07/03/2026
Great.
Now while everyone else is humming along to “the rockets’ red glare,” “purple mountains’ majesty,” or being a “cool rockin’ daddy in the USA” all weekend long, the Sun and News reporter is going to just have “Miss Ohio” bouncing around in his head through the Fourth of July. 😊
Karisa Wilson mixed in Gillian Welch’s catchy, 2003 folk tune about a girl who says, “I wanna do right, but not right now,” with a few other more familiar cover songs and more than a handful of her own tunes throughout her set at the Riverbank Music Series Thursday in downtown Middleville.
Songs went from folksy, to bluesy, to jazzy with a little bit of bluegrass thrown in for good measure, with Wilson swapping out her guitar for an electric violin on a couple tunes.
She was joined on stage throughout the set by guitarist Mitch Myers who took his own turn on vocals with a cover of Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally.” Both musicians also play as a part of the larger Bluewater Kings Band.
It was an emotional set, with moments both upbeat and moody. The penultimate tune of the evening was “The Promised Land,” a song she wrote in honor of her father, a Baptist preacher, after he passed.
It has been a while, but that one is on her most recent full-length album, “Stronger,” which came out in 2012.
She closed with the title track from that album, singing “and so if I survive. Oh when I survive. As I survive, then I’ll only grow stronger. While this storm may slow me down. Sometimes we can find resolve, but at the end of it all, I’ll only grow stronger.”
That one does sound a bit more upbeat on the album with its full musical accompaniment, than it did 14 years later, at the end of a 90-minute set, in 90 degree temperatures as the mosquitoes began to spread out from the banks of the Thornapple River. But just a smidge of weariness didn’t seem to diminish the message any.
The Middleville DDA would like to get out the message about more music downtown in the coming days. The Thornapple River Band is set to perform folk rock and Americana tunes at the next Riverbank event July 9 and the amphitheater will also be busy during Heritage Day, July 11, with country tunes from Jared Knox & the Hägarbombs in the afternoon …
Read more in the July 11 edition of the Sun and News …
