A State of Mind: The Falcon Ridge Folk Festival

From that humble beginning [in 1988], the festival soon acquired a life of its own. It was not just a physical event, but a state of mind and of spirit that you could go back to again and again whenever needed, whenever the grind of workaday obligations and stresses called for it. Many long time attendees say the physical act of attending each year is a recharging of the creative and spiritual batteries for them. And that Falcon Ridge is much like the mythical kingdom of Brigadoon, a place of light, love and magic that exists for one weekend each year. It appears, it unfolds, happens and then recedes into the mists with the certainty of next July's reappearance.

- Anne Saunders, Artistic Director, Falcon Ridge Folk Festival

PREFACE

If there is such a thing as a “neutral” ethnography, this is most certainly not it. In the spring of 2003, as a young musician and freshman at Harvard University, I was searching for who I was and what I was going to do with my life. Having recently quit playing drumset after ten years of focused practice, I had found an outlet in my songwriting. I explored my ideas on the guitar I’d learned to play just two years earlier, when I was a high school junior in Missoula, Montana.

I went to my first open mic (a musical gathering at which several performers, some amateur, some professional, sign up for a chance to appear on stage to sing one or two songs) at Cambridge’s famed Club Passim on the suggestion of Mieka Pauley, a Harvard College graduate who had launched a successful professional career. One Tuesday night led to another Tuesday night, and what began as tentative exploration became a passion, a family, and ultimately, the central axis of my life. I had found the folk music community.

Just over a year after that, I attended my first Falcon Ridge Folk Festival during the summer of 2004. Living, working, and playing with fellow members of the folk community for four days straight heightened the “family” experience of the year I had already spent frequenting folk clubs and other singer-songwriter events. When I woke up on Monday in my on-campus housing after my return from Falcon Ridge, I felt a bit like Dorothy, just come back from the Land of Oz. Although the physical Falcon Ridge was gone, at least until next year, I sensed my newfound membership in something more permanent, if more elusive. My individual journey in music had become inseparable from the larger community of which it was now a part.

This study of Falcon Ridge then, is the testimony of an interested participant. I write about my community, from my own position in the folk web outwards. Those in my immediate circle – the volunteer crew with whom I worked, musicians I work with or know well, presenters who have hired me - appear a bit closer than those I know only as fellow Falcon Ridge attendees. I write from the perspective of someone whose life has been profoundly transformed – for the better – by the event and community that is Falcon Ridge. Naturally, the phenomenon is cast in a positive (though, I hope, not uncritical) light. I also have financial ties to Falcon Ridge: music is something I now pursue as a career, and the many radio hosts, concert presenters, agents, and journalists who attend Falcon Ridge impact the success of my endeavor. Interactions I had in the course of conducting this ethnography would be difficult to completely separate from “doing business.” I should add that my primary means of rendering the world around me is as a songwriter. This cannot help but affect the way in which I observe and report on my surroundings. Because Falcon Ridge unexpectedly moved after the 2005 event, this ethnography has also become somewhat of a commemoration of the 15 years spent at Long Hill Farm.

My project does not create a new social exchange from which to tell a story, as do the monographs of “outside researchers.” Instead, this is a story from within the existing fabric, the testimony of one thread among many that are woven together to create Falcon Ridge. There are many stories like mine to be found among the men and women who gather on a farm in the Berkshires for four days each July. These are the ones I have heard, the ones I tell.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my thesis advisor at Harvard, Professor Kay Kaufman Shelemay, whose scholarship inspired me to explore the field of ethnomusicology, and whose patient guidance shepherded me through two years of work on this project. I would also like to thank my mentors in Folklore and Mythology, Chair Stephen Mitchell and Head Tutor Deborah Foster.

This thesis draws on the collective knowledge and expertise of hundreds of informants throughout the folk music world. I would especially like to thank Falcon Ridge Folk Festival Director Anne Saunders, Neale Eckstein, Jake Jacobson, and Alan Rowoth, all of whom read early drafts of this work and helped me correct my rookie mistakes. I am also very grateful to Neale Eckstein for providing the photos, and to Jake Jacobson for welcoming me into the Circle of Friends Camp.

Many fellow Falcon Ridge community members offered invaluable assistance of a more practical nature. Pete Urbaitis, my volunteer crew chief, showed me the ropes at Performer Liason in 2005, and Rick Kelly and Carole Metsger welcomed me as part of their crew at the Performer Merchandise Tent in 2004. Jake Jacobson gave me a ride and helped me set up my tent in 2005. Jim Gottlieb drove me out to Long Hill Farm from Boston in 2004. I borrowed many fleeces and blankets in the wee hours of the morning, while singing, playing, and listening at various song circles.

Finally, I would like to thank all my teachers, formal and informal, musical and

academic, for encouraging me when I didn’t “get it” on the first try, and for pushing me to keep searching when I thought I already had the answers.

INTRODUCTION

When word got out at the 2005 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival (FRFF) that Long Hill Farm, fifteen years the festival’s host, was being sold, buttons immediately appeared declaring: “Falcon Ridge is a State of Mind.” Though the festival soon found a replacement site just seven miles down the road, the response of the Falcon Ridge community to the land sale revealed a much deeper truth about the folk festival: “folk” music, now as ever, is about community-based creations. Those communities, however, don’t need to be geographical or political physical “states” that draw on a common history or ethnicity. Falcon Ridge is the creation of those who share the folk music ideal. It is a state of mind.

A traditional folk music scholar would be frustrated in attempting to taxonomize FRFF. It would be ludicrous to label the festival’s offerings “folk music of the Berkshires region,” although the festival appears in the same location each year, involving several regulars from the area. Primarily a venue for singer-songwriters, FRFF incorporates musical influences from southern blues to reggae to shape note. The strongest common element is undoubtedly American pop music, in the broadest sense of the term. Perhaps a case could be made that what FRFF presents is not a regional folk music but an American folk form – the “singer/songwriter genre.” But the musicians involved certainly don’t stop at the United States border when tracing their artistic roots.

Festival attendees have often struggled with the definition of “folk” – not merely as a matter of semantics, but in what are often very heated, concrete discussions about the way in which such festivals should be programmed: who should be booked and why. Folk purists generally feel that booking decisions should be based on some set of guidelines related to instrumentation or traceable “roots” of a songwriter’s music. Such purists are continually frustrated in attempting to construct a coherent picture of the “folk” music that is programmed at FRFF. How does one reconcile the music of Bjork-influenced Brown graduate and electric guitar-toting singer/songwriter Erin McKeown with that of New York-based trad string band Crooked Still?¹

This very dilemma has led many to conclude that FRFF is not folk and that, like many contemporary singer/songwriter festivals, it simply hangs onto a moniker that no longer applies. More than one frustrated folkie has griped that several FRFF artists are just pop musicians with acoustic guitars and a few token fiddles.

The error in this conclusion lies, I believe, in the application of the adjective “folk” to a decontextualized notion of the music, rather than to a holistic picture of the music as it is presented at the festival. What unifies the music of FRFF, as well as the community and the operations of the festival (which are much more wide-ranging than what occurs on the mainstage) is the folk music ideal, a shared (though debated) set of beliefs that finds its expression both musically and extra-musically in the day-to-day goings-on at FRFF.

Realizing The Folk Music Ideal

First of all, FRFF is not only a state of mind. It is truly a state of mind. It has its own currency. Falcon Ridge bucks, the only currency accepted by the food vendors, can be saved and used in following years, a constant reminder that Brigadoon is indeed real and will return. It has its own named streets, dedicated to heroes of the community, dead and living, just as conventional roadways are named for American Presidents. (Dave Carter Way honors a highly-respected songwriter who died suddenly of a heart attack just days before the 2002 festival.) Like any town, it has its own understood social geography, including named campsites that set up in the same place each year, often with large flags or other identifying markers. The camps on the hill are the place to find music late at night, and the ones on the far left host the most prestigious song circles. The hill is also where you’ll find Camp Dar, home base for diehard fans of Dar Williams who frequently travel from as far away as California and Florida. The flats are for campers who want to sleep at night, with the area closest to the stages reserved for volunteers. Run primarily by an astoundingly large army of volunteer staff, FRFF is divided into several command groups, not unlike a government. Performer Merchandise Sales (PMS), Site Crew, Kitchen Crew, and their brethren all have their own famous (or infamous) leaders, crew culture, and in some cases, even their own songs.

Breaking from the state model, however, is the nature of community membership. Very few FRFF attendees are community members by default or cultural inheritance. Though some of the younger festival-goers were introduced to the folk community by their parents, the vast majority of the participants became part of the community through some sort of “conversion” moment like mine.² Membership is perceived as an individual choice, often a critical one, and as a result, several attendees have a significant stake in both the folk music ideal and its expression. Whereas many studies of musical communities investigate the music made by a pre-existing community, proceeding according to research questions such as “what are third generation Japanese-Americans listening to or playing,”³ this study of FRFF differs in that the community is created and defined by the music. Individually chosen membership as a participant in FRFF and the larger folk music scene is what ties its attendees together.

