Houston Blog

The band Alvin assembled for his Gaffney tribute, billed as "Dave Alvin & the Guilty Women with special guests," couldn't have been of a higher Americana caliber: fiddler and 1-A vocalist Amy Farris; ex-Asleep at the Wheel steel guitarist Cindy Cashdollar; Austin Continental Club linchpins Sarah Brown (bass) and Lisa Pankratz (drums); ex-Joe Ely squeezer Ponty Bone on accordion; and rockabilly ringer guitarists Bill Kirchen and Chris Miller.

Obviously much more invested in this than they would be a typical SXSW performance, the one-off band honored Gaffney - who had played and recorded with many, if not all, onstage - with an hour that showed both how much he's missed and what an impressive and soulful country-rock legacy he leaves behind.

L-r: Ponty Bone, Cashdollar, Sarah Brown, Pankratz, Alvin, Farris, Miller. Obscured: Bill Kirchen.

As ringleader, Alvin introduced the songs with brief anecdotes about their origins, and also who covers them on May's Yep Roc album A Man of Somebody's Dreams: A Tribute to the Songs of Chris Gaffney. There were bloody-nose roadhouse rockers, sad-hearted Spanish ballads, barroom jukebox twangers and - courtesy of Alvin's entry on the album, "Artesia" - a lesson in how the smell of cow manure can trigger feelings of almost overwhelming nostalgia. Although the mood was certainly melancholy, Alvin injected enough warm humor and amusing Gaffney anecdotes to keep things from ever turning maudlin - quite an achievement, considering Gaffney's daughter was watching from about three feet away.

Other highlights were the swaggering whammy-bar workout "Lift Your Leg," the first song Alvin and Gaffney wrote together ("Which actually grazed the country charts in 1987," Alvin noted); aching waltz "The Man of Somebody's Dreams"; and elbow-bending honky-tonker "Six Nights a Week." Closing out was the Cajun two-step of "Fight (Tonight's the Night)" and "Marie Marie," the one song not on the album but, as Alvin noted, always an "accordion showpiece" for Gaffney. Stoked by Farris' fiddle and Bone's accordion, the band built to a fever pitch of Louisiana lightnin' that couldn't bring Gaffney back but ensured that nobody in the absolutely packed Continental would ever forget him. One of the most memorable SXSW sets in many a a moon.