Photo by Douglas Imbrogno. Click to enlarge.

West Virginia sends more than its fair share of young male and female warriors into the fray. We certainly need someone else other than the current guys in that big white house to choose which fray to get us into — and out of. But good gracious, West Virginia, a blowout for a senator who voted for the current war that’s chewing up and spitting out young people’s lives and the country’s treasure by the second? Like the last two presidential elections in West Virginia, let’s not get this one wrong, too, come Nov. 2.

One thing, he learned from the evening, remarked Ron Sowell, once he finally got to don a guitar on Saturday, was this: “I’m never going to trust my friends again.” | Photos by Douglas Imbrogno

It was quite the surprise. For the past couple months, Ron Sowell, one of Charleston’s most prominent musicians, expected to be the headline act this past Saturday at the Clay Center’s Walker Theater, to close out the year-long Woody Hawley singer-songwriter series. Sowell, who founded the series, normally hosts it. But the Mountain Stage band leader was to be featured for his own accomplished musicianship and body of songs. He’d rehearsed for weeks with musical mates. He was pleased to see how well the tickets sold — more than 100! — one of the highest advance ticket sales ever for the series.

Little did he know that the whole evening had been hijacked. Patricia Ansley, who works with Sowell on the Hawley Series, secretly planned for more than six months an alternate event: ‘Ron Fest.’ The evening was to be instead a musical roast and homage to Sowell’s decades of performing, his benefit work, his musical mentoring and inspiration to a host of singer-songwriters and young folk in Charleston and around the state. Family and friends came from as far afield as his homelands of rural Texas and — yes, it’s true — land of aliens, Roswell, New Mexico.

Mira Stanley, Sowell’s daughter, and Jon Wikstrom, one of his writing partners, share a tune at ‘Ron Fest’ at the Walker Theater.

Sowell was honored, toasted and roasted in several ways. A few among many:

• Bob Noone, the singing satirical attorney with a band called the Well Hung Jury, stepped onto the stage in a striped zoot suit. He gave ample evidence to the jury that — in the words of Sowell’s infamous tune he proceeded to sing — “White Boys Just Can’t Dance.”

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