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Knoxville’s annual Big Ears music festival has become a sanctuary for curious music lovers from around the world. And although it takes place in a city, the festival is rich with rural tradition, pulling in rural musicians from across the States and every continent except Antarctica (as far as I know).
Over four days every March, the full spectrum of music and sound art fills venues across the city. I caught an ambient country jam by Setting in the backroom of Boyd’s Jig and Reel Scottish Pub, and hit the Knoxville Art Museum to witness the electric saxophone wizardry of Sam Gendel.
Above all, Big Ears is a festival for music nerds who are interested not only in how a concert sounds, but also how it reflects the lived experiences of the people making the music. Here are just a few of the amazing musicians whom I got to know across four days of transcendent listening.
Yagódy
Latest Release: “Koni” Single
Ukrainian folk band Yagódy performing at Big Ears. (Credit: Billie Wheeler)
During a time of crisis in their homeland, the Ukrainian folk band Yagódy are helping to promote the richness of their country’s musical traditions around the world.
The members of the group described their traditional music to me via email with the assistance of a translator. “In many ways, folk music in Ukraine is deeply connected to rural life, much like the traditions found in the United States.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine has decimated the country’s agricultural communities, drastically reducing crop yields and displacing many farming families. “For many people we know,” Yagódy explains, “the stability of rural life has been shattered.”
The music video for Yagódy’s song “Ne lamai kalynu” tells the story of a soldier pulled from his rural homestead to fight on the frontlines. I saw the group perform this and a number of other powerful compositions during the first of their two Big Ears performances. Translating for Yagódy’s founding member and leader, Zoriana Dybovska, the group’s percussionist, Timur Gogitidze, noted that “Ukrainian is one of the most melodic languages in the world.”
Yagódy’s four female vocalists vividly articulate the beauty of their language by singing complex, four part harmonies. The accompaniment of a rock-n-roll drumset, as well as the repetitious, chanting-quality of their vocal arrangements, make their songs well-suited for resistance. ”Historically, war doesn’t just target buildings; it attempts to erase identity,” says Yagódy. “Today, preserving these songs is more than an artistic choice; it is an act of protection.”
Terry Allen
Latest Release: Blood Sucking Maniacs LP
Terry Allen performed two sets at Big Ears to promote the recent publication of his biography, Truckload of Art. The book surveys his multifaceted life as a titan of alternative country music, and his mastery of disciplines ranging from drawing to sculpting to scriptwriting.
“[Lubbock] was completely dominated by empty space,” Allen says of the West Texas hometown that shaped his wide-ranging artistic sensibilities. “And I think coming up in the 50s, what filled a lot of that space was radio.”
Radio was like a third parent to Allen throughout his childhood. It activated his imagination with vivid storytelling and introduced him to an expansive range of new music.
Allen’s first Big Ears set was a combined concert/book talk with his biographer, Brendan Greaves, and Jo Harvey, his wife and creative collaborator of more than 50 years. Allen kicked off the night with the song “Wolfman of Del Rio”. The tune pays homage to a colorful Del Rio, Texas, radio DJ who introduced him and his friends to everything from Rockabilly to the Delta Blues.
“We would literally drive out into a cotton patch, circle our cars with our headlights pointed in,” Allen remembers, “and when Wolfman Jack came on, we would turn on the radio at the same station and dance out in the fields.”
Terry Allen performed two sets at 2026’s Big Ears festival. (Credit: Taryn Ferro)
Cleo Reed
Latest Release: Cuntry LP
Cleo Reed’s genre-defying 2024 album, Cuntry, serves as the artist’s own state of the union. According to Reed’s website, the album was created with the goal of “holding space for the working class to understand the ways in which we have been exploited or have participated in the exploitation of others.”
Having spent much of their life crisscrossing the US to be with family–from the metropoles of New York City and Los Angeles, to the backroads of the rural South and Midwest–Reed is well-positioned to deliver a national address.
Artist Cleo Reed gave “an anti-capitalist concert” on the festival’s second day. (Credit: Ashli Linkous)
“I always had this very deep connection with the land and the locations where my family is from,” Reed told me. Their familial connection to rural places and the legacy of slavery inform their present-day concerns about labor. “[While I was researching for my album], I had stories that I could look at that are in the Library of Congress, from freed slave narratives that were released like in the 1920s. My relatives are in these published works talking about what their life was like living on the land.”
Giving “an anti-capitalist concert” on the festival’s second day, Reed and the multi-instrumentalist Mathew Jamal strung together infectious tunes with protest chants and vulnerable storytelling. “I’m here because I had the courage to release an album independently,” they declared in the middle of their set.
