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.