‘Absolutely Anything Can Happen’ at the Lummis Day Festival Today

For Juli Crockett, among the advantages of living on Avenue 43 in Montecito Heights is the proximity to Lummis House. When the annual Lummis Day Festival rolls around, she picks up her guitar and walks over to the historic, 116-year-old timber-and-stone Mission-style mansion, soaking up its positive energy, which keeps her going for the next nine-and-a-half hours of the festival’s music concerts, dances and arts and crafts events.

Today, Sunday, Crockett will perform at the Lummis Day Festival along with her singing partner and best friend Lisa Dee and folk legend Jim Kweskin. The performance line up identifies the trio as “Jim Kweskin Plus The Crockett Sisters”—and they’re playing at 2 p.m. at the Heritage Square Museum, four blocks south of Lummis Home, alongside the 110 freeway.

For those who don’t know The Crockett Sisters, the first thing to note is that the name is in reality a misnomer. “We’ve been performing music together for 10 years now and everybody assumes we are sisters because we have incredibly harmony and friendship,” says Crockett, adding that Dee and she play for the Evangenitals, an “alt-country/Americana love revolution” band whose music is described on its website as ranging from "truck-stop lullabies to Klezmer-punk-jazz, from ballads & barn-burners to hillbilly stomp, citing influences from the new-wave intelligentsia of the Talking Heads to the archetypal fire of Johnny Cash welded together with the mutant masterminds of Ween, the jukebox at the Mad Hatter’s tea party."

Further, the Evangenitals was founded in an effort to “foster a renaissance of compassion, love and gratitude as the platform to engage in global collaboration, activism and community building,” according to the band’s website.

Crockett and Dee played with Kweskin at an Obama fundraiser last year, which was a great honor for the two singing partners. “He has played with Bob Dylan,” says Crockett of Kweskin, adding: “Bob Dylan used to open for him.”

Crockett is an Alabama-born songwriter, singer, musician, playwright, theater director and former professional boxer. A CalArts graduate in theater direction, she recently got a Ph.D. in the philosophy of media communications from the Switzerland-based European Graduate School.

Crockett has lived in and around Highland Park since 2003, the year that the Evangenitals debuted on the music scene at Mr. T’s Bowl, a defunct bowling alley that is now a bar and music venue.

“When I moved into the neighborhood, everybody who was anybody in Northeast L.A. had played at Mr. T’s Bowl and then cycled through and played at the Lummis Festival,” says Crockett. “It was an incredibly fertile pool of talent—Even Beck played there—and we went on to play in different shows all over town.”

What Crockett loves about the Lummis Day Festival is the fact that just about everybody who plays there has some sort of connection to Northeast L.A. In that sense, the Lummis Day fest is markedly different from the Eagle Rock Music Festival, where Crockett has also performed and which is a much bigger and broader event focused almost solely on the music.

“Lumis Day makes a very concerted effort to feature not just what’s popular but the key part is that somebody in the band—or the band itself—has to either be from the neighborhood or have a legitimate connection to the community,” says Crockett.

Crockett’s own connection to the community is splendidly summed up in one of her songs titled Home: “And should one ask of me just where I am from/I’ll say that I am from right here/And should one ask of me just where I long to roam/I won’t roam nowhere that ain’t near.”

Indeed, not many bands have a name that speaks to the word “community,” in all its beauty and ugliness, as the Evangenitals. “Part of the meaning behind the name Evangenitals has to do with the embracing of all things between heaven and earth, from the sublime to the profane, and having mad love for all of it,” Crockett once told a music reviewer, adding: “For me, the name of the band is an invitation and a warning that absolutely anything can happen.”