Willi Carlisle will perform at the 2023 Newport Folk Festival. Credit: Newport Folk Festival

Newport Folk Festival kept their rolling lineup announcements going today with the news that Willi Carlisle will perform at Fort Adams State Park on Saturday, July 29, 2023.

Willi Carlisle, an award-winning folksinger, writer, and theater artist from Northwest Arkansas, shares the following on his website as part of his bio;

Willi Carlisle is a poet and a folk singer for the people. Like his hero Utah Phillips, Carlisle’s extraordinary gift for turning a phrase isn’t about high falutin’ pontificatin’; it’s about looking out for one another and connecting through our shared human condition. On his anticipated second album, the magnum opus Peculiar, Missouri, Carlisle makes the case across twelve epic tracks that love truly can conquer all. Born and raised on the Midwestern plains, Carlisle is a product of the punk to folk music pipeline that’s long fueled frustrated young men looking to resist. After falling for the rich ballads and tunes of the Ozarks, where he now lives, he began examining the full spectrum of American musical history. This insatiable stylistic diversity is obvious on Peculiar, Missouri which was produced by Grammy-winning engineer and Cajun musician Joel Savoy in rural Louisiana. The songs range from sardonic trucker songs like “Vanlife” to the heartbreaking queer waltz “Life on the Fence.” The album also imbues class consciousness in songs like “Este Mundo,” a cowboy border ballad about water rights, and the title track’s existential talkin’ blues about a surreal panic attack in Walmart’s aisle five. Though Carlisle’s poetic words evoke the mystical American storytelling of Whitman, Sandburg, and e e cummings, ultimately this is bonafide populist folk music in the tradition of cowboys, frontier fiddlers, and tall-tale tellers. Carlisle recognizes that the only thing holding us back from greatness is each other. With Peculiar, Missouri, he brings us one step closer to breaking down our divides.

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For his Artist Give, Willi asked Newport Festivals Foundation to make a grant to Ozark Folk Center State Park‘s Music Roots Program, which provides traditional folk music instruction in local schools. Our Foundation also provided a stipend for Willi to visit the program to teach folk songs and (in Willi’s own words) “tell stories about growing up as a weird kid, and talk about the joy of making music for a lifetime”. Thank you, Willi for taking time out of your busy schedule to educate the next generation. Our Festival Co-Founder, Pete Seeger would be proud.

The sold-out 2023 Newport Folk Festival will take place at Fort Adams State Park in Newport, Rhode Island from Friday, July 28 – Sunday, July 30, 2023.

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