Before distancing FRFF completely from musical communities defined in ethnic or geographic terms by either their participants or those who study them, it must be mentioned that the FRFF community demographics do not mirror those of general American society. Festival-goers are acutely aware of (and generally disappointed in) the lack of racial diversity. As Vance Gilbert, one of the lone African-American performers noted bluntly at his workshop, “Black people don’t listen to folk music. They see an acoustic guitar, and it’s a rope. Seriously people: it’s country music, and it’s something black people don’t have access to.” Despite the multiculturalist hopes of many in the folk music community, the music itself continues to rely largely on traditions perceived (particularly by nonwhites) as white. A secondary concern among folk music enthusiasts is the lack of diversity in age at most singer-songwriter events. Falcon Ridge proves somewhat of an exception in this regard. Though middle-aged attendees still form a strong plurality, several children, young adults and grandparents also attend. As the festival is accessible only by car and publicized through media such as public radio, it is unsurprising that well-educated, middle class attendees form the majority of the paying audience. However, as with age diversity, economic diversity seems to be stronger at Falcon Ridge than at several similar events. As FRFF Artistic Director Anne Saunders said of the volunteer demographic, “we have everything from high school dropouts to MDs and PhD’s.” The income level of the volunteers is somewhat deceptive – although many volunteers exchange their labor for free admission because they have little expendable income, few come from real poverty. Typically from middle-class backgrounds, these volunteers are usually starving college students, starving artists, or just hippies working poorly paid nonprofit jobs. The contrast between the heterogeneity valued by the folk music ideal and the homogenous reality evident in the sea of faces at FRFF is a source of great discomfort, frustration, confusion, and humor among the community.

I will describe the festival and its attendees more fully in subsequent chapters. This cursory description, however, should suffice to clarify that the ideals and idealism central to FRFF, while never perfectly realized, are not pipe dreams. As a well-developed “state” into which “citizens” opt in, FRFF is not just summer camp for a bunch of delusional, idealistic folk music enthusiasts (folkies). The festival is an efficiently-run, significant business operation involving thousands of people: 8,000 to 12,000 attendees each day, 4,500 campers, and just shy of 1,000 volunteers. For Anne Saunders, who oversees the FRFF office year-round, the festival is a full-time job. Other FRFF participants are involved with the folk music community to varying degrees during the rest of the year, gathering in coffeehouses and at other festivals, on email list-servs and over radio airwaves, often sustaining the “state of mind” in the midst of more immediate realities of day jobs and “real life.” For these four days, however, the folk music ideal could not be more concrete.

Indeed the real-ness of FRFF is at the crux of its symbolic power. The common goal of those who attend is to make the folk music ideal - a vision of shared power and creation, uninhibited personal expression, and general acceptance and love - real through a successful music festival. Given the strong anti-commercial, anti-regimentation components of the familiar sixties folk music ideal, converting this worldview into a viable business plan is no easy feat. However, contemporary “folkies,” no longer part of a nationally-visible social movement, are well-aware that they have a tough job in competing with the mainstream music business for fans. FRFF feels real for four days because it truly does create real careers for several of its featured musicians, many of whom spend twelve months a year on the road playing to the folk music audiences who gather at such festivals.

The impossibility, of course, is finding the right way to come to a concrete realization of this folk music ideal upon which everyone can agree. If community members disagree about the ideal itself, they most certainly disagree about the right way to live it out. Many, for example, feel that the prestigious “left side of the hill” campsites hosting invitation-only showcases (where emerging artists can be heard by venue presenters) flout the everybody-join-in, “true” spirit of folk music. Others applaud these showcases for helping jumpstart careers and build national networks, making folk music stronger and more commercially viable. Lively argument over such issues makes FRFF’s identity as an ideological “state of mind” community unquestionably evident. If the folk music ideal wasn’t the important factor at the festival, people wouldn’t argue about it so vehemently. To bring the point home, you might hear attendees at a classical festival debating the interpretation of a particular sonata, perhaps decrying a contemporary interpretation. In contrast, die-hard Falcon-Ridge-goers seldom argue very passionately about technical points of the music, but engage in endless discussion about the community, contributing to a year-round dialogue that spills over onto several email list-servs.

Further proof of FRFF’s status as an ideological community is the near-oxymoronic status of the mainstage. Listening to the music being played on the mainstage is most certainly not the primary focus of the festival.⁴ Particularly when talking to those who are regular attendees or who are involved in the festival beyond just attending, it becomes readily apparent that their festival experience centers around other axes: their camp, their volunteer crew, or their experience playing music late at night after the official performances are over. This is not to say that the programmed music is not an important part of the festival. It is - but not for its own ends. Music on the mainstage is one means among many through which the festival community unites, defines, and expresses itself.

What is the Folk Music Ideal, and How is it Expressed Through Falcon Ridge?

What I term the folk music ideal is the belief that individuals should be able to fully realize their own unique expressive potential, that this realization will benefit both the individual and the community, and that the resulting community should be a peaceful place of sharing, acceptance, and non-violence, in which flexibility and understanding eliminate power struggles and distinctions between haves and have-nots. I have met very few individuals involved in contemporary folk music who do not articulate some form of this ideal when describing their reasons for participating in this musical community. Because the folk music ideal is a dialectic and contested concept, it would be difficult to designate any one iteration (including my own) as a definitive statement of its meaning. Each of the interview excerpts in the appendix could be considered an alternative formulation. My approach to defining the folk music ideal shares much in common with Scott Alarik’s approach to defining folk music. After years of trying to formulate a precise definition during his work as a journalist, Alarik wrote in his 2003 book, Deep Community, that “Folk music is simply the most useful term I have found to describe the entire genre as it exists today: it is almost universally understood as a description of the kind of music presented in this book, and found on the stages of coffeehouses and folk festivals throughout the world.” In short, folk music is what the folk music community understands it to be. So too, the folk music ideal is what the folk music community understands it to be.

The most salient origins of this ideal, particularly in reference to the FRFF community, are the major social movements of the sixties: Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam War, and, to some extent, the Women’s Liberation, Gay Rights, and Environmental Movements that followed. These social movements both fed and were fed by the mid-century folk music revival (Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan), and helped give birth to the modern folk festival (Woodstock). In highlighting this historical moment, I do not mean to suggest that the sixties brought the first expression of the folk music ideal. Such an assertion would erroneously discount such familiar figures as Woody Guthrie and Alan Lomax, among others. However, the sixties marked the first major social movement based on these ideals – and it was this era that brought together the core group of current FRFF attendees.

It is interesting to note that the folk music ideal draws heavily from larger political and social movements, as well as a certain brand of nationalism. (Think of Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”) The folk music ideal could easily be thought of as one type of “imaginary,” a term often used by anthropologists and political scientists to describe the links that unify nations and societies. As I have noted, while visible markers and overt expressions of shared culture contribute to a sense of community at Falcon Ridge, these would merely be empty symbols without the “state of mind” that informs them. In a sense, Falcon Ridge attendees do “imagine” themselves into community. Many informants felt that this was shaky ground for asserting the realness and validity of what unifies them. Yet this type of community-building process, “the imaginary,” has been credited as the basis for the modern nation state.⁵

The Strange Bedfellows of Songwriter and Traditional Performer

Among the defining characteristics of folk music inherited from the revival of the sixties is the combination of traditional songs (and instrumentals) with those composed by contemporary songwriters who perform their own compositions. Along with this often awkward combination come warring camps of enthusiasts, retracing battle lines drawn both before and after Dylan “plugged in” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

In the context of the folk music ideal, both the pairing itself and the resulting debate reflect the community’s concern with identity. Singer-songwriter fans emphasize individual identity and individually-defined community identity (i.e. “Here’s what being a Texan means to me”). Traditionalists often find this approach navel-gazing and look to history and enduring customs to find a more reliable source of community identity.

Both the compositions of singer-songwriters and the repertoire of traditional performers fulfill the folk music ideal as identity music. Where classical and mainstream pop music, for example, both ask musicians to train themselves to reach beyond their individuality and aspire to a certain ideal, singer-songwriter and traditional music ask musicians to dig more deeply into themselves, then present an expression of identity. For traditional musicians, this identity is typically based on ethnic or national background. For singer-songwriters, identity is usually based on the basic story of who the individual is and where they are from. The 2004 FRFF program includes such descriptions as “native New Yorker,” “hailing from a small town in Northern Maine,” “born in West London and spent his early years in post war Britain surrounded by a family with wide ranging musical tastes.” Both musical forms reinforce a state of mind that values the expression of unique selves. While FRFF is primarily a singer-songwriter festival, the 2005 line-up included several “roots” artists who perform traditional material as well as their own compositions.

