It’s just before sundown in historic downtown Las Cruces, New Mexico, and sisters Sally and Sandra Rel are sipping beers on the patio of the Main Street Bistro & Ale House and listening to a country-music band across the street. The group, a local outfit called the Yarbrough Band, is playing traditional songs like “Faded Love” and “Hey Good Lookin’” while a dozen couples two-step happily to the twangy beat.
The Rels grew up in Las Cruces, and Sally still lives there, while Sandra has moved away to Amarillo. But they’ve reunited tonight, along with other family members, for the second annual Las Cruces Country Music Festival. It’s scheduled to kick off soon with outdoor performances on the main festival stage by singers Chase Bryant, James Wesley, and the weekend’s headliner, the Charlie Daniels Band. Sally’s looking forward especially to an appearance Saturday night by Casey James, a Fort Worth native who placed third on the ninth season of TV’s American Idol program. “He’s awesome,” she says excitedly.
Las Cruces may be a long way from Nashville, Tennessee, but the fledgling country-music festival in the southern New Mexico town of some 101,000 souls seems to have struck a chord. Attendance for this spring’s Charlie Daniels performance hit 3,000, officials say, up from 1,000 or so for last year’s inaugural opening night. The weekend festival was the brainchild of Philip San Filippo, who brought an idea he first developed in the Cayman Islands to the Las Cruces Convention & Visitors Bureau when he became its executive director in 2012.
While serving as a sales and marketing director for the Cayman tourism department, San Filippo had attracted the likes of Brad Paisley, Blake Shelton, and Rascal Flatts to a C&W festival he started there. The concept would be appreciated even more in rural southern New Mexico, San Filippo figured—correctly, as it turns out. Last year’s Las Cruces event starring Little Texas and Darryl Worley lured 7,000 ticket-buyers in all, he says, encouraging him enough to seek assistance for the second year from the New Mexico tourism department. Says Monique Jacobson, the state’s tourism secretary: “We worked with them to ramp it up this year.”
In addition to Bryant, Wesley, James, and the legendary Charlie Daniels, the April 24-27 festival featured Las Cruces native Bri Bagwell as well as the red-hot singer Cassadee Pope (“Wasting All These Tears”). Pope won TV’s The Voice competition in 2012 and has toured with Tim McGraw.
“A lot of this is luck,” San Filippo admits at a VIP party for festival-goers at the city’s M Five Martini Grill. “We didn’t know Cassadee was going to have a hit single” when he booked her, he adds. Nor did he know at booking time that Daniels would be touring and doing national press in support of a new album of Bob Dylan tunes called Off the Grid: Doin’ It Dylan. All he knew, San Filippo says, is that “when Charlie Daniels’ name first came up, I had a smile on my face.”
The festival artists performed Friday and Saturday evenings on a huge stage set up at the corner of Church Street and Las Cruces Avenue, a stone’s throw from downtown’s hulking Bank of the West building. Bryant, Bagwell, and a successful songwriter named Tommy Lee James—his many hits include “My Eyes” for Blake Shelton and Gary Allen’s “Life Ain’t Always Beautiful”—also appeared as part of the festival at a songwriter’s workshop on the nearby campus of New Mexico State University.
Between performances, visiting country music fans found plenty to do in Las Cruces, the economic and geographic heart of New Mexico’s Mesilla Valley. Surrounded by the rugged Organ, Dona Ana, and Robledo mountains, the clean desert city is somewhat reminiscent of Palm Springs, the famed resort town in Southern California. Among the area’s leading attractions are the White Sands Missile Range Museum & Missile Park, located about 20 miles east of Las Cruces; the White Sands National Monument, the world’s largest gypsum dunefield, some 50 miles northeast; and Mesilla, a tiny traditional Hispanic town, just outside Las Cruces, that dates to the mid-1800s.
Two restaurants there are of particular note: La Posta de Mesilla, famous for Mexican food and steaks, and the Double Eagle restaurant, a rambling historic structure that’s known for its beef aging room, its award-winning margaritas and, supposedly, several ghosts. Las Cruces also boasts a lively Farmers and Crafts Market — it operates downtown Wednesdays and Sundays — and an outstanding Spanish Colonial boutique hotel called the Encanto de Las Cruces. Decorated with colorful Mexican artifacts, the property with 203 rooms and five suites has hosted guests including Sir Richard Branson, George W. Bush, Tom Petty, and the Dallas Cowboys.
Another of the Encanto’s guests in April was Charlie Daniels, who followed James to the festival stage at about 9 Friday night. Tall (6-feet-4-inches) and burly, wearing cowboy gear with an oversized belt buckle that said, “Jesus is Lord,” the white-bearded star soon had the crowd roaring with appreciation for hit after hit from his 50-plus-year career. The camera phones really came out, though, when Daniels ripped into “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” his signature fiddle-tune classic from 1979.
Somewhere out in the audience, San Filippo must have been smiling again.