After the show, I asked Reed about making music on their own dime without a record deal, an experience familiar to many of the performers at an experimental music festival like Big Ears. “[I had to] bet on the work and myself and take a risk,” they said. The festival is at its best when platforming performers like Reed, whose music has caught the attention of many listeners who are eager to explore the sounds of independent artists.
Marilyn Crispell
Latest Release: Memento LP w/ Anders Jormin
Marilyn Crispell is an American jazz pianist and composer with a prodigious gift for improvisation. In 1977, Crispell moved to Woodstock, New York to study and teach at the Creative Music Studio (CMS), which convened musicians from around the world for cutting-edge experimentations in sound. She has remained in rural New York ever since.
At Big Ears, Crispell dueted with percussionist Harvey Sorgen for an hour of free-jazz sorcery. To start, her fingers took measured, halting steps across the keys, cultivating a musical openness reflective of the countryside where she has made her home. As the show went on, her hands began to blur as she played with increasing speed, forging a frenetic union with Sorgen’s expert drumwork.
When we spoke before the festival, Crispell helped me understand why U.S. musicians have often journeyed to rural settings to hone their sound. “It’s not the same kind of pressure [as in the city],” she explained. “[At CMS], there was a lot of space. The sound didn’t disturb any neighbors… And people would literally stay up all night, build bonfires and sit around the fire and play music.”
Peni Candra Rini
Latest Release: “Kumuda Djiwa”, commission for the Mangkunegara Court of Java
Peni Candra Rini grew up in a village of only a few families on the eastern side of the Indonesian island of Java. Her father, a master of traditional shadow puppetry, would take her on long walks through the forest to learn to sing traditional gamelan music by the sea. “And then I would fight with him,” Peni told me. “‘Who will listen to my voice? There is no one here. Only animals, only waves.’ ‘Yes, that’s right,’ [he said.] ‘But in your future, you will be listened to.’”
Peni Candra Rini brought rural Indonesian art practices to Tennessee. (Credit: Ash Ogle)
Her dad was right. Still calling Java home, Peni frequently visits the US to teach, perform, and record. Her career reached an astounding high point when, in 2023, she had the opportunity to perform one of her compositions at Carnegie Hall with the highly-regarded Kronos Quartet, one of her all-time favorite musical acts.
At Big Ears, Peni was joined onstage by several of her longtime, U.S.-based collaborators. Her stirring performance in the pitch dark of the festival’s Black Box theater was accompanied by a shadow puppet show and a series of experimental video works.
Rapturous is the best word I can think of to describe Peni’s voice in a live concert. And I was nearly moved to tears when she gave me a private performance during our pre-show interview, demonstrating the varying tonalities of singing styles specific to different parts of Java and other islands throughout the Indonesian archipelago.
shirlette ammons
Latest Release: Spectacles LP
shirlette ammons performed an intimate and powerful set. (Credit: Phillip Norman)
shirlette ammons got slotted into a brutal, evening set time on the festival’s final day, when a lot of folks had headed for the exits or fallen asleep in their beers somewhere. Fortunately, she knows a thing or three about forming a strong community among a chosen few.
“I grew up in a village of rural Black people farming and living off the land and being creative in open space,” ammons explained to me, referring to her hometown of Beautancus, outside Mount Olive, North Carolina.
Drawing on the musical influences and blue-collar sensibilities of her upbringing, ammons has hammered out a queer sound that’s hard to categorize. She took to the Big Ears stage in baggy Dickie’s slacks, a t-shirt reading “Papa Bird”, and a black panther ballcap. Her backing band fused funk, gospel, rock ‘n roll, and hip-hop, illustrating the breadth of Black rural traditions that have shaped so much of the popular music played in the States.
The band laid a solid foundation for ammon’s incisive lyrics, sometimes sung and sometimes spoken, always specific to the vernacular of her upbringing. . ‘I think the way we talk in eastern North Carolina, and also Black vernacular [in general], is something to be exalted and celebrated,” ammons said.
After her closing number, ammons stepped off stage, cracked a celebratory Miller Lite, and spread love to the small-but-mighty crowd that had rocked with her for the night. Let’s hope the organizers honor her energy and invite her back to build a bigger village next year.
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What Big Ears 2026 emphasized is that the term “rural music” encompasses not just one sound but many. This experimental, intimate, and refreshing experience amplified a wide range of genres, artists, and stories. So if you can make it to Knoxville during Big Ears, I encourage you to expand your musical horizons with this special festival.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Deep Listening, Rural Roots: A Big Ears Music Festival Roundup appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
