Two great “surprise” performances at the Newport Folk Festival this year.

Saturday July 23: Paul Simon.

This is what Paul Simon says about it on the official site:

The atmosphere at Newport Folk Festival and the spirit of the folk community yesterday was incredibly joyful. Thank you Jay Sweet for running such a great festival, and thanks to Chris Tetzeli for all of his patience and energy to make this happen.

What an absolute pleasure to work with Nathaniel Rateliff and his incredible band (Luke Mossman, Joseph Pope III, Pat Meese, Andreas Wild, Jeff Dazey, Daniel Hardaway, Mark Shusterman). Nathaniels curation of my music and all of the artists he selected to participate was overwhelming. My sincere thanks to those artists for lending their talent and time to come and perform my songs.

After Nathaniel Rateliff and his band played a couple of Paul Simon songs as tribute to the singer/songwriter he was invited on the stage.

He played a short set:

• Graceland
• The sound of silence
• The Boxer
• American Tune

“American Tune” was sung by the wonderful singer Rhiannon Giddens, accompanied by Paul Simon. Rhiannon played an almost haunting part on her banjo. This might be a good reason for Paul to record this song again sometime with Rhiannon. And what a great voice Rhiannon has.

Rehearsing with Rhiannon:

The lyric was also partly slightly altered in: “We didn’t come here on the Mayflower, we came on the ship in a bloody mood”.

Wonderful to see Paul perform again.

Rehearsing with the band:

The next day brought an even bigger surprise, knowing she has been very sick the last years: Joni Mitchell. Her set, sitting on big chair, lasted for almost an hour. Go see it at youtube.