Mavis, Booker T. Help Close Hardly Strictly

Booker T, playing with Drive-By Truckers, and Mavis Staples both played the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival's closing day on Sunday October 4, 2009 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. This year, the festival's eighth, attendance at the free event was estimated at over 500,000 people. Since its inception the event has been sponsored and funded solely by Warren Hellman, a successful venture capitalist and an amateur banjo player.

Rolling Stone said, "Gospel queen Mavis Staples — in the middle of taking the Sunday crowd to church — also covered Buffalo Springfield’s Vietnam-era protest anthem 'For What It’s Worth,' striking just the right note of a promise yet unfulfilled. [It] was a rare suggestion of politics on a weekend largely free of them."

Booker closed the set with the Truckers on the Arrow Stage by, as reported by Twangville.com, "walking up to the microphone and talking about being in Monterey 40 years ago with his friend Otis Redding. He then lit into 'Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay.' The hush of the crowd gave way to a soft sing-along, and finished with tens of thousands of people whistling along. Words don’t do justice to a special moment like that."

(Mavis @ Rooster Stage pic by Nora Stratton; Booker T (on guitar) and DBT's pic by Dave Vann.