Generations

Day 17 - June 7

All-star lineup on Main Stage Saturday night...

Billy Jonas, who used to be half of a quirky duo called The Billys, which sprung from one of those magical chance meetings at a Kerrville music circle. Eliza Gilkyson, then Jimmy LaFave, then Albert & Gage to close the set.

Jonas has his own act now, with a guitar player named Sherman and a girl singer named Ashley. He has traveled to many parts of the planet. His show is still big on crowd participation, and he’s still making percussion instruments out of recycled materials and putting them to brilliant use.

For the past decade or so, I’ve admired Eliza Gilkyson’s fearlessness. She went through some life changes and came out the other side fierce and outspoken. As if she reached an age and a point in her career where she couldn’t be silenced, because she didn’t have that much left to lose. So it set me back some when Eliza introduced a song that she said she wrote to quell her middle-of-the-night worries, and started listing all the things she worried about. It bore an uncanny resemblance to MY list of worries. Who knew?

How does that saying go? Courage isn’t an absence of fear; it’s the will to keep going in spite of it.

Jimmy LaFave rocked. Halfway through his set he brought Christine Albert on stage to sing a couple songs with him. What a cool idea, I thought: they both have sort of smoky voices; they’ll sound good together. Then he called out David Amram, who wasn’t on the program until Sunday night, but had arrived and was hanging out backstage. Amram walked on with a backpack, dropped it alongside his mic stand and started putting flutes together.

“We’re not hitchhiking to Lubbock, David, It’s just one song,” Jimmy laughed. And added, “He’s the only guy who can make me look young.”

I thought about that and realized something. Every performer on this night’s program is familiar to me; they’re people I’ve been following and listening to for years. But they aren’t the ones I think of as “the old guard.” Not the generation of Peter Yarrow, Tom Paxton, Carolyn Hester, and yes, David Amram. We’ve had some of those on other nights. But the people on stage this Day 17 were rising stars, fresh new voices, when I got to know them. Jimmy LaFave was a New Folk contestant. Eliza Gilkyson was once better known as the daughter of a songwriter. I remember the first time I saw Christine Albert hosting a Ballad Tree session, long before she partnered up with Chris Gage; before she gave birth to a son who is now a man with his own musical career.

“I worry about what kind of world we’re leaving for our grandchildren,” Eliza said during her set. Grandchildren. Yes, we have some of those in our folk community. In the three weeks we’ve been camped here, two young women who grew up as Kerr-kids bore babies of their own. Not here on the ranch -- to the best of my knowledge, we haven’t yet had an on-site birth at the Folk Festival. But a couple of moms have come close. And quite a few younger Kerrverts are pushing strollers and wagons occupied by kids born in the past year or two.

If the memorial tributes to Rod Kennedy and all our other recently departed friends haven’t given me a sense of time passing, tonight’s concert sure does.

The Ballad Tree

Day 16 - June 6

Here’s a bittersweet memory...

The Ballad Tree rises from Chapel Hill, a majestic live oak whose spreading green canopy shades nearly half the hill’s flattish summit. It is older than Texas, older than the most venerable musician who ever played the Kerrville Folk Festival, older by far than the rustic wooden altar that nestles under its sheltering branches.

There are bells on the hill: a tuned pipe wind chime of monumental size, suspended from a strong oak limb. Across the way, a brush arbor shades several rows of plank benches.

From Hot Jams & Cold Showers, © 2000 Dyanne Fry Cortez

We still have Ballad Tree sessions at 3 o’clock on weekend afternoons, but the tree itself is long gone.

When my book rolled off the press in 2000, the big oak was already in trouble. A lightning strike in 1993 sheared off a massive side limb, exposing heartwood in the main trunk. When it came crashing down, the limb smashed the altar and a section of brush arbor. And the wind chime went tumbling.

Kerrverts saved the wind chime and built a new redwood altar. Tom Frost agreed to underwrite a restoration effort. A plan was made and a crew of volunteers, headed by Nancylee Kennedy, went to work to try and save what was left of the tree.

... and found themselves battling not only the injury, but also the disease known as oak wilt, which was spreading across the Hill Country. Kerr County was one of the hardest hit. Staff worked through the summer, dragging hoses up the hill to supply water and nutrients to the Ballad Tree. Ranch maintenance nursed it along for years, shifting song circles and church services to different parts of the hill to avoid trampling the root zone and give the tree some breathing space.

