OKEMAH -- Pity the band with that first set.

It's Thursday evening at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival -- on an outdoor stage, in July, in Oklahoma, for Pete's sake -- the sun's still high enough in the sky to make misery, and nobody is fool enough to be out in the heat.

Well, some folks were. A dedicated stage crew and about 30 fans when the first band started.

"What in tarnation are we doing out here?" asked a fan to no one in particular.

By the time Xavier finished its opening set, though, the crowd was coming on, hauling lawn chairs and fans into the field where the Pastures of Plenty main stage looms. By the time the Red Dirt Rangers brought down the rafters, the audience was several hundred strong.

Xavier is the band featuring Abe Guthrie -- son of Arlo Guthrie and thus grandson of the festival's honored namesake. They've come a long way, baby. What was once a clunky and often ill-advised heavy metal band has matured over the last decade into a tight and buoyant Southern-sounding rock band.

The quartet opened the main stage festival by singing an a cappella version of the Beatles' "Nowhere Man," no doubt a ringer in their repretoire but an ironic opening to the festival; the song de scribes an anonymous slacker who couldn't be more the reverse of Woody Guthrie's do-or-die gumption. The rest of the band's set chugged ahead unfettered, maintaining the same sharp harmonies through rootsy rock that see-sawed between Alabama's rockin side and Little Feat's country side.

But the heat was getting to them, too.

"We're from Massachusetts, so this hundred degrees is a bit different for us," guitarist Randy Cormier said from the stage. "We just shoveled out our last bit of snow up there."

As the sun dipped behind the Okemah hill, the Thursday night main stage bill continued to shine. Grammy-winner Pierce Pettis slipped by, and Lucy Kaplansky (who's performed with everyone, from Shawn Colvin and Dar Williams to John Gorka and Bill Morrissey) played a beautiful, subdued set, which included a surprising cover of Roxy Music's "More Than This."

Slaid Cleaves moseyed his way through a batch of songs that further proves he is one of the most talented singers out of Austin, Texas (if not the reincarnation of Cisco Houston himself). He led off with his current hit, "Broke Down," before singing a character sketch of a very colorful character. The song included a couple of yodels, which both generated their own applause. When fellow Austin musician Darcie Deaville joined him onstage, she ribbed him about the yodeling. "I got that from Don Walser," Cleaves said, and the two of them then played a Walser tune. Cleaves later added his own, festival-centric verses to Guthrie's "I Aint Got No Home" and then closed with a haunting, pre-Mermaid Avenue collaboration with Guthrie: Cleaves' tune to a 1940 Guthrie lyric, "This Morning I Was Born Again."

The Red Dirt Rangers closed the show with their usual backbeat, once again being the first festival act to get audience members on their feet dancing. They opened with "Rangers Command," a groove-greased Guthrie original and the title track from their latest album. Later, they played a tune by the late Benny Craig, a former Ranger and a much-missed and talented multi-instrumentalist. The tune, called "Leave This World a Better Place," was unusually funky for Craig -- or was that the Rangers? -- but its lyrical sentiments were perfect for a festival honoring a scrappy songwriter who tried his utmost to leave the world just so.

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Thomas Conner, World entertainment writer, can be reached at 581-8473 or via e-mail at thomas.conner@tulsaworld.com.