As a gaggle of videographers, musicians, industry types and hangers-on stepped gingerly through tall brush to enter a dilapidated section of Fort Adams in Newport, R.I., you couldn't blame us for feeling like unwitting participants in a horror movie. Standing amid hundred-year-old rubble as the 2011 Newport Folk Festival clattered merrily in the distance, we were either going to capture two breathtaking minutes of music or get eviscerated by maniacs as part of The Newport Witch Project. Thankfully, we made it out with the footage you see above.
Like a ray gun that shoots weaponized gorgeousness, the Vermont trio Mountain Man fit an awful lot of moony harmonies into this all-too-brief performance of "Sewee Sewee." As a self-explanatorily named group called The Seeger Clogging Allstars clomped away behind them, Mountain Man's three members — Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Randall Meath — sang and stared sweetly into each other's faces. If the scene above once seemed destined to devolve into a grisly horror movie, at least we had a choir of angels on hand to escort us into the afterlife.
See more Field Recordings: http://www.npr.org/series/144918893/field-recordings
Producers: Mito Habe-Evans, Mike Katzif Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait Special Thanks to: Stephen Thompson Executive Producers: Anya Grundmann, Keith Jenkins.
