By Scott McLennan

In performance, singer Sierra Ferrell offered a more expansive vision of her spirited and spiritual approach to country music.

Sierra Ferrell at Roadrunner. Photo: Scott McLennan

Trail of Flowers is one of the year’s best albums, drawing a deservedly wider audience and broader recognition for Sierra Ferrell.

Ferrell played to a packed Roadrunner in Boston on Sept. 13, unfolding a performance that offered an even fuller depiction of her spirited and spiritual approach to country music.

Within the fresh wave of alternative country, Ferrell shares some of the traits you find in the music of Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, Zach Bryan, and the like — young artists who are more “traditional-ish” than traditionalists. In Ferrell’s hands, that translates into songs that range from punchy old-time jazz and smoky sambas to furious fiddle tunes.

Ferrell is becoming as well-known for her stage costumes as she is for her music, and in Boston she did not disappoint in the apparel department. The singer, fiddler, and guitarist emerged wearing a regal hooped skirt with matching white cowboy boots and sported a mile-high beehive wig decorated with flowers and butterflies and fitted with a lantern light. About midway through the concert, Ferrell traded the dress for an outfit that is best described as honky-tonk showgirl (and she kept the towering wig).

Yet these wild looks don’t distract from the quality of Ferrell’s music; in fact, they enhance it, contributing to the wry  surrealism that coats her downhome sound.  She blended the rustic and divine to cast a unique spell that trafficked in traditional country themes of heartache and desire but inevitably offered pathways to solace.

Ferrell’s prayerful underpinnings were well balanced with the wild picking and playing supplied by her superb band: Oliver Bates Craven on guitars and fiddle, Geoff Saunders on bass, Josh Rilko on mandolin, and Matty Meyer on drums.

Ferrell opened the show with the flirty and fun “I Could Drive You Crazy” that featured the singer and Craven trading fiddle licks. The airy mood was carried into “I’ll Come off the Mountain.”

Ferrell then showcased three tracks from her 2021 album Long Time Coming. The showed that Trail of Flowers didn’t just come out of the blue but was developed from a solid foundation, represented here in a sequence that included “Bells of Every Chapel,” “Give it Time” and “Why’d Ya Do It.”  Ferrell also turned to Long Time Coming for the night’s final encore, the spectral “In Dreams.”

That said, Trail of Flowers shows Ferrell branching out, as heard on “Chittlin’ Cooking Time in Cheatham County,” her sultry cover of a ’30s blues.

Ferrell played a few other choice cover songs in concert, starting with “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” an acknowledgment that the show was taking place on Bill Monroe’s birthday. She followed up with the Osborne Brothers’ bluegrass lament “Lonesome Feeling.” Later, she dug into Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” a song that on paper does not need yet another go-round. But Ferrell turned in stratospheric performance that proved otherwise. She also crafted a masterful take of John Anderson’s “Years.”

Ferrell’s own songs stood on equal footing with such classics. Her solo rendition of “Rosemary” was equal parts mysterious and flamboyant. She and the band crowded around a single microphone to accentuate the conflicting anguish and hope dramatized in “The Garden.” The breakout songs from Trail of Flowers were reserved to power the concert’s final stretch. “American Dreaming” and “Dollar Bill Bar” offered up the yin and yang Ferrell’s artistic vision, the former a hymn to persistence in the face of adversity, the latter an admission of the flaws and foibles we bring to the table.

“Fox Hunt” closed the concert with the same level of excitement that marked its opening: fiddles blazed, and the song’s manic energy indeed drove the crowd crazy, just as Ferrell promised at the outset.

Scott McLennan covered music for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from 1993 to 2008. He then contributed music reviews and features to the Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Portland Press Herald, and WGBH, as well as to the Arts Fuse. He also operated the NE Metal blog to provide in-depth coverage of the region’s heavy metal scene.