I’m not sure when they gave it up as a lost cause. But one day I climbed the hill and found nothing but a dead, grey stump where the Ballad Tree used to be.

It’s an impressive stump, to be sure. A couple of feet across, maybe 15 feet tall, chopped off just above the point where it started to divide and form a crown. On the left side I can see a stretch of white plaster where the big limb came off, where a tree surgeon tried to patch the trunk back together. The grove of smaller oaks on the downhill side of the altar, where they hung the wind chime after the lightning strike, isn’t looking too good either. Oak wilt is bad stuff, and drought has done its damage, too. What used to be the coolest, shadiest part of the campground, that zone along Sudden Creek that I called The Grove, is now called the Argon Forest, because those giant oaks, too, Are Gone.

On Chapel Hill, time has moved on. The ranch hosted a Sustainable Building Colloquium here in 2003. Participants built several interesting structures, including a small stage up here with a whimsical living roof held up by limbs of old trees. A new arbor has gradually taken shape, with wooden benches and smoothed-off sitting stumps. It looks nice, but to me it never feels as cool and shady as the old arbor did. I find it difficult to stay through a whole ballad tree session in the heat of the afternoon. Even the Sunday morning services can get awfully sweaty.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I don’t take heat as well as I used to. Maybe it really does get hotter than it used to: we've had several record-breaking summers in Texas this past decade. All that may be true, but I also suspect the old Ballad Tree to some extent made its own weather. Trees are great natural air conditioners, better than any shade structure humans can build. I think it gets hotter on this hill because that giant oak is no longer here.

There’s a new tree growing between the stage and the seating arbor. A chinkapin oak, planted several years ago. I came up for a ballad tree the first weekend of this festival, and noticed how all the singers stood under that tree and ignored the stage. Clearly, this oak is the new Ballad Tree. It’s already taller than the leftover stump of the old one, but it’s got a long way to go before it can change the weather on this hill.

It’s fun to wonder if people will still be playing and singing under that tree when it’s big enough to throw a major patch of shade.

Throwback Thursdays

A week ago, at the Thursday evening concert, Rex Foster and Mike Williams were on stage together for the space of a song. I wish I'd had the camera: if I had, I would have taken a picture and put it up next to this one:

Mike Williams (left) and Rex Foster at Kamp Cuisine, with Tamie Stewart in background.
From Hot Jams & Cold Showers. Photo by Jack Wellman

That was "then." As I didn't have the foresight to carry a camera last Thursday, I'll just have to say they don't look like that now.

Since I don't have a "now" picture of Mike and Rex, I'll share a throwback photo of Rex's daughter Rachel, with Mike Elwood's daughter Liana. I haven't spotted either of these gals at the festival this year, but I see them now and then. Like the guys in the above photo, they look quite different now!

Tipi girls making mud pies in the Meadow. From Hot Jams & Cold Showers.
Photo by Javier Cortez

Festival Style

A couple weeks ago, I was organizing clothes to take to Kerrville. It’s a process that requires some thought. I usually start several days before departure, allowing time to consider possibilities and combinations. And I get amused imagining what my mom — or any other non-Kerrvert — might think if she were to observe the process.

“Excuse me,” she might say, “I thought this was a campout?”

“This has nothing to do with camping!” our late, great photographer Ken Schmidt once said, in response to a similar question. I couldn’t quite agree with him, then or now. We sleep in tents, cook outside, socialize under portable awnings, and stargaze from canvas chairs at night. Of course we’re camping! But I can’t say we’re “roughing it.” I think that’s what Schmidty really meant.

Yes, the Folk Festival is a campout. It’s also an 18-day party. A party where we spend time with a great many people we care about, including some that we look up to and may want to impress. A place where we mourn the departed and celebrate weddings, birthdays and anniversaries. Kerrverts will dress for those sorts of things. Also — as I learned in 1985 — even if you’re not on the program, you never know when you’ll wind up performing on Main Stage. And I guess it goes without saying that you need to be prepared for a wide range of weather conditions, because the Hill Country is like that in May and June.

