The musical acts at Rebels & Renegades explore the borderlands where country turns into rock, and folk is played with punk energy.

AT FIRST GLANCE, OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW (founded in 1998) and Shane Smith & the Saints (2012) have no more or less in common with one another than with the 35 other bands that will play during the three days of Rebels & Renegades 2023. However, both bands have developed a sound that transcends genres, making them a great fit for this self-proclaimed “left-of-center country, Americana, folk, outlaw, Texas country, bluegrass and roots music” festival that debuted in Monterey last year.

For OCMS – whose song “Wagon Wheel” is the unofficial anthem of all singer-songwriters playing covers in pubs and at wineries – this is the first time at the festival; Shane Smith and his Saints were in Monterey last year and the band had a blast, Smith says.

Its members came from all over Texas, but before the group formed, Shane Smith (of Terrell, Texas) performed on his own, starting in 2006. Adding fiddle (Bennett Brown, who met Smith in Austin but is originally from Kentucky), lead guitar (Dustin Schaefer from Victoria, Texas), bass guitar (Texan Chase Satterwhite) and drums (Zach Stover, another fellow Texan) allowed Smith to take his small acoustic concerts to the next level.

“The name just stuck,” he explains about the logic behind Shane Smith & The Saints – “the Saints” simply joined later. They have never fully established a firm meaning of the name, but they like the romantic “hint of Catholicism” in it, Smith explains.

Singing about the glory of Southwest Texas, and the sadness of small towns and big abandoned spaces, the band has recorded three studio albums to date – Coast (2013), Geronimo (2015) and Hail Mary (2019). In 2021, they released Live from the Desert and that one – freewheeling, spacious – will take you as close as possible to what to expect at the festival (try “All I See Is You” or “Hail Mary”).

Smith, who writes the majority of lyrics, lists even more Texans as his songwriting inspiration – singer-songwriters Adam Carroll, Hayes Carll, Ray Wylie Hubbard and Robert Keen. The only non-Texan he mentions is Brandon Flowers of The Killers.

“Putting pen to paper in a local school paper helped me a lot with writing lyrics,” he says about his college times, when he was entertaining the idea of working in the media industry. But being a journalist wasn’t in the stars for him, and when you listen to his deep voice and raw emotions, there isn’t a doubt that this man belongs on stage.

The band seems to be in the sweet spot of a moment in their career – way too big for a bar in Austin, and just about to embark on a tour that will take their Americana for a string of concerts abroad.

“My voice changed a lot,” Smith says about how his sound has evolved since those early days of singing up to eight hours a night. “I was under a lot of stress when I used to sing in Austin. I had scar tissue, my voice changed, got deeper and lower. That’s the biggest difference. Now I have a different, longer spectrum.”

OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW KNOWS ALL ABOUT CHANGES; the band has been around for 25 years now. Originally spotted while busking outside a pharmacy in Boone, North Carolina, the band was discovered by a local musician who invited them to a music festival. Then they got hired as a band to entertain crowds between shows at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

A decade-and-a-half later, the band received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album for their fifth studio album, Remedy. In addition to original songs, they play pre-WWII blues and folk and are credited for the energy picked up later by younger groups, such as Mumford & Sons.

Ketch Secor, who was there from the beginning in late 1998, described OCMS as “old-time string band musicians, most of us still in our teens, who left Ithaca, New York to cross the Canadian border and play our way to the Pacific.” After re-crossing the continent they decided on moving to the mountains of North Carolina to further explore their “newfound musical farrago.”

Current members include Secor (fiddle, harmonica, guitar, banjo, vocals), Morgan Jahnig (upright bass), Mike Harris (slide guitar, guitar, mandolin, banjo, dobro, guitjo, vocals), Mason Via (guitar, guitjo, mandolin, vocals), Dante’ Pope (drums, percussion, piano, vocals), PJ George (banjo, accordion, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, guitjo, drums) and Cory Younts (mandolin, keyboards, banjo, harmonica, vocals), who spoke on behalf of the band before the Rebels & Renegades festival.

Younts joined OCMS in 2009, when the band had already built a big following and become known for its string band revival sound. Since then, OCMS began fusing more and more rock ‘n’ roll elements, further intensifying the live show experience.

The band’s performance at Rebels & Renegades will include expected crowd pleasers, such as “James River Blues” or “Down Home Girl,” as well as new material. In April 2022, the group released Paint This Town, their first album of original material in five years, followed by Jubilee (2023) with 13 brand-new songs.

“Sometimes we get bored with songs and a handful of them get retired,” Younts says. “But it’s all about the crowd and what they want. We would stop playing a song for a while and then approach it differently, in a new way.”

One of the most interesting tracks on the new album is “One Drop,” which features an iconic R&B vocalist Mavis Staples. Another song, “Allegheny Lullaby,” is a song about poverty of rural America and the people of Appalachia, Secor said in a 2023 interview for NPR’s “Here & Now,” adding the band is not afraid to write about tough issues like the opioid crisis.

REBELS AND RENEGADES Friday, Oct. 6-Sunday, Oct. 8. (Old Crow Medicine Show plays Friday, Oct. 6 and Shane Smith & the Saints play Sunday, Oct. 8.) Monterey County Fair and Event Center, 2004 Fairground Road, Monterey. $175-$500. rebelsandrenegadesfest.com