Methods

Ethnographies of one’s own community require a redefinition of research methods from those commonly associated with social science. Research, in this case, does not mark the boundaries between scholar and subject, observer and participant, or even work and play. These boundaries have been collapsed. Research is only one way of casting a set of activities that also fit under other headings, such as “volunteering,” “performing,” “networking,” and “socializing.” An ethnography such as this one is somewhat like a form of Zen – living, but being mindful about it. As I outlined my methods for this thesis, I asked myself the question, “what part of this experience was research?” And yet, the more appropriate question seems to be “What part of my experience was not research?” An ethnographer is always working.

I attended Falcon Ridge Folk Festival for two years in a row, 2004 and 2005. I did not take a notebook the first year, but I already had this project in mind, and I was certainly more proactive than your average volunteer about initiating conversation with other festival-goers about their experiences. In 2005, I took my notebooks with me everywhere, diligently scribbling field notes about the most mundane matters, and jotting down short interviews. This made me more visible as a “researcher.” In between the 2004 and 2005 festivals, I remained heavily involved in the folk music community of which Falcon Ridge is a part. Many other community members knew I was writing a thesis, and informal interviews often occurred by serendipity (even backstage at my own shows). After a few of these conversations, I devised a simple email questionnaire, which I sent to several festival-goers who seemed interested in the project. I found many of the responses evocative and have included excerpts from several of these interviews in Appendix B.

When writing about a community, it is always tempting to oversimplify social geography and social roles. Many times, I began this work by organizing it according to a single set of groupings: a straightforward breakdown of festival social space by region or role (volunteer, performer, audience member, etc). Such a structure, however, denies the reader a more complex, multi-layered experience of social geography – the experience available to anyone who set foot on the grounds of Long Hill Farm during the fourth weekend in July. It is the unavoidable frustration of the writer that a few minutes’ experience of any ethnographic subject conveys a richness that many hours of research and analysis fail to provide. I hope to at least minimize this frustration. Rather than organizing by categories, I have chosen to write layer by layer, uncovering the cumulative levels of community that make Falcon Ridge the strong, thickly constituted society that it is.

I begin with the bottom layer – that which is least obvious to the casual, first-time observer, but most crucial to the strength of the community structure as a whole. This foundational layer is defined by two characteristics: it exists largely outside the province of the official festival apparatus and its most active manifestations occur at night, usually very late and into the wee hours of the morning. This layer of festival experience was created just after Falcon Ridge’s initial years, when a campground was added. As the grounds have grown, the tent-based communities have grown with them, solidifying the social structure of the festival.

Layered on top of the campground space and its late night music is the official festival space. The most pervasive and deepest sub-layer of this level is the volunteer community, which incorporates a large portion of festival attendees with varying roles in the folk music world. At the surface level is the portion of the festival easily accessible in a press release: mainstage performances, some of the sidestage performances, commerce (food and craft vendors), and the concert-going experience of paying audience members not connected to the campground or volunteer communities.

The many layers of the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival’s social geography are interdependent, as the majority of festival attendees traverse most, if not all of them in their experience of the festival and its community. So as not to present these levels as isolated sub-communities, I foreground individuals as community members, and utilize my own multi-layered experience to better flesh out the way in which Falcon Ridge is lived.

As I endeavor to present a thickly-constituted, three-dimensional portrayal of social geography, I also want to avoid oversimplifying the social roles of individuals. These roles are as blurred and multi-layered as the social spaces that shape them. Asking a Falcon Ridge attendees what their roles are at the festival (as I did in my interviews), is a very poor way to answer the question. Because an academic interview is an interaction presumed to be governed by the rules of the general culture, most attendees feel compelled to answer this question on the most superficial (economic) level: how did you get your ticket? At this level, there are six principal roles: paying audience member, volunteer, performer, vendor, music professional, production team. Such roles, however, tell only a partial story. Some volunteers are basically paying audience members who pay for their tickets in work instead of cash – they are fans of the music and are donating time so they can afford to see the concerts. Like many paying audience members, these volunteers see themselves more as concert-goers than community members. Other volunteers are, in fact, music professionals – venue owners, radio deejays, and more often than not, singer-songwriters. Very often, the only way to distinguish two music business colleagues as “professional with a comp ticket” or “volunteer” is to look at their badges. This multilayered, blurred, and often confusing definition of roles within the Falcon Ridge community complicates the meaning of seemingly straightforward statements about “music businesspeople” and “volunteers” in the descriptions that follow. To help flesh this out somewhat, I have included excerpts from several interviews in the appendix, each of which paints a fuller picture of an individual’s complex weave through the festival’s social fabric.

I also open each section with overheard remarks from my two years at Falcon Ridge, which help track the inner landscape that accompanies various components of FRFF. These quotes are usually unattributed, either because I did not know who the speaker was or because the phrase was used by more than one person and has been incorporated as part of the shared folklore of the festival. Overheard remarks appear in bold typeface, while my personal observations, excerpted from my fieldnotes, appear in italics.

I begin here with a literature review of previous academic work that has informed my own thoughts, then proceed with a brief history of Falcon Ridge before describing the campground community. From there, I build the social space of the festival from the foundation upwards. Frustrating my attempt at order is the ironic pairing of mainstage and backstage, a single festival space experienced in widely varying depths depending on the network of relationships formed by any particular individual.

While drawing from earlier traditions, both musical and nonmusical, Falcon Ridge has also created several traditions of its own. I acknowledge this in my ethnography with frequent use of the present tense. Most descriptions, however, are of the 2005 event.

Folk Music and Festivals: A Brief Literature Review

The explosion of interdisciplinary work in the social sciences, the advent of ethnography at home, and the academy’s longstanding fascination with folk music have all left the American folk music festival curiously untouched. Very little has been written about the institution; particularly in its contemporary form, which often features singer-songwriters unaffiliated with an “ethnic” tradition. The study of the folk festival lies on the boundary between the study of festivals and the study of folk music, fields which have developed in relatively isolated trajectories, occupying privileged central space in their respective disciplinary canons, and rarely forced to engage with the emerging areas of urban and performance studies.

As Philip Bohlman points out in his 1988 retrospective, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World, scholarship on folk music has been overwhelmingly conservative.⁶ Both folklorists and ethnomusicologists have relied heavily on a bounded-culture paradigm that marginalizes original composition, urban setting, and commercial marketplace, all of which are crucial to an understanding of contemporary American folk music. For example, in a 1960 volume entitled Folk Music in the United States, Bruno Nettl writes that “folk music usually undergoes some very fundamental changes when it becomes part of an urban or a collegiate musical culture.”⁷ That cities or universities could have their own folk music which could be evaluated on its own terms, rather than as a perversion of an isolation-dependent model, was unthinkable for mid-century scholars of folk music in America. Perhaps largely because ethnomusicology’s institutional life never eclipsed the area studies model, remnants of the bounded-culture paradigm were still very much a part of folk music study at the time Bohlman was writing, and remain with us today. Almost all ethnographies of folk festivals are written about those events which identify particular “ethnic” or “traditional” genres to be performed, whether the project is billed as multi- or mono-cultural.⁸ Even Bohlman succumbs somewhat to this anti-original, anti-modern trend in the field, asserting that “folk music festivals are essentially revivalistic.”⁹ In truth, while contemporary folk festivals reject much of mainstream modernity, they do not draw exclusively from the past in constructing alternatives. The internet, for example, has been widely embraced by the community that attends the FRFF.

For a scholar of contemporary American folk festivals, folklore scholarship on festivals offers another potential source of relevant theory. Alejandro Falassi’s “time out of time” model, developed as part of a broad survey of festivals in human history,¹⁰ would be instantly understood and embraced by Falcon Ridge participants. Roger Abrahams and Richard Bauman’s refinement of reversal, a classic anthropological concept, also offers theoretical grounding for the ethnographic analysis of the contemporary folk festival. Through analysis of fieldwork conducted at carnival and among mummers, the authors conclude that reversal is not properly conceived of as a series of “discrete and extreme events against an analytic backdrop of unitary moral systems,” but rather as a more permanent and integral social reality.¹¹ In a more recent article on Luling, Texas’ annual Watermelon Thump, Beverly Stoeltje and Bauman conclude that festival events give forces of modernity (not revival or nostalgia) a concreteness and immediacy by framing them as public displays.¹² In my own ethnography, I have used the term “realizing” to refer to the process by which a community based on non-mainstream ideals becomes manifest through the lived experience of the folk festival.

