Review: Willie Nelson in fine form at 90 as Outlaw Music Festival returns to the Mann Center

It goes without saying: Willie Nelson’s continued existence is a cause for celebration.

So when the timeless Texas songwriter became a nonagenarian in April, he was feted in style. A two-day, all-star concert at the Hollywood Bowl has been made into a movie called Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90. It’s headed for digital release in the fall.

And now, the birthday show is on the road (again). On Saturday, the country-flavored Outlaw Music Festival caravan set up at the Mann Center, back in its comfortable Fairmount Park confines after spending 2022 in Camden at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion.

Before the beloved headliner strode on stage with no introduction at 9:45 p.m. — taking a seat in front of an American flag backdrop with his trusty guitar, Trigger, in hand — nearly seven hours of music had already transpired.

It started with Nelson’s son Micah’s band, Particle Kid, followed by Lubbock, Texas, sextet Flatland Cavalry, Canadian songwriter Kathleen Edwards, South Carolina guitarist Marcus King, and North Carolina folk-rock band Avett Brothers. More on the last three in a minute.

But first, Willie. His hour-long, casually masterful performance began with “Whiskey River” and ended with an all-bands-on-deck finale of two songs that find faith in the hereafter in “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and “I’ll Fly Away.” For laughs, Nelson — who wore a red bandana and a black T-shirt emblazoned with the word Legalize — followed those with Mac Davis’ “It’s Hard to Be Humble,” in which he amusingly boasted of being “perfect in every way.”

The set was billed as Willie Nelson and Family. Micah, who sat to his right, played guitar and sang lead on three songs. Nelson’s older sister Bobbie, a pianist who toured with him for decades, died in 2021, but her presence lingered.

Of course, when it comes to Willie Nelson, the concept of family extends far beyond blood relatives. Harmonica player Mickey Raphael, who also sat in with the Avetts, has been in the band for 50 years.

The younger bands on the bill all aspire to abide by the Willie ethos of nonconformity, aiming to stay true to their muse rather than follow the slick strictures of the mainstream marketplace. As he put it Saturday in “Write Your Own Songs,” a song he wrote in 1984: “We write what we live and we live what we write: Is that wrong?”

And the extended Nelson family reaches across multiple generations. Is there an artist alive that comes close to attracting an audience with significant numbers of followers over 60 years younger than them?

The self-styled Outlaws roaming the grounds of the Mann — checking out the Willie’s Reserve weed booth, sporting Johnny Cash T-shirts, “Willie: Est. 1933″ truckers hats — included lots of people in their 20s, and every age group on up from there.

On to the most important questions: How did Willie seem? Does he seem healthy? Better or worse than in recent visits?

The excellent news is: Better. In 2021, he appeared a little shaky. Last year, in Camden, he was in fine form, but it was a little concerning that — after a recent bout with COVID — he wore a down jacket to contend with the September chill.

On Saturday, he sounded great and remarkably undiminished. His signature, behind-the-beat conversational phrasing remains a sui generis marvel of musical communication, standing out most impressively on “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” and “Always on My Mind.”

That, and his Django Reinhardt-influenced, clustered-notes lead guitar playing coaxed all kinds of emotions out of battered old Trigger. He was cheerful and robust. When he shouted out “Mamas!,” and then cupped his hand to his ear Allen Iverson-style to get a sing-along underway in “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” the command grabbed the crowd’s attention.

On the subject of his own mortality, he was playful. Micah sang a song he wrote from his father’s perspective built around the self-revelation, “If I die when I’m high I’ll be halfway to heaven.” Willie sang his own “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die,” another popular T-shirt. And most entertaining — and thank goodness, entirely true — was a song from 2017 on which he sang: “Don’t bury me, I’ve got a show to play / And I woke up still not dead today.”

Brothers Scott and Seth Avett and their six-piece band — which includes their sister Bonnie on keyboards preceded Nelson on stage, playing for a full and fully satisfying 90 minutes, the longest set of the day.

With Scott on banjo and Seth on guitar, the Avetts put on a high-energy hootenanny, briskly paced and openhearted, proving just the jolt the crowd needed from the penultimate as they hung in for Willie.

Spiritual yearning in songs that move from the sweet to the raucous is the Avetts’ specialty, embodied best early on in the ultimately optimistic “Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise.” The Philly-connected highlight was a singalong on “Operator” by Upper Darby’s own Jim Croce, sung by Seth with Bob Crawford on double bass.

King cranked up the volume with fiery blues rock, but he also has a versatile band, complete with a three-piece horn section. He drew from his 2022 breakthrough Young Blood and dotted his set with covers.

He sang Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” with feeling, but overreached with a less-than-subtle take on Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.” That was the cue for a duet on John Fogerty’s “Joy of My Life” with his wife, Briley Hussey, who stuck around for the tender “Goodbye Carolina.”

Kathleen Edwards’ late-afternoon set was terrific. She played fiddle as well as guitar, won the best T-shirt contest with a shirt that read “Sex Drugs & Lobster Rolls,” and sang a tearjerker about her late dog Red called “Who Rescued Who.”

Edwards recalled opening for Nelson in 2005, and talked about how happy she was to rejoin his extended family after she had walked away from music in the mid-2010s and opened a coffee shop called Quitters. “I wasn’t well,” she said, “but now that I’m back, I realize that the bad stuff and the hard stuff are what make good times like these special.”