The beloved folk-rock band Indigo Girls strummed acoustic guitars and harmonized at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs on Saturday night to a packed audience.
Made up of longtime friends and collaborators Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, the Indigo Girls are pillars of the late 1980s to early 2000s queer music scene. The duo won a Grammy Award in 1990 and have recorded 15 studio albums. Hit songs like “Closer to Fine” and “Shame on You” feature their signature twanging guitars and overlapping vocals, elements that were front and center on the Saturday night stage.
But underlying the performance were the difficulties the band is persevering through. Prior to their 2026 tour, which is taking the group all across the country, the Indigo Girls released a video on social media that detailed two medical diagnoses that affect Saliers’ voice. She has cervical dystonia, a painful neurological condition that causes her head to twist, and an essential tremor, which causes involuntary movements of her vocal chords. She said the diagnoses give her a “vibrato that I never used to have.”
Saliers said in the video that there’s no cure for the conditions, and that her voice will “never be what it was.”
“As we get ready for these shows, we’re doing everything we can to make the songs sound as good as they can possibly sound,” Saliers said in the video. She said the duo is using technological equipment to help their voices align in harmonies, which is what they’re known for by fans.
Ray and Saliers, who met in elementary school in Georgia, rallied on Saturday and drew major support from the community, who looked on through tears and gave standing ovations between songs to a band that helped define queer musical culture during a pivotal time. They released their debut album, “Strange Fires,” in 1987 and came out as lesbians publicly in the early 1990s, nearly seven years before a television character played by Ellen DeGeneres came out as gay, followed by her own public embrace of her sexuality through a Time Magazine article with the headline, “Yep, I’m Gay.”
The 1990s featured a shift for queer rights. The AIDs crisis was ongoing, along with severe social stigmas regarding gay men. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was passed by former President Bill Clinton in 1993, which allowed queer military personnel to serve as long as they weren’t open about their sexuality. The Defense of Marriage Act was signed in 1996, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. All the while, marches, benefit concerts, and activism demanding equal rights for all genders and sexualities surged.
Ray and Saliers were at the forefront of the musical side of queer activism, along with fundraising and playing music for other causes, like indigenous rights, immigration and refugee rights, and the environment.
The entire band includes electric guitarist and keyboardist Jeff Fielder, violinist Lyrus Hung, and backing vocalist and opener Lucy Wainwright Roche. The band toggled between instruments and played hit songs from recent and past albums, as Ray and Saliers switched guitars nearly every song.
A technician moved quickly at the side of the stage to tune and prepare the acoustic guitars for the band leaders as the full and vibrant sound filled the Tabernacle and the lawn beyond it.
Behind the stage, a banner was unfurled that detailed H-1B visas and the cost of obtaining them as well as a list of countries that have had visas banned by the U.S. federal government. At the bottom of the banner, in red lettering, was the word “VOTE.”
“The central message of love and self-esteem and activism and all that is, it’s there, and that’s what we want to share,” Ray said in the video. “We just want to keep playing and do our best.”
