With an ace house band led by Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman, a parade of the weekend’s headliners and a few surprise guests tackled classic songs of unity and perseverance.
Maren Morris and Lukas Nelson played the parts of Janis Joplin and Kris Kristofferson, respectively, on a rousing cover of “Me and Bobby McGee.” Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff sang Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.” Mavis Staples — “the mother of Newport,” as Reilly called her — joined Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy on the stirring tune “Friendship.”
The reunited duo of the Swell Season, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, performed Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” with some help from the punchy horns of the Philadelphia funk group SNACKTIME. Newport perennial Nathaniel Rateliff knocked Leonard Cohen’s well-traveled “Hallelujah” out of Fort Adams State Park and over the Narragansett Bay. And the fast-rising folk songwriter Jesse Welles confirmed his status as a new darling of the festival by smashing his guitar to punctuate the Beatles’s “Revolution.”
Most of these “seashells” had subtle — or not-so-subtle — messages of resistance, or making “this land a better land/Than the world in which we live,” as the late New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint wrote on “Yes We Can Can,” presented on Sunday by Trombone Shorty. (In another surprise, the National’s Matt Berninger contributed a somber reading of the Flaming Lips’s “Waitin’ for a Superman.”)
But perhaps the most moving moment of the finale came when Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, the Berklee-trained co-founders of the band Lucius, put a pristine spin on the Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows.”
Reilly, who was full of jokes and good cheer, tried to get the audience to sit down for that song, in a show of gratitude and reverence for the recently departed Brian Wilson. When the packed throng balked, he laughed: “Hey, it’s a free country, for now.”
Throughout the day, showcase acts see-sawed from anguish about the state of the world to joyful defiance. Before noon on the Quad Stage inside the old fort’s stone walls, the South African group BCUC fed the early birds with their heavily percussive psychedelic sound. Frontman Nkosi “Jovi” Zithulele called for a moment of silence “in the name of your loved ones” and brought the band’s exuberant set home by jumping on the back of the cowbell player.
On the Fort Stage overlooking the harbor, the veteran songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter noted that this was the 30th anniversary of her Newport debut. “It feels emotional,” she said. “The passage of time. The people who are here, and the people who are not.”
Midday sets by the Indiana late bloomer Stephen Wilson Jr., the British songwriter Tom Odell, and the Chicago indie band Dehd (whose cockeyed boy-girl vocals gave off a Pixies-ish vibe) were all well-received. Mitch Cutts, leader of the Seattle-area folk-rock band Richy Mitch & the Coal Miners, spoke for several of his peers when he gushed about playing Newport for the first time: “I could yap about it all day.”
Hansard introduced the Swell Season’s Cohen-esque new song “Great Weight” as a glimpse toward an “imaginary future date,” when a great weight has lifted.
The most satisfying set of the day may have been Margo Price’s. The Nashville singer and her new band, featuring guitarist Sean Thompson, played classic honky tonk with finesse. They opened with Price’s own wistful origin story “Hands of Time” before stomping through “Tennessee Song,” and then lamenting the failures of the American Dream on “All American Made.”
Reilly joined Price and her husband, Jeremy Ivey, around an old-fashioned condenser microphone for a roaring take on Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.” The set wrapped with Price’s new single, “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” inspired by Kristofferson.
The timeless cosmic Americana of the Grateful Dead provided one of the day’s recurring themes. After instantly grabbing the audience with one of their newest songs (“Pink Lady”) and their oldest (“Astrovan”), the spirited Philly band Mt. Joy played a rocking version of the Dead’s take on the traditional “I Know You Rider.” Jeff Tweedy prefaced his upcoming solo album, “Twilight Override,” with a crystalline set on the Quad Stage that owed more than a little debt to the Dead.
Later, during the “Songs for the People” closing set, Goose’s Nick Mitarotonda stepped into Jerry Garcia’s boots on the Dead’s “Eyes of the World.”
“Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world,” as those lyrics, sung by a chorus that featured Sarah Jarosz and Bonny Light Horseman’s Eric D. Johnson, went.
“Kindness is not a luxury,” Reilly said by way of introduction to that song. For those who return every year to Newport – and there are many – the festival creates a vibe, he said, “that you have to bring to the world.
“Be the world you want to see,” he added.
NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL
At Fort Adams State Park, Newport, R.I., Sunday
Heather Diehl/For The Boston Globe