However, models generated by folklore prove insufficient, due to a lack of on-the-ground contact with musical events such as Falcon Ridge. Over the past three or four decades, the field has instead generated extensive theory and criticism related to events such as the Festival of American Folklife, in which several of its scholars have participated as organizers, performers, and advisors.¹³ This festival, which focuses on the traditional folk arts of minority groups within the United States, reflects the institutional bounded-culture orientation of folklore studies, and has existed in close dialogue with the field ever since its founding in 1967.¹⁴ Focused on multi-cultural and multi-ethnic “traditional” festivals, which offer clearly defined roles for participant-scholars, folklorists have largely ignored contemporary singer-songwriter festivals, thus leaving gaping theoretical holes related to such issues as composition and commercialism.

Consequently, in this study of a contemporary folk festival, I draw on voices from both ethnomusicology and folklore, as well as the work of other theorists from related social science fields such as anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and performance studies. I also consult music writers and folk world players outside the academy, and, through interviews and fieldwork, festival participants themselves. In the arena of folk music scholarship, such roles are particularly hazy. Many “folkies” have gone to universities and written their own ethnographies. An even greater number of these “informants” have read scholarly work on folk music.¹⁵

For my own “state of mind” model, I draw most heavily on Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s recent work on musical communities, moving away from ethnically and geographically-bounded associations in favor of those linked by descent, dissent, and affinity. As a community of choosing participants who position themselves in opposition to pop music and trace their heritage to the folk revival, Falcon Ridge contains elements of all three Shelemay categories. Among the academic models I found helpful in my study of Falcon Ridge are two from ethnomusicology. Mark Slobin’s tripartite structure of superculture, subculture, and interculture was a useful framework for thinking about the way in which a music culture positions itself within the modern world.¹⁶ Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld speaks of listeners engaging in “interpretive moves,” both while listening to and talking about a musical language with which they are familiar.¹⁷ Feld’s work illuminates the way in which musical events and their meaning are constructed by those who have a stake in the community, and are not simply organic expressions of a people, as earlier folk music models suggest. Adelaida Reyes-Schramm, one of the first ethnomusicologists to draw on sociolinguistics, makes a similar comparison to language, applying the concept of diversity and choice in an urban speech community to urban musical communities.¹⁸ While thinking through the dimensions of this choice or construction, I was guided by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s work on ethnoscape, particularly his notion of the ideoscape as one basis around which contemporary cultural groups are formed.¹⁹ Finally, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work on the festival as an ethnographic object, experienced environmentally, offers insight from the standpoint of material culture and performance studies.²⁰

While such an assemblage of ethnomusicology, folklore, linguistics, and sociology creates a strong theoretical base from which to consider an event such as Falcon Ridge, it says very little about similar musical events with which I may compare my own data. Most sources on contemporary folk festivals come from very distant fields or have been written by authorities outside the academy.

One of the most intriguing of these sources was an economics dissertation written by Emily King entitled “Accounting for Culture: A Social Cost Benefit Analysis of the Stan Rogers Folk Festival.” While King’s disciplinary concerns were far removed from my own, she actually raised several related issues related to why participants value the existence of a festival and their experience of it. I also consulted two works by “folkies” gone academic. Angus K. Gillespie, a folk festival manager who attended several festivals in the early 1980s as an observer, published his analysis as an article entitled “Folk Festival and Festival Folk in Twentieth-Century America,” grouping festival attendees into three humorous archetypal categories of “family,” “folknik,” and “outlaw,” and asserting that none of these characters attended festivals to listen to the music.²¹ Sheldon Posen, a singer and organizer who joined the ranks of folklore through a master’s program at Memorial University of Newfoundland, analyzed the Mariposa Folk Festival, concluding that what made the music “folk” was its context, not its content.²²

Posen’s concern with defining “folk” music is a prominent one within the folk music community, as reflected both by my own fieldwork and by Scott Alarik’s 2003 collection of articles, Deep Community. Alarik, a journalist and folk musician who writes for the Boston Globe and the folk music magazine Sing Out, is widely acknowledged by those who attend Falcon Ridge as the nation’s premier folk music critic, an important bearer of community knowledge and critique. Deep Community, a collection of short pieces previously published in periodicals, confronts the problem of defining “folk” music, and like Posen’s article, anchors the term in community rather than content.²³

The contemporary festival which bears the most resemblance to Falcon Ridge is Kerrville, a three week-long songwriter’s event held in Texas hill country at the end of each May and into June. The autobiography of its founder, Rod Kennedy, entitled Music from the Heart, depicts the administration and experience of a contemporary folk festival in descriptive detail.

Finally, the folk revival, the historic movement to which many Falcon Ridge’s participants trace their roots, has generated an extensive written history. Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk, Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good, and the collectively-authored Baby Let Me Follow Down: the Cambridge Folk Years, spearheaded by Eric Von Schmidt and Jim Rooney provided a context for the memories and constructed descent lineages of festival participants.

A Tradition Born: FALCON RIDGE HISTORY

Falcon Ridge began in 1988, at a time when MTV and lavishly produced pop hits had long since banished the folk music of the sixties and seventies from the mainstream media. The end of the eighties, however, saw a flurry of activity at open mics in both Boston and New York City, as a young crop of singer-songwriters who would soon gain national attention honed their craft. One summer, on the Massachusetts/New York border, a builder started a small festival that would cater to this new breed of folk musicians.

“It was a lovely 2 day event created by Howard Randall,” Falcon Ridge artistic director Anne Saunders recalls in her online history of the festival.²⁴ “A few years earlier he experienced bluegrass music for the first time. Almost immediately, without stopping to ponder the possibilities or consequences he created his first festival, the Winterhawk Bluegrass festival. On the heels of those first years, an avid interest in all types of acoustic music, most especially singer/songwriters, took root. Falcon Ridge was born in 1988.”

Saunders and others soon joined forces with Randall, and what began as a two-day concert at the Catamount ski area quickly became a full-blown festival. In 1992, Falcon Ridge’s second year at Long Hill Farm, the festival’s offerings included three stages, children’s programming, dancing, an emerging artist showcase, and camping. The fast growth of the festival reflected a nationwide rediscovery of the singer-songwriter: Tracy Chapman, not long removed from her days as a street performer in Harvard Square, won 1988’s Grammy Award for Best New Artist. Mark Cohn won in the same category in 1991. Folk music and the music business came face to face for the first time in decades, and festivals such as Falcon Ridge were at the crossroads, helping to catapult such artists as Ani DiFranco, Alison Krauss, and Shawn Colvin to mainstream success.

While this encounter most definitely changed the face of pop music, it also forced folk music to redefine itself. Having persisted in fairly isolated status since the folk revival (when festivals such as Newport and Woodstock gathered large audiences and mainstream, if countercultural, attention), the folk music community found itself confronted by a new generation, forced to clarify its values and identity. While many of the questions raised by the folk crossover of the early nineties are still being debated, what has developed at Long Hill Farm is perhaps one of the most robust, fully established manifestations of what this new folk music really is.

CHAPTER 1:

The Hill and the Flats: Camping and After Hours Music

It is 1:17 a.m. on Thursday, and I wake up cold as a result of poor camping preparation. I walk up the hill to try to locate a fire and find all the music tents quiet except the Front Porch, where a few people sit in chairs in a circle. There is a fire burning just outside the tent, so I station myself next to it. I get there just as one of the circle-sitters finishes a song, and notice that there are also a few people on the periphery – this “audience” meets the song’s finish with polite applause. The next performer, Ollie, begins strumming on a very cheap guitar (which he proudly broadcasts as a $10 purchase), then delivers an original number based on the premise that a woman cannot make a date as a result of having been abducted by aliens. With each verse, Ollie expands further and further into the ridiculous, eliciting the hysterical laughter of the sleep-deprived. After he finishes, one of the circle-sitters declares, “I’m going to join the pussies,” to which his neighbor replies, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” The stubbornly wakeful camper relates a story about a friend of his. “She woke up at 6:00 a.m. every morning,” he said. “I asked her about it once, and she said, ‘I’m going to spend enough time underground.’ She died the next summer.” “That’s cool,” an alternative-looking young woman says. I am still clinging close to the fire, not yet warm enough to face the walk down the hill to my tent. Ollie gives me two wool blankets, then tells me his volunteer crew assignment – the equivalent of an address here at Falcon Ridge. “You can keep them all weekend,” he said. “Just return them to me before you leave on Sunday.” Most campers are asleep now, but as I walk down the hill, I notice a drum circle still going.

“That was the only time I ever feared for my life. There was so much lightning and thunderstorms all night long. People were sliding down the hill on tarps like a waterslide, and of course the music kept going on. I went back next year and they were selling T-shirts with little lightning bolts on them that said “I survived.”

