Fourteen Grammys Walk Into the Friedman: Dan Tyminski Plays the State This Thursday
You have heard Dan Tyminski's voice whether you know his name or not. When George Clooney's chain-gang crooner opened his mouth in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and out came "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow," that was Tyminski — a piece of movie-music history that helped kick off a nationwide bluegrass revival. Two decades later, when Swedish producer Avicii built "Hey Brother" around a weathered, aching lead vocal that has since racked up more than a billion streams, that was Tyminski too. This Thursday, August 13, that voice comes to the Friedman Auditorium at the State Theatre, 8 p.m., tickets $52.28. For a town whose summer concert calendar runs mostly to tribute bands and brewery patios — no knock; we love them — this is the rare night a genuine giant of American roots music sets up on a State College stage.
The résumé is faintly absurd. Tyminski has won 14 Grammy Awards. He's been the guitarist and mandolinist in Alison Krauss & Union Station since 1994, his "burnished, soulful tenor" one of the defining instruments in modern bluegrass. He's been named the International Bluegrass Music Association's Male Vocalist of the Year four times, and he's logged session work behind a murderer's row of country royalty — Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Reba McEntire, Martina McBride. He can front a hard-driving bluegrass band and he can sit inside a global EDM smash, and the through-line in both is that voice: plainspoken, a little haunted, impossible to fake.
The Friedman is the right room for it. The State Theatre — a 1938 Warner Bros. movie house rescued from closure and reborn as a nonprofit performing-arts center in 2006 — has the acoustics and the intimacy that acoustic string music lives or dies on. You want to hear the woody snap of a mandolin and the breath at the front of a vocal line; you want a room, not an arena. This is a room.
And Tyminski headlines a genuinely loaded week at the State, the kind of stretch that reminds you what a nonprofit theater is for. The night after his show, Friday, August 14, the Friedman screens The Song Remains the Same, the 1976 Led Zeppelin concert film (shot at their 1973 Madison Square Garden shows), at 8 p.m. ($12.68, students $10.58) — bluegrass Thursday, Zeppelin on Friday, a fair summary of the State's range. Upstairs in the Attic the same weekend, the stage production Maytag Virgin runs Friday and Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 3.
But Thursday is the ticket to buy. In a summer built on cover songs and comfort, Dan Tyminski is the real thing — a fourteen-time Grammy winner, an O Brother legend, a voice a billion strangers already know — playing an 800-seat room in a town that mostly has the place to itself right now. That's not a WingFest tribute act. That's the man himself. Constant sorrow has rarely sounded like such a good time. Get there early.
Sources: State Theatre events from Aug. 10 to Aug. 16, Daily Collegian; Dan Tyminski Band, The State Theatre