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The Indigo Girls at South On Main, Little Rock, Arkansas

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The Indigo Girls
South On Main
2015—2016 Oxford American Concert Series
South on Main, 1304 South Main St, Little Rock, AR 72202
Thursday, December 3, 2015

"I'm gonna clear my head..."

The Little Rock, Arkansas restaurant and performance stage, South on Main, represents an effort on the part of the Oxford American magazine to unite the elements of Southern food, music, film and writing into a single experience. The venue has become well known for programming events related to the content of the magazine, including musical performances, literary readings, film screenings, discussion groups, and other events. As the website says, "it the place where the Oxford American goes 'from the page to the stage.'"

Founded in 1992 in Oxford, Mississippi, the Oxford American has stubbornly gone its own way, resisting efforts to make it more commercially accessible (like its rival/competitor, Garden & Gun. The magazine has become the home for many Southern scribblers like Charles Portis, Roy Blount Jr., Allan Gurganus, and Kevin Brockmeier, as well as a good deal of the new writing talent evolving from its fecund DNA. For the past 17 years, the OA has published an annual Southern Music Issue, accompanied by CD collection of songs focusing on specific genre and musical eras. Beginning with the 2009 Music Issue, the magazine began devoting the entire issue to the music of a single Southern state, this year's concentration on the music of Georgia.

It is neither a mistake or surprise that concurrent with the music issue's publication that Georgia natives the Indigo Girls and Patterson Hood would be appearing as part of the 2015- -2016 OA Concert Series, Thursday, December 3, 2015. South on Main made for a small and cozy venue to watch masters at their craft. Hood, a current member of the Drive-By Truckers took the stage and provided an hour of original compositions and cover material (particularly by the late singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt) that perfectly prepared the ground for the Indigo Girls. Playing a vintage Harmony Gene Autry Round-Up Parlor Guitar, Hood proceeded to entertain a diverse following that came as far as Jackson, Mississippi to see him play and lecture/play at the Clinton Presidential Library. Hood was also featured in the present issue of OA, providing the article "The Cos-mo- pol-i-tan Sound" in the Athens X Athens section. Of Arkansas' Capital City, Hood remarked on his Facebook page, "Little Rock, day 2. Excited to be speaking at The Clinton Presidential Library this evening. Growing fond of this strange little city." Strange, indeed.

The Indigo Girls also rated words in OA issue in Jamie Quatro's deliciously acute prose-poem bildungsroman, "Nomad, Indian, Saint—Pondering the indigo Girls, awaiting clarity." The piece is an appropriate casting of song lyrics against the cold, flat pane of growing up and older. Looking every bit like two hip college professors, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers took the stage and proceeded to unpack thirteen songs from across their near 30-year career. Sans their fine backup band, the two carefully spun the material that makes up their unique brand of Americana, opening with the perfect "Galileo" from 1992's Rites of Passage (Epic).

The Indigo Girls' body of work has become the well at an old country home place. It is still and deep, perfumed with the fragrance of the new American pastoral. "Three Country Highway" is as close-intimate as it is wide open and universal, while "Yield" evokes the duo's Georgia roots. The performance pivots on what might be the pair's finest song, "Get Out the Map" with Ray playing mandolin and Saliers, banjo. Music this refreshing, honest, and familiar is almost is difficult, if not impossible to come by. It is a hopeful song of love and family, comfortable as late-summer breeze. It is a tome of calm and good and gratitude that is analgetic to the quivering 21st Century psyche.

The pair closed the show with "Closer to Fine" from their eponymous sophomore recording released in 1989. Saliers, in her composition, acknowledges the angst and anxiety that Jamie Quatro captured in her ""Nomad, Indian, Saint" with Saliers providing the balm of resignation and resolution, "The less I seek my source for some definitive / The closer I am to fine."

Indigo Girls Set list: Galileo; Three Country Highway; Elizabeth; Yield; Mystery; Share the Moon; Get Out the Map; Go; Watershed; Fishtails; Hammer and Nail; Kid Fears; Closer to Fine.

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