The Hill

Common to many festival or ritual experiences across all cultures is an element of completely restructuring time, abandoning quotidian temporal markers in favor of different markers – or no markers at all. Alejandro Falassi refers to this phenomenon in the title of his oft-cited volume on festivals, Time Out of Time. From my own life experience growing up in Montana, I am reminded of the practice of vision quests among many Native American Nations, in which young men leave the comforts of everyday life (including food, water, and sleep) and go alone into uninhabited country to realize spiritual truth.

Late night music on the hill at Falcon Ridge is not nearly as spartan a proposition as a vision quest, yet the unpredictability of camping, the culture of sleep deprivation, and the single-minded pursuit of music and musical communion create a similarly spiritual, otherworldly frame. If there is a moment when you are most aware that you are at Falcon Ridge and NOT in the real world, it is 4:00 a.m. on the hill.

“The hill” is not an officially designated piece of the Falcon Ridge geography. As Jake Jacobson (concert presenter at Franklin’s Circle of Friends Coffeehouse and twelve-year Falcon Ridge attendee) remembers, only a few tents were even staked there during the festival’s initial years at Long Hill Farm. But the festival grew, and more campers began creeping up from “the flats” adjacent to the stages onto the terrain uphill.

What put the hill on the map (literally – it now appears on the map in the festival program), however, weren’t individual tents, but canopies that accommodated entire communities of campers, hosting song circles and cookouts, and functioning as gathering places for watching the mainstage music and socializing.

The Big Orange Tarp

“The first time I heard his new CD, I had to listen to it five times in a row. I’m telling you, at least three of those songs are hits.”

One of the first such mega-tents to sponsor late-night music was the Big Orange Tarp (or, as regulars call it, the BOT), which appears every year in the same spot on the left side of the hill. Founded in the early nineties by Alan Rowoth, who also initiated folkmusic.org and the folk music list, the first e-newsletter for the folk music community, the BOT began as a means of showcasing emerging talent at several singer-songwriter events: Falcon Ridge, the Rocky Mountain Folk Festival, and the Folk Alliance Conferences.²⁵

Over a decade after its inception, the BOT remains a central feature of the late night music scene on the hill. In both 2004 and 2005, music at the BOT ran Thursday through Sunday, beginning each night after the mainstage (between midnight and one o’clock) and continuing until four in the morning on Friday and Saturday. Alan Rowoth and Scott Moore (a house concert presenter and central figure in the DC-based organization Focus Music) presided over the circle of chairs gathered beneath the namesake orange tarp, moving from the prestigious invitation-only showcases “early” in the night to the open circle just a couple hours before sunrise.

Friday and Saturday nights at about one o’clock were the most crowded moments at the BOT 2005, with onlookers backed up in concentric circles moving out from the chairs and stretching beyond the shelter of the tarp. Most of the ten or so “first round” performers were already tuned up and seated in their chairs by the time the mainstage performances finished, having been invited by Alan when they arrived at the festival - or perhaps even earlier by email.

Traditionally reserved for artists performing as part of the Friday afternoon emerging artist showcase on the mainstage, the coveted first round slots provide a good opportunity for rising stars to get heard. With only a lantern casting light over the performance, it is difficult to see any faces other than those of the musicians, but those playing can only assume that several people lurking in the darkness book venues, host radio shows, or perhaps even have connections with booking agencies or independent labels like Signature Sounds or Waterbug.

Scott Moore was clearly aware of this dynamic when he announced each performer at the BOT 2005, giving a quick biographical plug that included recent career highlights. The floor belonged to each artist for one song at a time, progressing around the circle until each first rounder had played twice. After playing their second song, each first round performer disappeared back into the darkness to pack up their guitar and move on to another song circle (or perhaps go to bed), and a ready and waiting second rounder, alerted by Alan or Scott, quietly took his or her place.

The second round, while not as exclusive as the first, was still a coveted position. The circle was populated this time with one or two more mainstage showcase performers as well as “friends of the BOT,” with whom Scott and Alan were familiar. The crowd had thinned out a bit, but the format was the same, and those present continued to treat the occasion with the seriousness of a performance: audience members spoke to one another only in low whispers and some performers were visibly nervous. When the second rounders left their places, however, their chairs were not immediately filled, and there was a sense of slow exodus. By the time Alan announced the open third round and called on any performers who were still awake, most of the presenters and BOT “audience” had left, and the coveted showcase became more of a campfire song swap.

The third round is usually a mix of good friends who stay up to share increasingly moving or hilarious songs, dogged wannabe first and second rounders hoping to get an “in,” and performers who never expect, or hope, to move from the campfire to the stage. The songs definitely get a little more “out there,” as exhaustion sets in and the delirium of sleep deprivation (affecting most) becomes difficult to distinguish from the delirium of excessive alcohol consumption (affecting a few). Those still awake for this round are generally very proud of it and wear their ability to stay up as a badge of honor. Comments such as “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” and “going to bed already?” are frequent and animated, as well as a few well-developed philosophical statements on the importance of living life to the fullest and refusing to succumb to soul-deadening middle-class normalcy.

Music at the BOT

“This is one I won’t do on the mainstage.”

The Music at the BOT underscores the nature of Falcon Ridge as an ideologically-based musical community, rather than a community defined by shared repertoire, genre, or group participation. Most songs performed at the showcase are presented by their writers, who accompany themselves on guitar. (One or two banjos or mandolins make an appearance, and some performers have even been known to haul a keyboard up the hill.) Many, if not all, audience members are hearing the song for the first time, and if anyone joins in, it is another respected professional performer whose impromptu harmonizing is considered an asset and a compliment.

First and second rounders aim to present themselves in the best possible light, playing their strongest songs and showcasing their performance ability. Most understand that another important element of positive reception in this community relies on conveying a portion of one’s identity, convincing the audience that songs come from an authentic and unique place. Bringing in unusual musical influences or otherwise creating contrast is a terrific way for a performer to validate themselves in the eyes of the community, provided the music is clearly connected to the person making it. Thus, performing oneself as a community member has more to do with foregrounding the shared values of the folk music ideal than with highlighting musical similarities between oneself and others in the community. The introduction to a song can often be as important, or more important, than the song itself.

Mike Morris, a showcase performer attending his first FRFF, was one of the first round performers at the BOT on Thursday night. He began by openly telling the circle that he had had difficulty connecting with his military father. “Maybe I should go to one of his retired officer’s meetings and he should come to Falcon Ridge,” Morris joked in introducing the song “Fat America,” a critique of commercial culture and media-driven violence. Though Mike was relatively unknown at the BOT, he gained immediate acceptance by introducing his song in a way that demonstrated his personal connection to both his music and to the festival community.

By the middle of the night on Saturday, the tension of first impressions had clearly diffused. Showcase performer Kellie Lynn Knott presented a new song co-written with five campmates, plopping down a paper plate with lyrics before breaking into “F**king at Falcon Ridge up on the Hill.” Lines such as “We don’t know their names, but we caught it all on film” and “Maybe it’s late tonight, but are you on the pill?” drew knowing laughter from those present, who signaled their awareness of the festival “hookup” scene, and applauded Knott for her blunt, humorous, hyperbolic portrayal. When another showcase performer followed Knott with an instrumental, BOT regular and famed folk envelope-pusher Eric Schwartz asked “Can we imagine it’s about f**king?” “Yes, I encourage it,” the soft spoken player-of-sensitive-guitar-instrumentals replied. “It’s called ‘Oregon,’ so you’ll have to imagine you’re in Oregon.”

A few moments later, Schwartz regaled the crowd with one of his best-known songs (released as a music video online), “Keep Your Jesus Off My Penis,” (a critique of “moral” legislation by President Bush and the Christian Right) to which many sang along. A few of the BOT listeners, particularly showcase performers who were attending the festival for the first time, had not heard the song before, though, and Schwartz drew particularly enthusiastic applause for the line “Who the f**k are you to turn your views into my laws?” “This is a song that is a lot more fun with a sign language interpreter,” Schwartz cracked.

Other Showcases: The Front Porch and The Budgiedome

Midnight Friday. Alan Rowoth and Scott Moore at the BOT have squeezed me in for a pre-first-round song. My producer Russell Wolff joins me on acoustic guitar and harmony vocals, and we perform one of my originals for the crowd assembled to hear first-round showcasers. When we are finished, the initial round begins immediately, and we struggle to quietly pack up our guitars and make a graceful exit to the Budgiedome, where Russell is scheduled for an early set. When we get there, we immediately go from silence to socializing: everyone knows him there. Several are diehard “Früheads” who know Russell as a former opener for the now defunct Moxy Früvous. When his set begins, he references these regulars from the stage, mostly not by name, but by an identifying feature. “Bald Chick” is proud of her strikingly unique appearance. We play seven songs together – a highly impromptu set with snatches of pop covers and silly songs from Russell’s old albums that he seldom plays anymore. I try to keep up with the harmony vocals. Though the tone seems light, Russell gives a very serious thank you to the Falcon Ridge community for being a place he can come back to, where he can talk to people after having gone through rough times. “Most of you know the story of how I almost died from a throat infection,” he says. “I’ll spare you the gory details right now.”

