50 Years
Entry #7
July 30th, 2024
Festivals play a big part in the music scene. They vary greatly in size, theme, and setup. The are various templates and those templates are always evolving. Each festival has its own unique qualities, and after you attend the first time, you are better prepared to take advantage of them.
When I really started making a go of it as a musician in 1974, there were not nearly so many festivals as there are currently. The surge of younger music fans of the baby boomer generation certainly provided fuel for festivals of all kinds, and what we have today is greatly influenced by that same demographic.
I was 15 when Woodstock took place. That festival was a newsworthy event and subject of a successful movie released 7 months later. The resulting nationwide impression of it informed other parts of the festival scene. Another important festival - Monterey Pop - which bad also spawned a major motion picture — had plowed ground for Woodstock, and the new counter culture was now flowering. Then in December of 1969, the free Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California revealed the dark side of large events like Woodstock.
The first multi-day event featuring Bluegrass music was organized by Carlton Haney in 1965. Revolutionary at the time, the festival and its successors drew bluegrass fans from around the entire US, and helped build what has become quite a community. Bill Monroe took Haney’s template and started his annual festival in Bean Blossom Indiana. Soon, he had his own talent agency which launched annual festivals in several locations, including one near Denver, Colorado starting in 1972.
That festival morphed into Rockygrass, where I played this past weekend. I grew up with this event and others like Walnut Valley festival in Winfield KS. I competed in the contests, jammed in the parking lots, and eventually played onstage.
In Canada, a new kind of folk festival - Mariposa - debuted near Toronto in 1961.
Covered nationally on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, it quickly grew in attendance. Out of this event came similar events in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver. Multi-stages feature collaborative workshops during the day, with tightly curated main stage lineups at night. Mariposa director Estelle Klein pioneered the unique workshop format where several artists appeared on stage at once, trading songs and styles and often collaborating for the first time. Mitch Podolak attended the early Mariposa Festivals and went on to start the Winnipeg and Vancouver festivals. At Mariposa Mitch noticed that volunteers were essential to the event’s success, and he worked up a new festival model that treated the volunteers with as much respect as the artists. That template fostered greater annual community participation. The festival became as much theirs as anyone’s. This same volunteer model was adopted by Carsten Panduro, founder of Denmark’s wonderful Tonder festival. (Jan and I are happy we get to perform at the 50th annual Tonder fest this August.) At Tonder, you see socialism that actually works. The more the community participates, the more the government supports it, and for the volunteers it’s a great source of pride. One large tent stays up a day longer, and volunteers cook a curry supper that’s shared by them and the performers who stay around to entertain them. One reason I’ve loved performing at the Canadian festivals and at Tonder is the diversity of musical style. I get to hear many types of ethnic music, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, while also feeding my addiction to Celtic sounds. It really refreshes a bluegrasser’s palate.
Among the most humble festivals are what are generally called fiddlers conventions. These events are based around contests for various acoustic folk instruments, singers, and bands, with the fiddle competition at the symbolic top of the heap, with more attention and prize money. These events have a very long history in the US. Henry Ford promoted several contests in the 1920’s, and they were just part of the story. As the decades rolled on, and as radio and commercial recordings became affordable, fiddle contests became a bigger draw and they popped up all across the US. The annual convention in Galax VA started in 1935. With the folk revival of the late 1950’s and early 1970’s and with the help of urban practitioners like The New Lost City Ramblers, more and more young contestants were coming from the northeast, many of them competing on the contest stage against older southern players. I came along as an aspiring fiddler in about 1974, and kept a sharp lookout for contests in my area. Winnings helped buy groceries and each contest was a lesson in how to produce under pressure.
Folk and Jazz festivals have also been a big part of the mix. My older brother Trip attended the Newport Jazz festival in 1967 or 1968. He’d attended a year or two of college and had been exposed to a wider variety of music. As I’ve noted before in this blog, he brought home records by Joan Baez, Ray Charles, and Miles Davis. The Newport folk festival made serious waves with the exposure of not only younger artists like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, but also folks like Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, and Lead Zeppelin! In fact, Lead Zeppelin’s appearance in July of 1969 at Newport was a bit of a Woodstock preview - the rock group attracted more people than the venue could hold, and the crowd eventually tore down the wooden perimeter fence, and made bonfires in the chilly evening with the fence and the wooden folding chairs provided by the promoters. As a result, Newport 1970 did not happen.
The fiddlers convention in Union Grove North Carolina was launched in the 1920’s. In 1974 the Easter weekend event was invaded by long haired kids smoking pot and taking psychedelic drugs, some of them riding motorcycles around evening campfires. That year 75k attended. In 1979 130k attended. There was a boom going on, with a growing audience, and festivals sprouted up everywhere. With that expansion, Bluegrass festivals and Fiddlers conventions splintered into different styles.
For instance, Union Grove promoter Harper Van Hoy’s brother Rafe started an alternative festival called Fiddler’s Grove on the same weekend that catered more to the hard core traditional crowd, and was built to be smaller and friendlier. Some bluegrass festivals followed this model, with stricter rules against alcohol and drug abuse. At this kind of festival, mainstream bluegrass artists like Jim and Jesse, Ralph Stanley, and the Lewis Family, would often make a handshake deal with promoters offstage, and then announce during their sets that they’d be returning again the following year. Meanwhile festival promoter Jim Clark started a run of what he called Peace, Love and Bluegrass festivals. He catered to hippies, with country rock artists appearing alongside traditional bluegrass bands, and a more cavalier drug and alcohol policy. I wrote about one of these events, the 1973 Warrenton Bluegrass Folk festival, in an earlier entry of this blog.
Festivals like Walnut Valley/Winfield, Telluride Bluegrass, Merlefest, and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass are hybrids. Winfield combines a contest format with a diverse folk and bluegrass lineup on several stages. There’s even a stage right in the campground! Merlefest has a similar diverse, multi stage lineup that ventures into commercial country with past headliners like Dolly Parton and Alan Jackson. Telluride is a tightly curated tastemaker and still concentrates on just one main stage. Hardly Strictly has multiple stages with an astounding and diverse lineup and is free to the public.
One of the first festivals with free attendance was sponsored by Kentucky Fried Chicken in Louisville KY. I played it several times with Hot Rize and on my own. The Festival of American Folklife in Washington DC is great free event on the national mall. The National Council for the Traditional Arts has jumpstarted numerous free festivals in cities like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They tried to jumpstart one in Nashville, but it never took hold, maybe because there’s already enough music there.
One of my favorite festivals is California’s Strawberry Music Festival, which stays intentionally smallish and user friendly, and freshens the palate with a diverse lineup. It also pioneered the festival simulcast with its in-house Hog Ranch radio.
And don’t forget what Darol Anger calls the “festival in a box”. Indoor events like Mid-Winter Bluegrass near Denver and Wintergrass in the Seattle area are perfect for those jonesing for bluegrass jams in February. The International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) presents its World of Bluegrass, an amazing array of bluegrass related music performed both inside and outside, every fall.
An important newer feature of bluegrass festivals is the instructional music camp held on weekdays leading up to the festival. This brings the aspiring amateur and, more importantly, young children to the community. Last weekend at Rockygrass, we heard fine sets from the Cody Sisters and from Sarah Jarosz, both of whom attended Rocky Grass Academy as youngsters. Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn brought their 11 year old son Juno, a regular kids academy attendee, onstage to sing. Thanks to music camps, the talent keeps growing, and the music stays in safe hands.
Lastly, the word festival is now a verb, so let’s Fest-i-val and don’t forget your sunscreen!