Howling, hands to his head, Charlie Parr seemed in pain. But he was simply cleansing his – and his listeners’ – soul as he stomped his feet on a mic’d board and sung “There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down” sans instrumentation while the standing audience clapped in time. 

This is how Parr ends most of his concerts. And Thursday, July 16 on the sweltering Creekside Stage at Nelsonville, Ohio’s, ironically named Snow Fork Event Center was no exception when Parr gave a free performance to some 150 intrepid music lovers braving 90-plus-degree temperatures. 

He knew where he was – Parr called the wooded location a church – but thought it was Tuesday or Wednesday. 

“I don’t know when I am,” the hard-touring musician said. 

Parr is somewhere in the 1920s and ’30s, as his evening of folk and blues offerings demonstrated. They found Parr alternating between resonator and 12-string acoustic guitars on originals and covers that explored the human condition. 

A triple-time, Piedmont-pickin’ “Rocky Raccoon” preceded “Grave” and will one day be a classic folk number “if we forget who wrote it,” Parr said. 

An actual folk song, “Hard Time Blues” kicked things off at 7 sharp. The bespectacled Parr, his thinning salt-and-pepper hair falling over his shoulders and with a slide on his pinky finger, played lead, counterpoint and rhythm simultaneously on a number that set the course for the 90-minute journey that followed. 

“I’m gonna play some songs and then, um, stop,” he said at that point. 

And so he did. 

He played songs about aging and dying and alcoholics and shop owners and families and human depravity and sung them in a gruff, acrobatic baritone – often out of the left side of his mouth – that contrasted with his soft-spoken introductions and thank yous. 

“The Last Lonesome Blues” and “Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me” nodded to influences “Spider” John Koerner and Mississippi John Hurt, respectively, though Parr said he did not bring the 12-string he received from the late Koerner because of the heat and humidity. 

Parr sung of the collective good on “What’s So Funny about Universal Health Care” and “817 Oakland Avenue.” He voiced a canine chiding a human for questioning whether he has a soul on “Dog.” And Parr followed “Cheap Wine,” a wistful story of the downtrodden, with the “more upbeat, not necessarily less depressing, but faster” number “Funeral Road Blues.”

Keeping death clearly in focus, Parr asked his friends to eulogize, cry over and send flowers now on “Ain’t Dead Yet.” After a show like this, that’s an easy request to fill. 

And with the songs thus played, Parr stopped.