For many emerging singer-songwriters who come to FRFF to advance their careers, the BOT is the destination on the hill. However, as an invitation-only showcase (for the first two rounds), it has its detractors, most of whom feel it is too exclusive, too serious, or simply not “the only game in town.” Some of these critics commented to me that the BOT had become increasingly exclusive and business-like since its more campfire-like inception, and complained, “This is a festival – not [the] Folk Alliance [Conference].” Neale Eckstein, house concert presenter and regular BOT attendee, counters this assertion that the circle is elitist. "An invitation to play at the BOT carries some weight. The mixture of well-established and rising stars are what draws the large audience, and they expect a level of quality. Performers want to play in Alan's circle because they are assured of a respectful listening audience, a good number of whom are in a position to give bookings or radio play. Many of the performers Laurie (Laba) and I have booked for our series are people I first heard at the BOT. I also know Alan is trying to make the trip worthwhile for Emerging Artist Showcase performers who've traveled here to perform only two songs on the mainstage. The BOT gives them valuable additional exposure.”

For those looking for slightly looser, invitation-based showcases, the BOT’s neighbor to the right, the Front Porch, runs simultaneously, featuring a slightly larger oval of chairs, a bit more convivial atmosphere (you could hear a guitar drop, but not a pin), and a more easily accessible performance space. Unlike the BOT, the Front Porch was not initiated with the specific purpose of showcasing music. In fact, co-founder Renette Hackett told me, the Porch’s beginning was more serendipity than intention – an accidental meeting of the Hackett and Szlachta families at the 1988 Philadelphia Folk Festival. Over time, the group of people comprising what is now the Front Porch expanded beyond these two families, but the group wasn’t given the moniker The Front Porch until 1996, and wasn’t part of Falcon Ridge until 1998. Though many Front Porch regulars are non-musicians or amateur players, singer-songwriter Lisabeth Weber, her bass player Maggie Marshall, and Maggie’s husband Jimmy have been very active attendees since the mid-nineties, and help to facilitate late night music at the Porch. The music here runs even longer than the BOT – those up late enough to hear it are often treated to a victory yell by Front Porch “survivors” who witness the sunrise. Late Saturday night at the 2005 festival, Weber led a Front Porch tradition: a group performance of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” during which a pair of concert crash cymbals made a very loud appearance in the chorus. Sunday morning at 6:20, a piper played Amazing Grace on the hill, and a large crowd at the Front Porch cheered, never having gone to sleep.

A significant portion of Weber’s writing is political (as are the buttons she makes and sells in the Performer Merchandise Sales Tent), and both political and humorous songwriters abound at the Front Porch. Politically liberal songs are well-received at virtually every performance space on the festival grounds, from the mainstage to the chair outside the staff toilet, though certain environments expect more musicality than others. While these leftist songs certainly have a leg up at the BOT, they are so well-received at the Front Porch that their writers can get away with hastily-penned compositions and admittedly poor musicianship if necessary, as long as they drive the point home. I have never heard a Republican-sympathetic song performed on the festival grounds.

One of the most popular Front Porch performers is Chris Chandler, a performance poet with a flair for the bizarre, a facility with literary and political reference, and a physically dramatic style. Chandler, whose festival itinerary includes a fifteen-minute mainstage slot, was a hit at the BOT as well. He brought his band, keyboard player David Roe and trumpet player Frankie Hernandez, along with him on the late night campfire circuit. The trio drew both uproarious applause and laughter with such convictions as “the antichrist is responsible for non-alcoholic beer,” and “the fruit loops bird is a homosexual” (a poke at the paranoia of the right-wing morality police). Chandler’s performances broke from the usual sound texture of the campfires. He performed his lead vocals mostly as spoken word, with Roe and Hernandez riffing and singing in the background. Occasionally, the group brought in snippets of other songs as references, as they did in one wildly popular piece that included several well-known peace songs from the folk revival era.

On the other side of the BOT, at the far left side of the hill, stands the Budgiedome, one of the largest canopies, and a hybrid fan-camp/showcase tent. Unlike the BOT and the Front Porch, the Budgiedome is set up in typical concert fashion with rows of chairs facing a stage area (a well-lighted rectangle of grass). Instead of running song circles, the Budgiedome features six to eight song sets by a handful of artists each night, often bringing in acts that are well known among folk fans. The Budgiedome’s founders, Steve and Lori Martin, first set up at FRFF 1999 as Camp Früvous, a gathering place for diehard supporters of Toronto-based folk/rock band Moxy Früvous. The Budgiedome made its debut the following year, after “a few test runs in our back yard.” Russell Wolff, a frequent opening act for Moxy Früvous, invited performers Christina Abbott, Christopher Williams, Kevin So, Butch Ross, and Adam Brodsky for the inaugural weekend. (Among followers of the national folk scene, Williams and So are now familiar names, while Abbott, Brodsky, and Ross are well-known regional performers.)

Though Gordon Nash has replaced Wolff as the booking coordinator, Wolff still performs each year, and the Budgiedome continues to draw considerable talent. Moxy Früvous has been “on hiatus” since February of 2001, but their fans seem no less eager to gather at FRFF. The crowd at the Budgiedome still consists primarily of proud “Früheads.” Not surprisingly, given the nature of the former band’s material, cleverly humorous or slightly oddball performers get the best response at the Budgiedome, which has a much more alternative, even anti-establishment, feel than does the BOT. While flowing, natural fabrics abound at the Front Porch, and outdoor or casual wear is the norm at the BOT, the younger Budgiedome crowd is more likely to sport a few piercings, studs, and shaved heads. (The unforgiving nighttime chill of the Berkshires, however, proves to be the great equalizer, as the fashion statements of all three camps are buried under wool blankets and winter jackets.)

Beyond the Left Side of the Hill

“I forgot about all those other circles. I’ve gotten so into the BOT, I miss everything else. They’re probably more fun.”

The BOT, The Front Porch, and the Budgiedome are far from the only showcases at FRFF. BOT host Alan Rowoth summed up the plethora of late night music in a parenthetical editorial on the Folk Music list in July of 2001:

Every year there's more music around the campgrounds at Falcon Ridge. Terry [Kitchen] and Joe [Giacoio]'s event is also the one thing I know about that's always happening down in the flats [The Night Owl Song Swap – see the following section on The Flats], which is key if you can't muster the energy to climb the hill. There's also LOTs of music up near the BOT. At the BOT we go all night long and start each Friday and Saturday night with a little artist showcase featuring some of the performers from the new artist showcase on Friday afternoon with a sprinkling of main stage performer drop ins, folktrainers, and other surprise guests. The first couple rounds of that are sure to be some of the hottest performers at the festival. We also make sure that everyone who wants to gets to play, but we keep the circle small and run people in and out of it so that I don't freeze a couple of dozen performers in my area, but instead give them all the opportunity to get around to the other camps and play.

The camp directly next to ours on the ridge (towards the tree) also has some fabulous stuff going on and they do a lot of ensemble jamming. The other direction around our cul de sac takes you to the Burlington VT camping group and they always have good music there too. There's a lot of stuff close by our area. Camp Dar is just down the hill from us and they often have music. further up along the ridge road are several other music camps including The Baltimore Songwriters Group, Camp Hoboken, and Jack Hardy's camp. There's so much good music around, about the only mistake you could make would be to go to bed early.²⁶

Another notable camp, now in existence for half a decade, is Tribes Hill, which identifies itself on its website as: “a nonprofit organization uniting musicians of the lower Hudson Valley region and their patrons in support of a music community that aspires to common goals and beliefs. It is a conceptual gathering place for people of all races, politics, and faiths coming together to explore and celebrate the human experience through song.” A favorite of several established performers as well as established artists, Tribes Hill, like the Front Porch, is known as a less competitive alternative to the BOT.

Further Beyond the Left Side of the Hill

“Oh no. Don’t grow up.”

Even the BOT, the Front Porch, the Budgiedome, Tribes Hill, and the expanse of showcases mentioned by Alan Rowoth take up only a fraction of the “long hill” the farm is named after. There are many other non-showcase sites where FRFF attendees share music far into the wee hours. Walking towards the right side of the hill after the mainstage has finished, one can see several small canopies in action. At first, they are mostly small song circles – friendly gatherings of songwriters or amateur musicians. As one moves further left, the crowd gets progressively younger, and drum circles begin to appear. By the time one reaches the far right, gatherings seem mostly social, with only sporadic music punctuating the conversation. Many of these are held in large tents, in the open air, or alongside cars parked next to the road.

