Beginning this evening, 25 acts from D.C., New York, Philadelphia, and Virginia will descend upon 13 acres of privately owned land in Lingum, Va., for the eighth annual Mustock Outdoor Music Festival. This year, the public will able to attend the festivities, whereas in years' past, only close family and friends could attend the festival, says Angela Barnes, an organizer for this year's Mustock festival.

Also this year, Mustock will conclude Sunday with a ceremonial tree planting—another first for the annual event, Barnes say.

The Mustock festival was created by Mustafa Akbar as a way to pay homage to D.C. artists, and get great use of his family's land, which it has owned since 1882.

“Just as my mom’s siblings and their families and friends would gather for parties, fish fries and music, the tradition has been carried on," Akbar said in a statement.

The list of performers include: Alexis Golden Lover, All Good Funk Alliance, Ancient Astronauts, Asheru and The ELs, Beetnix, The Breden Sound System, DJ Jahsonic, Farid, Fatso, Fort Knox Five, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, GODISHEUS, Lady Alma, Mz Munchie, Mustabar SoulBush, Nappy Riddem, Punk Rogers, Pure Light Seed, Rob Paine of Solomonic Sound System, SEE-I, Sleepy Wonder,  Tamika Love Jones, Tony Ozier and the Doo Doo Funk All-Stars, Thunderball, and W. Ellington Felton

MUSTOCK 2010 BEGINS AT 5 P.M FRIDAY AND CONTINUES TO SUNDAY AT 23078 BATNA RD., LIGNUM, VA. $25-$65. (800) 594-8499.

I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to say that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind, to reach forward and behind
For the more I seek, the more I’m sought

These lyrics, from Joe Pug’s “Hymn 101,” might as well be the tagline for Pug’s current year-long tour, which has taken him from tooling around the local circuit in his hometown, Chicago, to tailing alt.-country legend Steve Earle’s tour bus on a swing down through Texas and back up toward the Great Lakes. From there, he'll take a brief sojourn to Norway then take up with Josh Ritter for an upper-Midwest tour before heading west for festival season. “I rent a room in Chicago,” he tells me Tuesday after a set in Richmond, “but I’ve probably slept in it about 20 times this year.”

So far, Pug’s seeking has prompted plenty to seek him in turn—not least, Earle himself. “The way I understand it is, Steve’s manager played Steve my album, and Steve said, ‘Yeah, let’s go,’” says Pug. We’re sitting in the green room at The National, in Richmond—I on the slick leather sofa, Joe on the edge of a matching chair adjacent. The furniture looks like it might have been lifted from the set of Scarface, and Pug looks out-of-place in a plaid shirt, faded jeans fraying at the knees, and tan work boots. “It’s cool, a lot of great musicians have come through here,” he says. His tone matches his general comportment: humble, polite—but with supreme confidence lurking just beneath, every so often leaking to the surface like oil from plain earth. He had filled the role of opener that night with consummate deference: playing well, thanking the audience, then helping clear out his gear so the roadies could ready the stage for Earle. I had to wait for him afterward while he hawked his album in the lobby, stuffing a fistful of rumpled bills into his jeans. He’s not a star yet. But when he says plenty of great musicians have come through here, he’s certainly not apologizing for his own presence.

“Bob Dylan is someone I’ve been compared to a lot,” he says when I ask him about his influences, surprising me with his lack of shyness about this fact. (These comparisons are not for nothing: You can hear echoes of Dylan’s sneer, his indulgent harmonica breaks, and his poet-advocate m.o. in Pug’s music. But to liken someone to Dylan implies far more than musical similarities—and musicians, who are generally more sensitive to this fact than their fans, tend to distance themselves from such comparisons.) Pug also counts among his influences John Hiatt, Warren Zeavon, and Beck—“songwriters that don’t really adhere to a genre, they just write songs that connect to people.” But ultimately comparisons will not do, not even flattering ones. “You hear an athlete say they want to get to a point where they’re only competing against themselves,” he says. “As a musician, you want people to compare your music not to other musicians, but to the rest of your catalog.”

Pug’s catalog is currently only seven songs long. He recorded his debut EP, Nation of Heat, for free at a Chicago studio courtesy of a friend who worked there, and put out the album himself last summer. You can’t find it in stores, only on the Internet and at shows. “Your industry and mine are both changing,” Pug says to me, taking a drag in the smoking pen outside the National. That’s for sure. Here’s a guy who recorded seven songs and put them on the Internet, bypassing “the industry” altogether, and now he’s touring with Steve Earle and Josh Ritter. He’s been sought by plenty of labels, but has seen no compelling reason to sign. “I’m making a very good living just doing what I’m doing now,” Pug says, “and I have complete control over what I make.” He says there might come a time in his life where he’ll seek the stability of a label, but he’s in no hurry. “I really want one that’s into what I do,” he says, “not one who wants me to write choruses.”

