Billy Strings hosted a big camping weekend at Bethel, NY’s Bethel Woods Center For The Arts over the weekend. The bluegrass guitar prodigy loaded his first shows at the historic venue, which is located on the site of the original Woodstock festival, with special moments, beginning during his first set on Friday, July 31, when he debuted “Mill Town Flood,” a track off his forthcoming record So Much for Goodbyes. On night one, he also brought back a pair of tunes for the first time this year, Leon Rusk’s “Airmail Special” and Bobby Davidson’s “If Your Hair Is Too Long, There’s Sin In Your Heart,” the latter of which found Strings and most of his band gathered around a single mic.
The special moments continued the following day, Saturday, August 1, which happened to be Jerry Garcia’s birthday. A few songs into the show, Strings nodded to his surroundings by teasing Jimi Hendrix’s “Who Knows” during his own “Doing Things Right,” and he offered a more pronounced nod to the guitarist a bit later by covering “Love or Confusion” during second two. Exactly one year after he joined Dead & Company at San Francisco’s Golden Park Park, during one of Bob Weir’s final shows, Strings also celebrated Garcia’s birthday by both closing his first set with his second-ever cover of the adventurous Garcia/David Grisman number “Arabia” and kicking off his second set with Charlie Monroe’s “Rosa Lee McFall.”
Garcia started played the latter bluegrass tune as early as 1964 with the Black Mountain Boys and famously performed an acoustic arrangement with the Dead in both 1970 and 1980 as well as with the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band in 1987. Strings had not dusted off the tune in almost four years before Saturday, last offering it on anniversary of Garcia’s passing, August 9, in 2022. The original “Everything’s The Same” and the traditional “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” also received their first 2025 airings during the August 1 show.
Billy Strings will return to Charleston, WV’s Charleston Civic Center tomorrow.
