Sarthe hosts France’s first Americana festival – Technologist

A festival is born on Saturday, September 7 in Vancé, a village with a population of 300 in the Sarthe department (northwestern France). It’s the very first in France to be entirely devoted to Americana, a term that designates the contemporary reinterpretation of musical genres as old as country, rock, blues, folk and soul.

It will come as no surprise to connoisseurs that this initiative is spearheaded by the cavalier Michel Pampelune, who made the defense of this aesthetic his hobbyhorse back in 1999 when he created Fargo, a name chosen in reference to the Wells Fargo stagecoaches in the westerns of yesteryear. The Paris-based label, which shut down in 2015, helped make Americans Ryan Adams, Alela Diane and Andrew Bird known, as well as French-British artist Emily Loizeau, and was already setting up stages in the capital and on the road.

Now settled in the Sarthe countryside, Pampelune has rediscovered with the Eldorado Americana Festival the excitement he felt in the early days of Fargo. “Here I am again, 55 years old, putting flyers on windshields in the parking lots of the TGV stations [Le Mans, Vendôme and Tours]!” he said with delight. Along the way, he has also reconnected with the genesis of a festival: human scale with a limited capacity of 1,500 festival-goers, modest prices, small Americana market (from vinyl records to plaid flannel), food trucks… In a rural setting just right for the two acoustic guitars adorning the poster, “an old sawmill with its wood, which gives the atmosphere of a western ghost town and has the advantage of being a covered site.”

Authentic approach

Originally supported by the future mayor, who “wanted to get things moving” in his village, the neo-ruralist drew his inspiration from the “off” South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, a mega-popular annual gathering that, over the years, has merged multimedia in Austin, Texas, one of the undisputed capitals of Americana (aside from Nashville, Tennessee) with its rich music scene. “I saw things there around a family audience, which helps to bring together insiders and locals by involving them in the organization,” Pampelune explained. “This goes from my farmer neighbor, who lends tools, to the road worker. Country festivals in France are mostly based on playing dress-up. I’ve opted for an authentic approach that can appeal to connoisseurs, without being elitist and leaving others at the door.”

The program offers a representative cross-section of Americana, “born with the country-rock of the 1970s and the figure of Gram Parsons (1946-1973), who brought together hippies and cowboys and extended by people from punk rock, like the band Uncle Tupelo rediscovering the records of the Carter Family or Hank Williams,” he detailed. It features Dylan LeBlanc of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, flanked by his Steel Vaqueros, heirs to the live intensity of Neil Young & Crazy Horse – and California’s Emily Nenni, the new queen of honky-tonk, the urban, sentimental style played in bars since the 1940s, for her first concert in France.

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