In addition to late night music, the hill also plays host to several ardent fan gatherings, the best established of which is undoubtedly Camp Dar. Setting up every year halfway up the left side of the hill, Dar Williams fans from all over the country form a physically-manifest version of the famed Dar-list. This email list, like Alan Rowoth’s folk music list, was one of the first virtual communities to gather a large online fan base around the contemporary singer-songwriter genre. Other fan camps include the George Fox Pavilion (home base for fans of The Nields and the Kennedys), Camp 9 (for fans of We’re about 9), and Happytown, the Buddhist prayer flag-bedecked canopy erected by fans of Tracy Grammer and her late partner Dave Carter.

Late Nights on the Hill

1:00 a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning. I am napping in Laini Sporbert’s tent up near the BOT, until my manager Neale Eckstein wakes me up for one last chance at the late-night music scene. “It’s showtime,” he says, a little ironically. I am somewhat dazed, but Neale manages to get me and my guitar over to the Front Porch. When we show up, there are quite a few musicians in the circle, but not many people watching yet. There is still a lot of noise and talking, tuning, in between songs. Lisabeth Weber’s emcee style bears greater resemblance to introductions at a casual barbeque than to those at a showcase. “Hey everybody, this is Claudia,” she belts out. “She’s a Falcon Ridge virgin.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

If I were to follow my own formatting conventions, the heading “Late Nights on the Hill” should indicate a physical locale at FRFF. Indeed, it is a space, but not a space sanctioned in any official way by the festival organizers. Yet for many, late nights on the hill are the ritual center of FRFF, the source of its strong sense of community, the element that most clearly establishes the annual event as “time out of time.” Throughout the year, participants in this late-night music scene (which reconvenes at regional and national Folk Alliance Conferences as well as a few other festivals such as Kerrville and Rocky Mountain) recall one-of-a-kind moments when they first heard a song performed or were moved to tears by a sentiment of love, loss, or longing shared among members of the circle. As Chris Chandler said when beginning one of his performances, “I’ve been doing fifteen or twenty years of this … I see us gathered here, and I say ‘where would I rather be?’”

It is late at night on the hill when dreams – the dreams of those for whom FRFF is most meaningful – take center stage. For aspiring musicians, this is a shot at “making it.” Voices exhausted by the late hour, fingers barely able to move over the necks of their guitars in the frigid air, they wait several minutes, often hours, to pour their hearts into one five-minute song. For presenters and other listeners, this is a chance to discover a truly inspiring artist for the first time, spend time with old friends (both musicians and fellow listeners), and believe for a moment that life is about seeking out beauty, that there is more to living than just the routine of work and household chores.

Late night music is a source of both individual pride and community spirit among those who participate as either musicians or audience members, stemming from the shared experience of staying up late, enduring fatigue, cold temperatures, and hunger in order to experience music together. Those still awake at three in the morning (particularly the amazingly well-represented middle-aged contingent) rejoice in not being spiritually dead, not having lost their sense of adventure and enthusiasm for life. One gets the sense that the rest of the world is missing out, that folkies might be crazy, but at least they haven’t completely succumbed to a McDonalds/minivan/Nintendo nation. Those who stay awake are proud to be “sucking the marrow out of life,” and reiterate time and again that this is what is worth living for. “I figure I can sleep at work,” one of the regular BOT listeners commented.

“It’s grueling, but you know, we’re here now, and you’ve got to be as present as you can for it,” Alan Rowoth told me on Friday. He had stayed awake until four in the morning the night before, breaking down the song circle set-up after the music was done. “I’m not as young as I used to be,” Rowoth said. “Setting up really takes it out of me.”

The element of sacrifice evident in Rowoth’s comments generates not only pride, but also a strong sense of community. Shared hardship forces people to become closer, and everyday boundaries collapse to allow spiritual communion. This is particularly true for the small group that actually camps in the area surrounding the BOT. “Now it’s such a community up here,” concert presenter Laini Sporbert told me, “that I would come even if there wasn’t music.”

Ironically (from the scholarly standpoint, though not so much from the standpoint of community members), one of the strongest centers of community is also one of the least regionally grounded. The Budgiedome hosts are from suburban Philadelphia, and they also pitch their canopy at Susquehanna Music and Arts Festival. Alan lives in nearby Syracuse, but Front Porch mainstay Lisabeth Weber is based in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and the performers featured at both showcases hail from all over the country, as do many of the presenters and other interested audience members who come to listen. The Big Orange Tarp appears not only at FRFF, but also at the Rocky Mountain Folk Festival in Colorado, and the annual Folk Alliance conference, which is hosted by different cities each year. Tribes Hill also makes the rounds of several festivals.

For many of the people who participate in late night music on the hill, FRFF is a family reunion of sorts, one of the few times when their “state of mind” community, spread throughout the US and Canada, gathers in one place.

The Flats

“This is it. We’re home.”

At the foot of the hill and to the right of the festival stages are the flats: volunteer camping and general camping for those who want easy access to the stages and (relative) peace and quiet for sleeping at night. The area closest to the stage is reserved for volunteers, while general campers (paying festival attendees) have a bit longer hike from their campsites to the programmed entertainment. Filling up quickly beginning Wednesday, the flats are fully populated by Friday night, with tents, campers, and cars lined up next to one another in neatly arranged rows betweens roads. Characterized predominantly by vehicles parked next to tents and a few small, private, social canopies, the flats also have a few named canopies, such as The Last Chance Cafe. I camped with a small group of volunteers from the Circle of Friends Coffeehouse in Franklin, MA, and we hung a banner on a small canopy that featured the coffeehouse name and logo. On the flats, however, named locations are primarily social destinations, not showcases, since late-night music after the mainstage is prohibited in the “quiet camping” area.

The flats are not completely devoid of the song circles and fan camps that characterize the hill, however. Northeast-based singer-songwriters Terry Kitchen and Joe Giacoio host the Night Owl Song Swap, which unlike the BOT, Front Porch, and Budgiedome, is listed in the official festival program and marked on the map of the festival grounds.²⁷ As the program proclaims, “The Night Owl Song Swap takes place by the horse barn Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from midnight ‘til whenever. All are invited to come share a song, story, poem or just listen.” Kitchen, who has been hosting the event for thirteen years, describes the circle as “friendly” and “low key” in a 2001 post to the Folk Music list, differentiating it from the more exclusive, higher-stakes setting at top-of-the hill showcases. Both the Night Owl Song Swap and the Night Owl Hoot, the two after-hours events officially sanctioned by the festival, predate even the Big Orange Tarp. As Festival Director Anne Saunders explained, these official events were actually intended to encourage the spread of unofficial late night music. “We started these as a way of seeding the campgrounds,” she told me. “It seems like it worked and we don't even need to keep our fest organized ones but we do, sort of grandfathered in.”

The flats are also home to Camp Edhead (alternatively known as the Pirates Patch or Lower Camp Früvous), founded by fans of Eddie From Ohio, a folk band that has appeared at FRFF for seven consecutive years. A few other small named campsites identify themselves with flags and banners. Nonetheless, the flats function primarily as a bastion of relative sanity, basking as much in their normality as the late night uphill song circles do in their abnormality. Many of the campers on the flats take pride in making their camps “home,” adding various trappings of suburbia: lawn chairs, picnic tables, grills, pink flamingos, gnomes. (I even watched one man mow his “lawn.”)

Many FRFF attendees, myself included, camp in the flats, but hang out on the hill at night for as long as possible. Even within the “time out of time” festival experience, we are able to manage our level of “out-ness,” taking in our dose of heightened ritual timespace, then coming back down to the flats to sleep, eat, rest, and engage in behaviors that are more recognizable as normal life. “I camped on the hill a couple of years, up near the BOT,” Jake Jacobson from Circle of Friends told me. “Sleeping on the hill is no fun. I’d rather camp in the quiet area and then wander around at night.”

With the majority of the late-night music scene congregating on the hill, the music heard in the flats is primarily broadcast through radios: as people return to their camps during the day, some play CDs and others broadcast the “Falcon Ridge Radio” – a Low Power FM signal that allows those on the flats to listen to the mainstage sets.

CHAPTER 2: The Midway: Volunteers, Vendors, and Sidestages

It is 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, my first day “on the job” as a member of the Performer Liason Crew. My fellow crew members, most of whom know each other from the Philadelphia Folk Festival, have done this many times before and are signing up for shifts on a spreadsheet. Unsure of the protocol, I ask crew chief Pete Urbatis how many shifts I should sign up for. “Just so long as all the boxes are filled,” he replies. “We’re very casual here.” Performer Cadence Carroll walks in and asks “Am I too early?” quickly discerning that we don’t seem to have any supplies out, let alone any fully prepared performer access badges. “No coffee, no check-in,” Pete replies, jokingly, then says “no, we don’t have anything.” Check-in, which is technically at nine or ten (stories differ), won’t actually start until twelve thirty, when we finally begin cutting badges and hastily inserting them into their plastic casing. The reason? “My printer is having a conniption fit,” Artistic Director Anne Saunders declares.