So I picked out my wardrobe. Three pairs of shorts (red, white and khaki), a pair of capris, and one pair of full-length jeans. Four T-shirts. A small assortment of tank tops and cool, gauzy shirts for the really hot days. Two button-up shirts with sleeves, to be worn alone or layered over other things for sun protection. Three dresses and a short denim skirt. We’re talking casual dresses here; no stockings or high heels, but I did throw in a shawl that goes with the black dress, in case I want to get fancy. For campfires on cool nights, the red-striped playera that I “adopted” from Javier’s closet many festivals ago. (It fits me better anyway, and has a kangaroo pocket where I can stash bassoon reeds.) Rain jacket, of course. A few bandannas. After getting all that lined up, I focused on picking out jewelry.

“JEWELRY?” says the hypothetical mom who's watching me pack. Well, yes. Didn’t I just point out that this is a party? Besides, my husband is a bead artist. How would it look if I went around like a plain-jane not wearing any ornaments? After some winnowing, I settled on three necklaces and six sets of earrings. I avoid taking my most favorite earrings, because I have been known to lose them in the weeds and dirt.

Oh yes, footwear. My Teva sandals, which I’ll probably wear most of the time, but also sneakers and a few pairs of socks in case the feet need more protection. I have a pair of knee-high mud boots that have proved useful at past festivals, but decided not to bother taking them this year. I figured it couldn’t possibly rain that much.

.. which proves that even after three decades of experience, I can still miscalculate.

New Folk, Old Tradition

Day 11 - June 1

Yeah, I skipped posting yesterday. First there was the kids' concert, then a shower for my sweaty self, then the New Folk winners' concert. And then it was packing up for a drive to Austin and back to work for a few days, and finally the drive itself. When I got to the house, there was just time to schlep my few belongings inside and fall into bed.

But I'm glad I made time for the New Folk concert. It was really good this year.

New Folk is one tradition that hasn't changed much since the festival began. It's still a showcase for emerging songwriters. Finalists, selected from a slew of recorded entries, have always performed their competition songs on Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, with six winners chosen to play longer sets at the winners' concert the following week. I remember when there were 40 finalists instead of the current 32, but that was quite a few years ago. Also quite a few years back, the New Folk concerts moved from Main Stage to Threadgill Theater, which has a roof over the audience and the stage and is a much better place to be in the heat of a late-spring afternoon. (Not bad when it's raining, either.)

Judges of this contest have a hard job. I don't always agree with them, but this year they picked two of my favorites. Which is pretty good, considering I only heard 12 to 14 of the finalists. Taken together, this year's winners are an interesting crop. Four men, one woman and a gender-bending female duo; representing both coasts and a few places in between. Some look barely out of high school, some like wise grandparents. Some came across a little shy, even when they'd won; others stepped onto the stage like they owned it. They wrote and sang of all sorts of things: boats, trains, old coins, cluttered closets, whiskey, moonshine, romance, circuses, and being Irish. I will definitely want to get the live CD of this concert when I go back to Kerrville next week.

KERRmputer Bug

Day 10 - May 30

I remember the first time I brought a laptop computer to Kerrville ... though I’m not sure what year that was. I’d bought it second hand from a student of classical lit at UT. I had some assignment I that couldn’t wait until fest was over, so I packed up the laptop and carried it to camp. It had a big rectangular battery pack that popped out for recharging, and would run for about 20 minutes before the low-battery warning started flashing.

I didn’t get much work done that year.

Laptops are much more advanced now. This Macbook is wireless-enabled and can pick up the Internet at several spots in the campground. It’ll run several hours on battery power. Besides, we now have RV spaces here with hookups, and there are electric connections even for tent campers who want to pay for them. I can usually find somebody who will let me plug in to work or recharge my machine.

And when you write under a camp awning in the Hill Country late at night, sometimes insects will crawl across your screen or land on your keyboard. As one did to me two nights ago.

Don’t know what it was exactly. Maybe something in the order Coleoptera. It was narrow, about 3/4” long, a dark shadow on the illuminated keypad. I thought at first it might be a firefly, but it never lit up. It crawled around some, didn’t look too threatening, and I figured I’d flick it off if it got in the way of my typing. Aside from that, I didn’t think much about it. When the words are rolling, I’m good at blocking out distractions.