Yes, it’s a different world: different than the world Dylan and the others played in—different than the world they described, and different than the one that rewarded them with fame. It’s easy to read the lyrics of Pug’s “I Do My Father’s Drugs” to mean that folk’s battle has been fought and won.

When hunger strikes are fashion, and freedom is routine
And all the streets in Cleveland are named for Martin Luther King
You will see me at the protest, but you’ll notice that I drag
I burn my father’s flag

But when I wonder aloud whether a ‘60s-style folk musician can thrive in the 21st century, Pug’s rebuke is polite but firm: “I think it’s sort of a misconception to call it ’60s-style folk,” he says. Pug describes folk not as an era-specific phenomenon but as continuum—one that manifested in Irish troubadours, then southern bluesmen, then the ‘60s discontents. What I take Pug to mean is that the tradition did not end; it still exists wherever there is restlessness and doubt and disillusionment and people who would use music to confront these things rather than to escape them.

In any case, it is far too early in the development of Pug’s music to know how popular it will be. He says he recorded his LP (scheduled for a fall release) with a backing band, meaning the album that will serve as most people’s introduction to Joe Pug might sound much different than Nation of Heat.

Pug’s set in Richmond included two new songs from that album, “Bury Me Far From My Uniform” and “Not So Sure.” You can check them out below, courtesy of Laundromatinee.com:

The National, in Richmond, is a decorous little theater with a semiformal air. But on Tuesday night, when Steve Earle played a set of mostly Townes Van Zandt covers from his new tribute album, peppered with anecdotes from his 25-year friendship with its eponymous hero, the venue assumed the close familiarity of a living room.

Earle’s speaking voice—deliberate, avuncular, devoid of pretense—sounds as though it was engineered for the specific purpose of perpetuating folk legends. When he says he got the idea for the tribute album when one night from his tour bus he saw Van Zandt’s ghost riding his old horse Amigo through the Colorado fog, you take him at his word. At Tuesday night’s show in Richmond, Earle deployed folk’s discursive oral tradition in the service of contextualizing Townes.

Earle had been “stalking” Van Zandt for awhile before they officially met, he explained, during a gig Earle was playing at a Texas dive in 1972. Townes, drunk, was loudly demanding that he play the folk standard “Wabash Cannonball,” a standard the 17-year-old Earle did not know. “He said, you call yerself a country singer and you don’t know Wabash cannonball?” At a loss, and upset at being upbraided by his unknowing hero, Earle launched into a Van Zandt song called “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” a breathless gambling allegory punctuated with the final line,

This is what this story’s told
You feel like Mudd, you’ll end up Gold
You feel like lost, you’ll end up found
So amigo, lay them raises down.

Earle and Van Zandt each played both Mudd and Gold over the course of their lives and careers, imbuing their relationship with the sort of solidarity and candor that made possible the sort of confrontation they had at Earle’s house in the 1980s, when Earle was taking a beating from a heroin habit.

“I had a home at the time,” said Earle. “But there weren’t anything in it. I pull up into my driveway one day and there’s Townes’s truck, and I’m like ‘Oh, boy.’ I knew I was in trouble, getting a lecture on temperance from Townes Van Zandt. He goes, ‘You look like shit.’ I go, ‘I know.’ He says, ‘How’s yer arm?’ I look down and say, ‘Not too good’ … Townes takes out his guitar and says, ‘I wanna play you something I wrote a few days ago.’”

Earle then made like Townes did then and began picking a dark tune called “Marie,” which chronicles the deeply unromantic plight of a drifter-musician couple clawing for dignity in a world that wants to distance itself from them as much as they want to distance themselves from it.

Introducing the songs with these personal anecdotes recruited us into the cradle of Earle’s memory and allowed us to all but shake hands with Townes–to touch his empathy (“Townes was notorious for bringing homeless people home .. then when he didn’t have a home, he brought them home to other people’s homes”), his mischievousness, and his sadness. It made us feel as though we had more at stake in each song, making certain lyrics—such as this one from “To Live is to Fly”—to land a little deeper in the chest:

Everything is not enough
And nothin’ is too much to bear
Where you’ve been is good and gone
All you keep’s the getting there

It was a night for poignant, lyrics-driven folk, as Greenbelt native Joe Pug set off Earle’s weary wisdom with the angsty passion of his opening set. I had been deeply intrigued by Pug since hearing his debut EP a few weeks ago, and I spent some time with him after his set; details in tomorrow's post.

Via TPM: "A Virginia Democrat sends over a new radio spot that Obama is airing in the southern part of the state — it stars homegrown bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley vouching for Obama's values and character to the tune of some banjo pickin' in the background."

Here's the ad transcript from TPM:

"Howdy, friends. This is Ralph Stanley, and I think I know a little something about the families around here," the spot runs.

"Barack'll cut taxes for everyday folks — not big business — so you'll have
a little more money in your pocket at the end of the year," he continues. "I also know Barack is a good man. A father and devoted husband, he values personal responsibility and family first."

Can Stanley bring out the votes?