“I just assume everybody here knows everybody.” – Reba Heyman

The central vein of the official festival space is the midway, a wide dirt road that accommodates several lanes of foot traffic as well as the golf carts used by volunteer crews engaged in everything from escorting performers to delivering ice. This thoroughfare runs from the Mainstage and Volunteer Food Tent on the left, past the food and craft vendors, to the Kids Tent (Family Stage), and Workshop Stage, stopping just before the Dance Tent on the far right. The center of activity for paying festival attendees, the midway is also home base for volunteers. Most volunteer crew assignments place volunteers in T-shirt sales, Performer Merchandise Sales (PMS), Security, Information, Grounds, or the Kitchen, all of which are located along the midway. All volunteers stampede the Volunteer Food Tent three times a day for free staff meals.

Walking down the midway at the height of the festival, it’s easy to spot the markers of community membership. Falcon Ridge Staff T-shirts are ubiquitous, and many of their wearers carry tote bags from various festivals, folk clubs, Folk Alliance conferences, and organic food co-ops. Liberal or anti-Bush buttons and T-shirts are a common sight as well. More than one person sports a button made by festival performer Lisabeth Weber that proclaims “Feeling Blue? Think 2008.” When cars drive through to camp at the beginning of the festival, they carry familiar markers as well. We drove in right after a van with a kayak on top, a bike rack on the back, and a bumper sticker from Boston’s WUMB, the nation’s only 24-hour folk music station.

Also easy to spot are the markers that distinguish community members from one another. Though every volunteer wears a staff T-shirt, they are not all the same. Longtime crew members often wear T-shirts from past years, which function as a status symbol among the volunteer community.²⁸ On Wednesday night of FRFF 2005, I was chatting about this with the “Godparents of folk,” Vic and Reba Heyman (two sprightly senior citizen folk music patrons from the Washington, DC area who have been to every FRFF) and their friend Brenda, a massage therapist who regularly volunteers. “I think I’ve got the whole collection in my tent,” Brenda said, “I didn’t pack any other shirts. I’m always on duty, and I’m not wearing one shirt for four days straight.” “That’s good,” Reba said. “It shows you’re not a newbie.” Backstage access, in the form of a lanyard worn around the neck, also functions as a visible marker.

Volunteering

“It’s great to be involved in all the behind-the-scenes stuff.”

At the beginning of the day, the Midway belongs mostly to volunteers, some of whom have early shifts, and others of whom simply want to get a good spot in line for the staff showers or the food tent, which begins serving breakfast at eight o’clock. On Friday morning at seven, there was already a line at the staff showers and someone began singing “how many years …” a la Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” eliciting a few groggy laughs.

Two other staff members were having a serious business discussion about T-shirt sales. “They sold like $5,000 worth of merchandise just yesterday,” one of the staff members exclaimed. “The tie dyes are gone, the women’s tanks are gone – every year we tell them, I don’t know why. I mean, they don’t consult with us.” “They’re probably worried about laying out inventory that won’t be sold,” the other volunteer proposed.

Many of the staff members at FRFF have a great deal of experience, and accompanying expertise (or perceived expertise). Clashes of opinion are not uncommon, and volunteers like those outside the staff shower certainly turn a critical eye to the proceedings. This is another manifestation of the folk music ideal and its encouragement of uninhibited individual expression. Most volunteers take pride in their contributions and are unafraid to voice opinions about how things should be done, even if their views conflict with those of their crew chiefs. I talked to several volunteers who had done similar jobs at other festivals, and most embraced their “veteran” status and the comparative perspective they were able to offer. Most of these volunteers with experience at multiple festival praised FRFF for its laid back attitude, community feel, and focus on the music and “social issues” rather than making money off party crowds. “I’ll never volunteer at Philly [Philadelphia Folk Festival] again,” one volunteer told me. “They’re f**king rude. After twenty-five years of volunteering there, they told me I could sleep in the parking lot.”

Some of the regular Falcon Ridge staff members have become well-known community icons. “Have you heard about the Ice Man?” Performer Liason crew chief Pete Urbaitis asked me on Friday. “He was this man who used to run the ice concession and drove through the campground with a megaphone going “ice” in a low voice, usually at seven a.m. after a late night.” Though Ice Man was present at FRFF 2005 only in community memory, Lost and Found Guy (Ben Zeman) - who pinned lost items to his T-shirt and wore them everywhere he went - was there for his seventh year, joined on the volunteer crew by his wife and mother.

Other volunteers are familiar because of their year-round roles in the folk community. Several are involved in some way with a folk venue: booking shows, promoting them, or running sound. Others host radio programs. Quite a few are musicians. At a festival like FRFF, where emerging songwriters try to get noticed and build their careers, volunteers with influence don’t necessarily want to advertise that fact. “I try to keep a low profile here,” one promoter/volunteer told me. “It’s better here than at Folk Alliance. There it’s on your badge (the label “venue”) like a target.”

The Volunteer Open Mic

“This is an ugly song: three chords of pain and bitterness. I’ve just got five minutes, so I’ll give you the abridged version.”

While the festival begins on Friday for most of the paying attendees, many volunteers arrive Wednesday to set up camp before their Thursday shifts. For the past three years, Vic and Reba Heyman have hosted the volunteer open mic Wednesday night at the Volunteer Food Tent, complete with a sound system and an audience that can easily top one hundred. The level of professionalism varies widely. In 2004, I saw Waterbug recording artist Jonathan Byrd (a full-time touring musician) perform at this event. In 2005, one of the performers forgot all the words to her song and nearly had a nervous breakdown on stage. Another act featured two instrumentalists who “sat in” with one another and never quite got in sync. Some of the audience seemed uncomfortably aware of the warring time feels, while a fair number of others were blissfully oblivious, hooting and hollering at the end of the performance. Though singer-songwriters with guitars dominated, as they do at all FRFF events, the 2005 open mic also featured a few poets.

The most popular acts were those that specifically referenced FRFF. Several audience members sang along with a song performed and written by a member of the kitchen crew famous for addressing the audience as “my fellow workers” each year. “When it rains at Falcon Ridge, the food tent is full,” My Fellow Worker sang in a husky voice. “When it snows at Falcon Ridge, you have stayed too long.” Another well-known performer was Dave Brennan, the son of Long Hill Farm owner Robert Brennan. “This may be the last Falcon Ridge here,” he said, with visible regret. “You’ve been a great crowd, and on behalf of myself and my family, we’ve really enjoyed having you here.” The original song Brennan performed, “Born on the Land of Long Hill Farm,” recorded his heartfelt attachment to both the farm and the festival. “Peace, Love, Friendship and Freedom upon the land, everyone stand hand in hand and share the Peace, Love, Friendship and Freedom born upon this land, born upon the land of Long Hill Farm,” Brennan sang.²⁹

Thursday Music Business Workshops

I am about to perform in front of the largest group of people who will hear me all weekend, and I am almost certain to look like an idiot. I am one of six to seven hundred people at Vance Gilbert’s Performance Skills Critique at the Family Stage tent, and I have volunteered myself as an example. There are no casual fans here: they won’t arrive until tomorrow. This audience is mostly made up of volunteers, many of whom are promoters, and some of whom just want a good laugh. I am hoping to convince the promoters that I am the sort of unshakeable, confident performer they would want to hire. I won’t have to work hard to satisfy the people who are there to laugh. Vance will undoubtedly make several good-natured jokes at my expense.

“Ever wondered why people don’t dance to folk music? Good luck finding the beat. You go to see a singer-songwriter and they are always playing in Eastern Standard Emotional Time. Tap your foot people, give us a “one” to land on.” – Vance Gilbert

Thursday’s events, though more formal than the volunteer open mic, also cater to an inner circle of folkies, mostly volunteers. A relatively recent addition to the FRFF schedule, the Thursday programming consists of two stages of music business workshops during the day and dancing throughout the afternoon and evening in the dance tent. In 2005, the mainstage performances didn’t begin until six thirty Thursday night. “I guess they figure only the crazy people are here this early, so they put the business stuff on Thursday,” Jake Jacobson surmised. The workshops, with titles ranging from “Touring with Kids” to “Guitar Care Primer” to “The Artist/Venue Relationship,” were lighthearted, well-attended affairs, featuring panels drawn from the line-up of FRFF musicians and festival VIPs. At the Guitar Care Primer, veteran guitarists and panelists Pete Kennedy and Eric Lowen swapped road horror stories. “You really have to understand the technical end,” Kennedy told the audience, “particularly in the folk world, where you’ve got the sound guy who’s usually a park ranger walking around with one of those poles with a nail on it.”