Not until one of those waking moments in the wee hours of the morning, when odd bits of data float to the top of my consciousness, did I remember the visiting insect. Had I brushed it off? Had it left under its own steam? Or had I closed it up in my laptop and zipped it into the case?

Yesterday got so busy I never fired up the machine at all. When I opened it this morning at Camp Inertia, sure ‘nuff the critter was there: a grayish lump of matter on the keyboard, right about where I had last seen it. It wasn’t exactly smashed, but it looked inanimate. I prodded it gently to see if it was alive. No response. Darn. I should’ve looked before I folded up, been more respectful of life. Oh, well.

“Look!” I said to the folks who were sitting around playing music before breakfast. “A computer bug!” That got a few laughs.

The blob hadn’t moved easily when I prodded it. I figured I’d need a napkin or something to pick it off. I also needed hot water for my tea, so I set the laptop on a chair and wandered over to the stove. When I came back with cup in hand, I was surprised to see the Computer Bug standing up on all six legs, testing the air right and left with jointed antennae. It didn’t look damaged at all, just maybe a little confused.

It made a circuit of the 4 key, rather like a dog that turns around several times before curling up on a mat. It stood there a moment, alive and curious, then unfolded its wings and flew away.

Fajita Thursday

“I guess you’d call this a victory lap,” Javier said just now, sitting in our tipi with a few friends, sipping on a bottle of Jose Cuervo Family Reserve.

He and his crew of volunteers sliced and grilled 100 pounds of meat and passed it out, wrapped in flour tortillas, to a hungry crowd. I think there was a little pico de gallo left in the big enamel pot; the Old Fart’s Kitchen across the way will use it to spice up beans and maybe breakfast tomorrow. Two empty beer kegs are floating in bins of melted ice. Leftover soft drinks languish in the red tubs. Our water cooler is still out by the barbecue pit.

Some say men can’t keep track of anniversaries. Javier can. He’ll tell you, without hesitating, that today’s fajita party was the 31st annual. This tradition has been going on  almost as long as I’ve been attending the festival.

From Hot Jams & Cold Showers, © 2000 Dyanne Fry Cortez

Donations are gratefully accepted, but not required, and he has no system for keeping track of who gave money and who didn’t. He hands out food to all comers as long as it lasts; anyone who doesn’t want to miss out better show up and get in line.

Occasionally someone will offer to bring a side dish. Javier declines, politely but firmly. This isn’t a potluck, he explains. But he has made an exception in recent years for the women of Camp Inertia, who fry up batches of cheese-stuffed jalapenos and pass them out to people waiting in line at the barbecue pit.

Fajita Thursday in 2014 is still not a potluck, but the menu has evolved some since I wrote that. Camp Inertia still makes stuffed jalapenos, and the cooks aren’t all women. Last year, Javier talked the Pedernales Brewing Company in Fredericksburg into being a business sponsor and donating two kegs of their Lobo Negro beer. We had Lobo again today, though it wasn’t all donated. We also have dessert, provided by Justin’s Ice Cream on the River Walk in San Antonio.

This sprung from one of those magical Kerrville encounters: Justin Arecchi came to the festival one year and set up a tent in the Meadow. Fajita Thursday happened more or less at his front door. He was impressed with the extent of the production and the community spirit behind it, and offered to donate some ice cream the following year. His teenage daughter Giovanna dipped and served. She’s the youngest of Justin’s kids, and he told us she had never shown much interest in working at the store -- but she really took to handing out ice cream for free. And Justin did too, I guess, because he shows up with a different flavor every year. Today it was mango. He brought ten gallons. Giovanna, now 20, is still working the ice cream table. When the crowd gathered and the party got under way at 6 p.m., I noticed quite a few of the guests were having dessert first.

Evening in the Meadow

Day 7

Maybe it won’t rain tonight.

There were clouds up there this afternoon. Pretty, fluffy white ones, like a flotilla of ships all aimed in the same direction. They seemed to increase in number as the day progressed; around 5 p.m. some were looking sort of dark on the bottom. But it’s nighttime now, and I’m seeing stars.

