‘Pettygrass’: Tom Petty songs, bluegrass style

Staff report

KENT

Keller Williams’ Pettygrass concert tour – in which he plays the music of the late Tom Petty bluegrass-style – will come to Kent Stage on Saturday.

The show originated as down-time fun. Williams, the prolific sound-looping troubadour of the jam-band scene, and his musical collaborator, Jeff Covert, would play Petty tunes on acoustic guitar during breaks while in the recording studio.

The impromptu songs were riddled with wrong notes and wrong lyrics, but they were fun, and Williams recorded them on his phone. He would play them from time to time when he needed a laugh.

Keller took the music to a new level in 2015 when he put together a set of Petty covers and played them bluegrass style for a fundraiser concert in his hometown of Fredericksburg, Va.

After Petty’s unexpected death in October 2017, those phone recordings took on a new light as Williams and Covert listened to them as a form of mourning.

Keller would soon after team up with the Hillbenders, a Missouri-based bluegrass band, to create Keller Williams’ Pettygrass.

The concert draws from all eras of Petty’s extensive catalog. The set list brims with rollicking takes on his many hits, including “Here Comes My Girl,” “Listen to Her Heart,” “Don’t Do Me Like That” and “The Waiting Is the Hardest Part.”

“There is nothing like a room full of people singing along to the same song,” said Williams in a press release. “With his untimely passing, these songs have been pushed to the forefront of my mind and it seems like as good a time as any to celebrate, publicly, the music of Tom Petty.

“Luckily, the Hillbenders share my passion for this music and it just so happens that they are [great] pickers who have amazing attention to detail. These Petty songs lend themselves quite easily to bluegrass and by the end of the night, the audience will more than likely be singing in harmony.”

“Luckily, the Hillbenders share my passion for this music and it just so happens that they are [great] pickers who have amazing attention to detail. These Petty songs lend themselves quite easily to bluegrass and by the end of the night, the audience will more than likely be singing in harmony.”