed to be the thing about this boozy southern town. People weren’t really concerned with status or appearances, but were more interested in branded beer coozies and the historic tours that threaded the town in rickety tour buses. Leading up from riverfront are a series of historic steps posted up and down with warning signs for drunk, stumbling tourists. (By the way, the steps might’ve actually been hewn back in the colony days for how steep they are.) There, a man named Raymond sitting down by the historic river gave me a flower bent and folded out of a reed stalk and told me he’d practiced for three and a half weeks 30 years ago to learn the technique. Broke journalist that I am, I told him I had no money to pay for the flower. He looked me dead in the eye: “That’s okay, your smile is enough,” he said, somehow not sounding lame. To be honest, his thick Dixie drawl probably didn’t hurt.

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Southern hospitality is a real force, and the open, welcoming spirit with which most people greeted us erased any stereotypes I had involving missing teeth and banjos. Hospitality isn’t an “aww shucks” yokel ignorance, but an ease that’s based on actually not giving a shit what someone else’s background is or what they might be able to offer you. It’s an open-arms acceptance of how things already are, with no effort to change them. Even some of the best bands on the lineup showcased this—hospitality means making people feel welcome with any sound in any setting.

But anyway, let’s talk about the music. On the first evening, I was walking beer in hand through houses from the 1700s to a venue called Knights of Columbus, and was immediately hit with a wave of brass from a soulful collective called St. Paul and the Broken Bones. Think men in suits and ties playing Sam Cooke covers with the fervor of an acid drop—and a powerful voice to match. Their gospel jams drew festivalgoers and a handful of locals who ranged in age from just past puberty to mid-80s. Hanging around the venue after this bizarrely beautiful introduction of an evening, a 50-plus year old white dude approached our group unasked and began to regale us with stories of the time he got drunk off cough syrup. “I think it was… DRANK!” he confided, and then toddled back down the street, double cup in hand.

Old people are always the most turnt at guitar-based music festivals. Savannah was already revealing that it was not a city to be underestimated.

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Later in the weekend I found myself in a bar called Hangfire that had chandeliers made out of liquor bottles dangling from the ceiling, with cocktail menus designed after the jagged speech bubbles you find in comic books. I drank a beer, though. On one of the walls, a hand-painted portrait of Stevie Wonder hung stoically. Across from it hung a similar portrait of Malcolm X. At the time, the juxtaposition seemed bizarre, but rather than focus on What It All Means, man, I just joined the packed crowd in jamming with Brooklyn darlings Total Slacker, whose sound delivered such a punch we had to dip after only about four songs. Obviously, I grabbed another beer before departure.

For the festival, the burlesque club in town agreed to double as a venue, so stepping into the mirrored, strobe lit space of Club One felt like a portal away from the colonial architecture. It was like walking into the future—or at least a flash homage to what people in the ‘80s thought the future was. Here is where I made my first musical discovery: a trio out of Athens called DEGA, and I caught their second show ever. They’re the side-project of some other bigger group, but I missed their name. That doesn’t really matter though, because their performance—full of bass as thick as a beef stick below weirdo alien noise synths—made me not care about their other bands. The strangest part, though, was that the drummer was a dead-ringer for Michael Stipe. I still can’t decide if I was happy I made that connection.

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On the way home, some Florida Georgia Line-esque vibes pulled me into another bar. The band, J. Roddy Walston & the Business, are from Baltimore and currently creating a form of music that simultaneously encourages pseudo-moshing, couples grinding, and dudes doing rap hands. Bizarre? Sure, but somehow, each form of dancing made sense to this music. However, because I was hit on five times over the course of two songs, I decided to duck out.

Friday was the day I found out breakfast at my hotel ended at 9:30 AM. By the afternoon, I was over it and had wandered across the street from my hotel to Abe’s on Lincoln, a bar that shows its dedication to our 16th president with a shrine of paper napkin portraits of Honest Abe. On stage, Christopher Paul Stelling—a Brooklyn-by-way-of-Daytona-Beach fingerpicking guitar player—delivered an intimate performance of a slew of quirky and fiery songs. With time, the charming set had caused the room to swell with people, the only spotlight coming from a beat up lamp in the corner. Behind Stelling, a sign stating that the bar “proudly serves Fireball Whiskey” played backdrop. Really, it was all just a little too perfect, if I’m being honest.

But jokes referencing presidents aside, performances like this one are what make smaller, off-the-beaten path festivals important. On a bench beside Chris sat his parents, a formidable pair old enough to have a son in his 30s, but still youthful enough to have driven three hours in a Winnebago from Daytona Beach. As Stelling disavowed his hangover from Thursday night and shared stories about accidentally playing an improptu wake for a shipwrecked boat in Amsterdam, the room’s vibe drastically changed. People cried. No one spoke. It felt like being in church without any guilt or awful church lady perfume.

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Later around 10 PM, when Caitlin Rose—one of the main reasons I wanted to attend the festival at all—took the Moon River stage, the temperature had dropped to an intense chill. Those who stuck out the cold didn’t mind. We sang along, swinging with one another as she played songs from her 2013 record The Stand In, backed by a local Nashville band called Los Colognes. For her encore, she shut down the PA due to a city ordinance, but the unplugged set ended up as one of the festival’s highlights.

Saturday meant wolfing down some Chick-Fil-A at 2 PM to even feel awake. The freedom to drink in the streets offers no respite as far as hangovers go and, at the time, I was scheduled to fly out the next morning at 8 AM. I said screw it, kicked myself in the butt, and took my Lagunitas to go see Torres, one of the baddest motherfucking guitar players of our current era. On stage, she gracefully walks the difficult line of being both vulnerable and strong, recalling other current acts like St. Vincent or Sharon Van Etten (whose upcoming record Are We There Yet Torres actually worked on). Her concentration during the performance never slipped, and it was only just before playing her closer (and arguably best track) “Honey” that she caused the lacking crowd to stir.

And that was the moment that got me. Forget the day drinking. Forget the bizarre bars. Forget the colonial architecture. Forget the strange theories about the south we’re all coming up with these days because we can't stop watching True Detective. At that moment, standing before her in this tiny festival in Savannah, I thought about, simply, how funny and weird and strange it was that I’d just seen her play to a crowd of roughly 30 people, something that will probably never happen in her career again. The next morning, I listened to her self-titled album while sitting in the plane on the runway. I fiddled with the flower Raymond made, trying to figure out how it was unfolded. I was heading to the feeding frenzy of brands and social climbers that is SXSW in Austin in just a few hours. There, people would be concerned with my credential status, the publication for which I was covering, my thoughts on the latest cover of the Fader, Twitter followers, and a whole bunch of other stuff I probably won't be prepared to discuss. I said fuck it, turned up “Honey,” reveled in southern hospitality a bit longer, and watched Savannah disappear beneath me.

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Caitlin White is a country bumpkin. She's on Twitter@harmonicait

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