Javier spent the day soliciting contributions for his big fajita feed tomorrow. When he got back to camp I made him a sandwich. Dorothy and J.C. Hammond stopped by to peruse an old photo album Javier brought to Kerrville this year. It’s full of old, faded pictures of a festival-sponsored trip to Puerto Vallarta, which happened before I met Javier. He and Dorothy were on that trip. I’m not sure about J.C. or Dan Greenlee, but they had fun looking at the pictures, too.

Now Javier is chilling out with Amazin’ Walter and Laurie, whose tent is just behind our tipi. The air is pleasantly cool; I just traded my summer dress for a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Camp feels pretty lively tonight. People who’ve spent the past few days hiding from the weather are cutting loose. I hear music coming from several directions, along with snatches of conversation from various camps. Somebody must have said something funny at Camp Inertia, which just erupted with howls of laughter. The mud-slick paths that kept me close to camp last night are drying up nicely (caliche will do that if you give it a few hours of sun) and I think it may be safe to go cruising with my bassoon tonight.

I've been attending this festival since 1981. Some things haven't changed at all.

Wild Jams & Warm Showers

Day 6 - May 27

Some aspects of this Folk Festival are comfortably familiar, much as they’ve always been. But here’s one that’s really different. The cold showers by the Kerrtry Store -- the showers that are featured in the title of my book, and appear as background setting or lead character in several chapters -- exist no more.

They’ve been replaced by a new building, located more or less where the camp known as Peckerwood Island used to be. The new shower shed has hot water and concrete floors. The women’s side is divided into two halves; each with a vanity sink and two shower heads. There are dressing areas with benches and rows of hooks on the wall. We also have a sort of anteroom where some gals dry and fix their hair.

The dressing area is open to the sky, like it was in the old shower shed. I like that. But the divided room doesn’t foster quite the same sense of community we had when we were all in one big space together. And hot water? More comfortable, I’ll admit, but it just isn’t the same. Here are some excerpts from the book:

First night ever at the Kerrville Folk Festival
... when I said I wanted to take a few minutes and try the shower behind the Kerrtry Store, he decided I was too compulsive for his taste.
“Those showers are cold, I mean really cold,” he said. “You take one in the heat of the day, not at two in the morning. Believe me, you don’t want to go in there!”
I did. It had been a hot, sweaty afternoon. Night breezes had cooled the air, but I still felt grungy and out of gas. The cold shower took my breath away, but I emerged refreshed, renewed, and definitely wide awake. I’d been tired before; now, I felt as if I could keep going for hours.

Ten years later (or thereabouts)
The act requires some courage. Once inside the roofless shed, you must bare your body in the presence of friends, strangers, rivals, maybe even your ex-husbland’s current wife. Then you step up to one of the overhead nozzles that protrude from the inside wall and, by your own hand, loose the cascade of icy water that will bare your soul. When it hits, you’ll stop fretting over your tan lines, your hysterectomy scar, or the comparative size of your hips and beasts. You’ll speak the name of whatever god you believe in -- perhaps in a whisper, perhaps in a shout -- as you focus on getting your business done and getting out.

I should mention that the new shower shed has one cold-water spigot on the left side, where an old-fashioned Kerrvert can get an ice-cold shower if she really wants one.

Do I use it? Heck, no! Well ... maybe once or twice, on a 105-degree afternoon.

Steve Fromholz Celebration

Day 5 - May 26

I won’t talk about the storm we kerrvived last night, followed by a mid-morning squall that kept us huddled under awnings until nearly noon today. Let’s just say the rain I wrote about yesterday was, by comparison, a mere spring shower.

Anyway, the skies cleared in time for Celebrating Steve Fromholz at Threadgill Theater this evening. And what a show that was!

As I mentioned in Friday’s post, Fromholz died in a hunting accident earlier this year. Today’s tribute was organized by a crew of his old running buddies: Craig Hillis, Craig Toungate, Fletcher Clark, Dan McCrimmon, and I didn’t catch who all else. It featured an all-star cast of Texas folk and outlaw musicians, with guest appearances by Fromholz daughters Darcy and Felicity, They kept it upbeat and full of laughs. Appropriate, I guess, because that’s how Steve mostly was.

