Big Barrel Festival kicks off with country, commercial or gritty

DOVER, Del. - The battle for country music's soul is being waged on side-by-side stages this weekend at the inaugural Big Barrel festival at the Woodlands at Dover International Speedway.

On Friday night on the main stage - the same stage where Paul McCartney and Snoop Dogg played last weekend at the Firefly fest - Blake Shelton, star judge of the music reality show The Voice, headlined. His set took turns pleasing genders in the multigenerational crowd.

Shelton took the stage to a recording of "Something Bad," a duet between wife Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood, who are scheduled to top the Big Barrel bill Saturday and Sunday, respectively. He sensitively promised that his favorite thing is "Doin' What She Likes" - then shored up his hillbilly bona fides by declaring himself a "down home, backwoods redneck" in "Kiss My Country A--."

The run of acts that preceded Shelton on the Main Stage was molded by prime-time TV experience, including Nashville Star winner Chris Young, One Tree Hill actress-turned-singer Jana Kramer, and Voice contestant Cassadee Pope. The trio's performances all argued that the allegedly modern sounds of "today's country" are as nostalgic as those of the genre's traditionalist wing. It's just that contemporary stars emulate the comforting sounds of bygone eras in rock, not country music.

Pope covered the Eagles' "Hotel California" (while also, with "This Car," reaching out to the NASCAR demo that frequents the speedway, across Route 1 from the Woodlands). Kramer got into the act with Alanis Morissette's "Ironic." And Young - a burly-voiced singer who leans toward legitimate honky-tonk and even name-checked Conway Twitty - offered ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man." Earlier, Massachusetts country singer Joel Crouse won the crowd over with a rearranged take on Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams."

The music was grittier on the adjacent, well-programmed Wildwood Stage, where the New Orleans folk band Hurray for the Riff Raff and Texas outlaw legend Billy Joe Shaver played, and where Loretta Lynn and Merle Haggard are set to top the bill on successive evenings this weekend. Friday's standout was Sturgill Simpson, the Kentucky tough guy whose wide-ranging ideas - musical and otherwise - powered the bruising songs in last year's album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music; those songs filled his set.

Long-in-the-tooth Southern rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd offered a set full of hits from the '70s. Gone was that longtime Skynyrd stage backdrop, the Confederate flag. The band stopped using it in 2012 because, according to guitarist Gary Rossington, it had been "kidnapped" by "people like the KKK and skinheads." Sure enough, Skynyrd's set closed with "Freebird" and also provided fans, during "That Smell," with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to heed nature's call in a nearby port-o-potty.

Big Barrel drew about 30,000 on Friday, roughly equivalent to what Firefly (which lured 90,000 this year) pulled in when it began in 2012. Attractions were rebranded for the more family-oriented country audience. Hammocks were replaced with hay bales, and an area used for trippy DJ performances at Firefly was converted into a petting zoo. The beer tent that showcased the local brewery Dogfish Head during Firefly was made over into the Harvest Moon dance hall, where Daisy Duke-and-cowboy-hat-wearing female fans showed off dance moves as a DJ spun tunes by Florida Georgia Line and Kacey Musgraves (who plays Sunday).

The crowd for both festivals this year was overwhelmingly white, with a bit (but not much) more red-white-and-blue patriotic fashion at Big Barrel. Chairs were allowed for the more sedentary crowd, and the aroma of legal cigarettes was stronger than that of decriminalized ones at Firefly.

Some scheduling was awkward at the fest, a joint venture between now-partnered Firefly presenters Red Frog Events and Goldenvoice, which puts on the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals in the California desert. There was significant sonic bleed when Skynyrd and Kramer were simultaneously on stage, and a momentum-killing half-hour gap with no music at all between Young's and Shelton's sets.