Despite the rain, the music at Shakori Hills wasn’t dampened Saturday. Sure, many campers slept in less-than-ideal conditions, and the festival grounds themselves became a mud pit. But most attendees were able to overcome that wet atmosphere.
As the traditional Saturday afternoon parade ended, country music singer/songwriter Elizabeth Cook took to the Meadow Stage. As a Sirius/XM DJ, Cook hosts a weekday afternoon program called “Apron Strings.” It often comes across as Cook’s own mental stream, as she touches on random topics between tunes from modern Americana artists and traditional country music. As on the radio, Cook’s stage banter on Saturday is a breath of fresh air. She discussed her background of growing up in Florida and admitted her parents had a history running moonshine and being in hillbilly band in West Virginia.
Between her many jokes on stage (it takes balls for a woman to use a festival port-a-potty, she joked, punning on an old album title), Cook touched on the serious. “Heroin Addict Sister,” a song off her 2010 release Welder, brought the Meadow crowd near silence. As the rain began to fall, Cook decided to offer tribute to another Florida artist, John Anderson, by performing one of his more popular tunes, “Wild and Blue.”
Elizabeth Cook, “Heroin Addict Sister”