As I’ve admitted on past occasions, I knew next to nothing about Texas folk music when I first came to Kerrville. The redneck rock revolution of the 1960s and '70s mostly escaped my notice. Fromholz was among the leading voices of that movement. So were McCrimmon and Mike Williams, along with Gary P. Nunn and Bob Livingston of the Lost Gonzo Band -- all of whom were here tonight.

Sitting in the audience, I felt once more like that babe in the woods: listening to the guys on stage tell stories about how it all began; how they met and watched each others' kids, how they started playing music together. Stories that happened when I was in high school or just getting into college. Everybody did one or two of Fromholz’ songs. I thought I was familiar with his work, but they did quite a few I’d never heard. Segle Fry was here playing banjo; he’s someone I’ve only seen a couple of times and know mostly from folk legends. And I didn’t know Tommy Elskes even knew these other guys.

Return of the Muddow

Day 4 - May 25

From Hot Jams & Cold Showers, © 2000 Dyanne Fry Cortez

Lovely ... are the showers that fall in early morning, after most of the campfires have played themselves out. If they're timed right, such rains can delay the full heat of day, giving campers an extra hour or two to catch up on sleep. This only works, of course, if your shelter is reasonably waterproof. But even if it turns out not to be, there's joy in a rain-washed spring morning. When the sun comes out and dries your gear, the discomforts of the past few hours will shimmer like the memory of a great adventure.
Click here to read the whole piece

We had one of those rains this morning, but I gotta say it was more than a shower. And campers who are trying to dry their gear aren’t getting very far. The sky still threatens at a quarter to noon, and the sun hasn’t been out more than a few minutes at a time.

It started about dawn, just as I made that first run to the outhouse. I heard a light pitter-patter on the canvas and grabbed my rain shell on the way out the door. Coming back down the hill, I observed that our smoke flaps were closed. That was good, because the stuff falling from the sky looked less ephemeral than what we’ve had the last few days.

Javier had been saying it would rain today, that he needed to install our rain pins and the ozan over our bed. He never got around to doing all that yesterday, so we had to scramble. He grabbed the ozan out of our toolbox, throwing aside a few other things I’d put in for safekeeping. He followed up with the plastic cover that goes over the spare bed: drops were already scattering every which way from the pole bundle at the top because we didn’t have the rain pins in. The many-tentacled plastic sheet that he cut to fit over the ozan was tangled, we did a lot of fumbling and grumbling before we got it right. We were too late to pick up the rugs; they’re wet and muddy and we’ll just have to deal with them when things dry up. Corners of the bed got damp, but we found enough dry space to lie down and cocoon until the rain let up. That took quite a while. I think we both went back to sleep.

I wonder if anyone has a rain gauge. I’d be curious to know how much we got. “I’ll bet an inch or more,” said a guy I met by the community sink.

Considering that we weren’t quite prepared, Javier and I did okay. Some camps got hit much worse than we did; the folks just outside our front door had a river running through their tent. But so far, I haven’t seen anyone who looks particularly unhappy. How could they, knowing how badly Texas needs rain?

I’m not kidding myself that this morning’s rain will solve our water problems. But if this festival can summon up the R-word and do anything at all to help alleviate the drought, I’ll gladly put up with a wet pillow and a few soggy socks.

Saturday Morning Rain

Day 3 - May 24

Saturday morning. Breakfast at Camp Inertia. And it’s raining.

Not a downpour, but something that varies from a fine mist to a light rain. It’s after 11 a.m. It’s been raining since I got up. Enough precipitation to form puddles in the seats of canvas chairs left out last night. Enough to turn the very top surface of the caliche into sticky mud. I’m wearing my rain shell over my T-shirt and shorts.

It sprinkled a bit yesterday morning too -- just enough to settle the dust, as we used to say when it rained, reliably, every festival. In recent years, that hasn’t been the case. Texas has been -- still is -- gripped by drought. We’ve lived through a few festivals where it didn’t rain at all. And hot days are hotter than they used to be, or maybe I’m just getting older and don’t take the heat so well.

This year so far, weather has been the way I remember it in the old days. Cool for setting up at Land Rush; nice breezes in the theater after the sun goes down. By midnight, it’s chilly enough to put on a jacket. I’m wearing the same hooded playera I’ve worn at Kerrville for the past 20 years, the red-striped one I "borrowed" from Javier’s closet not long after we moved in together. And I was glad to have a wool blanket last night when I went to bed. Don’t know how long this will last, but it’s lovely.

