With age comes wisdom and/ or wimpiness, so I didn’t drive up to the South Country Fair on Friday, during what turned out to be an all too brief lightning and thunderstorm and share in the tight knit community taking shape for this year’s South Country Fair.
While I missed Punch Drunk Cabaret and 
blues/ jazz singer S’Aida, who by most accounts was a highlight of Friday night, I did arrive at around noon on Saturday, July 21 to catch one of the best daytime line-ups I’ve seen.
I caught the tail end of a hot set by Redrum Triumph on the East Stage.
I could have just set up a chair and stayed on the east stage all day long to hear their rock solid line-up, but , of course, had to see what else was shaking.
A lot of the campers designed intricate camps, including a group who not only designed their camp like a pirate ship, but dressed the part too. They were on the edge of a good sized crowd dancing to Steve Foord and Kelsey Jesperson’s music.
In the audience, Brittany O’Neill held up a picture of friend Ali Stuart, who couldn’t attend the fair because of a cycling accident, but her spirit was there.
There were a lot of highlights. Most of the acts I wanted to see were playing during the day, but, as always there were some surprises.
One of the surprises was one of several workshops happening.
The first one featured crazy Australian roots/ blues/ rock band Wagons, who shared a stage with T. Nile and David Ross MacDonald.
Their lead singer Henry Wagons gave the enraptured audience a taste of their south stage set later that night by howling and cracking jokes and jumping off the amplifiers.
John Wort Hannam played a strong solo set on the South Stage with fiddler Scott Duncan, who added tasteful background fiddle throughout.
They would be back to share a workshop with Dave McCann and Steve Brockley, later in the afternoon.
In that workshop, each musician played a song while the others sat back and listened, though Scott Duncan added extra fiddle to everybody’s songs.
Transgendered singer Rae Spoon played an innovative set of laid back love songs and dissonant guitar lines on the south stage. Meanwhile, all the energy was on the east where a rock solid set of fantastic music was keeping toes tapping in the scorching sun.
A pleasant surprise for me was Scarlett Jane, a new roots/ blues duo featuring Cindy Doire playing bass and Andrea Ramolo on guitar with a drummer keeping the beat. The raven-haired beauties rode to Fort Macleod all the way from Saskatoon on a bus, to knock their set out of the park with absolutely gorgeous vocal harmonies, sexy basslines and blues tinged folk guitar.
As a complete contrast to the more laid back love songs of Rae Spoon on the South Stage, Miss Quincy brought the blues to the east stage in a fantastic set of raunchy blues rock, which had a huge crowd in front of the stage dancing up the dust. They had about a dozen people watching them last time they played Lethbridge, hopefully their set will result
in more people coming next time.
They sang a sexy version of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Snake Farm,” and incendiary versions of the songs off their laid back new CD “Like the Devil Does.” They were pure, bluesy fun.
She showed off her powerful pipes at the end of her set, putting her guitar down and singing unaccompanied while her bassist and drummer kept a subtle beat going.
There was the battle of the bluegrass bands next around 4 p.m. Halifax’s Modern Grass (formerly the Modern Grass Quartet) took over the south stage with uptempo traditional sounding bluegrass music, featuring some superb dobro playing.
On the East stage, Winnipeg’s The Magnificent 7s had a big audience who sat patiently waiting for a few technical difficulties to be resolved.
As expected they played an exciting set featuring lots of fiddle as well as quite a bit of banjo, though not as much as I expected. They got those toes tapping.
The crowd clustered in front of the stage to dance up a storm with fellow Winnipegers the F-Holes.
The F indeed stood for fun during that set which had everyone on their feet as they blasted through their two CDs and added some exuberant horns for a touch of jazz.
I had to take care of some things back in the city, so had to leave during an awesome set on the South Stage with Wagons.
They were great, they put a quirky Australian twist on traditional country-rock. The lead singer, whose voice sounded like DOA’s Joe Keithley, joked with the crowd, good 
-naturedly picked on a couple audience members and got everybody in the mood for a hot night including poet/ folk singer C.R. Avery, Tambura Rasa, one of my favourite bands the Weber Brothers and Edmonton reggae band Souljah Fyah which I unfortunately couldn’t stick around for.