Today Inertia is serving fresh fruit salad, Little Smokies and French toast made with croissants. How does this compare with Kerrville 14 years ago? I’m not sure. Camp Inertia was well established when Hot Jams & Cold Showers came out. It was there during the years when I worked on the book; Val and Catherine were some of my first readers who kept me going through the process. They always liked feeding people. But the camp has evolved over the years. Their menus have gotten more organized, and the breakfast and dinner crowds have gotten bigger. I didn’t count, but I bet they served 30 folks this morning. There’s a kitchen area, a dining area, and a dishwashing setup that’s worthy of a commercial kitchen.

Spirits of Kerrville

Day 2 - May 23

There’s obviously one big thing that’s different about this year’s Folk Festival. Our founder, Ron Kennedy, is no longer with us.

Rod passed away April 11. He was 84. He was 51 when I spent my first evening at Kerrville; at that point, he’d already been in this gig for ten years. Producer Dalis Allen has organized a memorial concert, scheduled for Saturday night, but there was a brief observance when Main Stage opened last night. Dalis stepped out to introduce those first performers, doing what Rod did night after night for all those years, and broke up.

“I swear I was fine until 10 minutes ago,” she protested through her tears.

I’m sure it feels really different to Dalis. Rod was her mentor. She worked with him for decades in various capacities, eventually taking his place as producer and emcee of this festical. Even then, Rod was usually around somewhere: watching from the VIP seats at stage right or riding a golf cart to Threadgill Theater to make an appearance at the New Folk concerts. Now Dalis casts her eyes at all those places and doesn’t see him.

It feels strange to say this, but to me things don’t feel so different. It feels like Rod is still here. And why not? He built this festival, kept it going through torrential rain and financial drought, made it his mission in life for 30 years and more. Where else would he hang out?

Ghosts are nothing new at Kerrville. Antler Dave passed two years before I ever set foot on this ranch, but his spirit hung around the Energy Tree for years and we still sing his story on closing night. Back in the ‘90s, I played in a washtub band with a guy named Glenn Allen Schulze. He died, but his ghost stopped by to see Javier one festival and they had a conversation in our tipi. I wasn’t there. I didn’t see Glenn. But I could swear I saw the late Malcolm Smith one afternoon at a camp music jam, and heard his Gypsy fiddle.

Merrilu Park wrote a poem about Rod’s final days. She said that as he prepared to move on to the next plane of existence, he had visits from Allen Damron, Tim Henderson, Steve Fromholz and others that have gone before. (Yeah, Fromholz also left us this past year, killed in a hunting accident.) He saw them, talked with them. And when she called the festival office to report that Rod had crossed over, the staff said he’d just been seen on the ranch, “looking fortyish and flirty.”

Even the ones we don’t see are still here. I’m writing this late at night Fat Jack’s Domino Parlor, with Schmidty’s memorial tree over my right shoulder. Rod’s legacy lives on, built on the contributions of all who’ve been with us over the years. And it won’t surprise me at all if he comes to the party now and then.

Here We Are Again!

My name is Dyanne Fry Cortez. Since 1981, I've spent part of every spring at the Kerrville Folk Festival. I wrote down a lot of what happened there, to me and to my fellow musicians and campers. In 2000, I put a bunch of those stories in a book called Hot Jams & Cold Showers. It's my personal memoir, but in a way, it's also the story of a community.

Strange to think it's been fourteen years since that book rolled off the press. It doesn't seem so long. Surely I can't be that much older! But I was thumbing through my book a couple of weeks ago, stopping to read passages here and there, and I saw that time really has gone by. A lot of things have changed since I wrote that book. Still, the Kerrville Festival goes on, hasn't missed a year since it started in 1972, and I still come back to camp and enjoy the music every spring.

So I thought it would be fun to keep a running account of this 43rd festival. I'll quote some excerpts from my book (published last century!) and compare it to how things are today (who knew we'd ever have wireless Internet at the Kerrtry store? I remember when we used to stand in line, 6 or 7 deep, to get three minutes on a pay phone.)

I hope you'll join me on this journey. If you're here at the festival, stop by and give me a hug. If you can't make it, I'll see you online!